Among the many interesting ideas thrown around at ITSMA’s annual conference this week was that the era of PR is over.

As in dead. Don’t do it anymore.

First, let’s define what PR means from the perspective of the customer (i.e., a journalist) and the customer’s customer (i.e., the readers of the journalists’ publications). Looked at this way, there are only two types of PR: Guard dog PR and placement PR. Let’s look at each in more detail.

Guard dog PR. These are the internal corporate PR representatives. Unless the company they work for is a startup or otherwise desperate for attention, these people tend to be ground down by the risk management aspect of their jobs over time. Much like IT people, they don’t hear much from anyone inside their companies unless something goes wrong. Then they get plenty of the wrong kinds of attention. The pressures on the guard dogs lead to a lot of problems:

• The emphasis is on risk avoidance. The outsized focus on the negative from the people that sign internal PR people’s checks inevitably turns them into risk-averse guard dogs. After all, the only real foolproof way to keep your people from saying stupid things is to not let them speak in the first place.
• Message control cuts out half the conversation. Our lives are filled with good and bad, yin and yang. It’s called being human. But guard dogs don’t have that luxury. If they are to avoid risk, they must stick to the positive—or at least the not negative. Like that last phrase, what ends up coming out is crap that doesn’t sound human.
• Your customer hates and avoids you. Journalists have always hated the system represented by the guard dogs. This hatred sparked a (not quite) equal and opposite reaction: investigative journalism. Journalists try to get around the guard dogs whenever and however possible, which often makes the situation even worse for companies.
• The rigors of the job breed mistrust. Like the people behind the counter at the DMV, most guard dogs have had just enough bad experiences with people to make them wary and mistrusting of everyone. And frankly, the demands of the job favor those who come to mistrust naturally. These aren’t the people you want talking to influencers and customers.
• Nobody reads your content. Back when we had a strong press, the fact that press releases were self-aggrandizing crap didn’t matter. In order to differentiate themselves from the many other journalists receiving the same releases, self-respecting journalists never used anything from press releases in their stories. They dug deeper and created original content. Today, the few remaining journalists don’t even have time to read the releases anymore. They do their research on the web. And customers never read the releases.
• Press releases are not substitutes for real content. As the media melts away, companies can’t link to or highlight objective sources on the website. That means many companies have nothing to offer visitors to their websites besides press releases and offering descriptions. In B2B, that’s not going to build relationships with customers.

Placement PR. The second type of PR is based on getting the company’s thought leaders into publications and other externally-sponsored venues. Occasionally, the placement PR people are in-house, but in the vast majority of cases the placement people are contracted through PR agencies. This does a number of things. First, it focuses the agency on some clear goals—cranking out press releases and getting press mentions—and gives the guard dogs a degree of separation that helps with risk management. For example, if the agency-managed interview leads to bad press, the guard dogs can show that they are managing risk for the company by blaming and firing the agency (agencies are used to this and work with many different companies in order to manage the ever-present risk of getting fired). However, there are as many problems with this model as with the guard dog model:

• Lack of focus. PR agencies generally serve as many different clients as possible in order to maximize their resources and profits. This usually means an avalanche of poorly written, completely untargeted press releases, and interview pitches that show no understanding of the target influencer’s publication or audience.
• Metrics that favor activity over results. Agencies’ goals and metrics are usually based on the needs and wants of the guard dogs rather than on the needs and wants of the target customer—the influencer. This means that metrics are based on merely making contact and shoveling crap out the door rather than helping influencers meet their goals.
• The emphasis is on contacting rather than helping. In fairness to PR people, if their metrics were entirely based on placements in articles, they’d all starve. Journalists can only do so many interviews and many of those don’t make it into articles. But most agencies overemphasize contacting—annoying phone calls, emails, etc.—at the expense of helping.
• The pool of targets is shrinking. PR people have always outnumbered journalists, but these days it looks like a beehive surrounding the queen. Meanwhile, companies’ appetite for exposure continues unabated, which just increases the noise that the few remaining journalists are hearing to an unintelligible level. Companies that aren’t cutting the number of placement people are wasting their money.
• The process is incredibly expensive and inefficient. The process of getting subject matter experts placed in publications or other third-party content channels is awful for everyone involved. The agency must go through the guard dogs to get permission for the subject matter experts to speak, then they must get the attention of the busy interviewee, then they must coordinate with the busy executive and the external parties to make it all come together. The inefficiency and expense of this process for the agencies was tough to justify even in the glory days of trade journalism, conferences, and trade shows. Now, it’s even harder to justify.
• Control kills placement. I could always tell when my interviewees were coached and under a tight leash. They were uncomfortable, guarded, and hurried. And they never said anything of value. The entire process was focused on trying to use me and my publication for corporate messaging—as though that’s what my readers wanted. I’m sure many of these PR people went back to their companies proclaiming success after one of these interviews. I never used any of it.
• Trust requires fewer resources. Most of the hundreds of CIOs I interviewed over the course of my career were happy to be interviewed. Most had no media training, and many spoke to me without PR people on the line. The CIOs instinctively understood that they were spokespeople for their companies while also understanding that spouting corporate pabulum would not get them quoted. And they knew the value of being perceived as a thought leader, both within their companies and with their peers. I think some guard dogs and agencies perpetuate the myth that their subject matter experts will crack under questioning and that companies need to spend lavishly on legions of PR people to prevent the inevitable disaster. It’s a myth.

I don’t hate PR people
Look, please don’t think that I dislike PR people or don’t understand their value. As a journalist I met up with some real pros that got it. They understood my publication, my audience, and my needs. They would work hard to get CIOs and subject matter experts to agree to talk to me in an open way. They didn’t coach CIOs to talk only about how they used the products and services of the company. On the contrary, they asked me to explain the story I was working on and supplied that information to the CIO or their subject matter experts prior to the interview. I truly valued these PR pros and always told them so.

But the death of the media and the rise of the web and social media mean that the traditional model for PR, already creaky and inefficient, is becoming indefensible. What do you think?