I respect your position while respectfully disagreeing.

The PR world is enabled to now, finally, fulfill its original mandate: to facilitate Relationships with the Public. I explain more at my post today; no sense rehashing it here but I hope you might give it a read.

Meanwhile, thanks for the food for thought.

If you look at the advice that most of our governments receive from their consultants they are not needed either.

I suggested to our CEO, who writes a weekly newsletter for the staff, that he should post those or similar newsletters on a blog. I thought the open discourse with the general public, our customers, would be a very interesting conversation but the IT (Idiot Technologists) folk said it would be too hard to have a “secure” site.

I hate people who can’t see beyond their self interest and refuse to think of the bigger picture.

Huh? What do consumers “need” PR firms for?

Consumers may be willing to listen to what an organization has to say, but “need”? Not so much.

Of course the relationship between the current PR agency and client model is governed by the pay cheque. I won’t stoop to calling them whores but it is a service they are providing. Would Edelman dump Wal-Mart as a client because Wal-Mart refuses to change in order to meet the needs of consumer perspective on what makes a company “good”?

Not a chance.

The folks who run Wal-Mart would have to be caught red handed committing ritual baby killings at midnight in the housewares aisle before any existing PR firm would walk away from their “relationship”. Edelamn’s challenge to your position is PR posturing for his own firm – and nothing more. The only way to prove other wise would be through their actions.

Walk away from a pay cheque?

Not gonna happen.

Cheers.

In my experience, very few PR (or agencies) are challenging organizations. Too many times, it is about how to spin the message so that it is palatable to the customers. Many PR pros have not grasped how to capitalize on markets as conversation. They try to join the conversation with tales of how wonderful their clients are. That is the rub.

j.

They also operate as listeners and provide a valuable internal advocacy of what those outside the organisation think and do. This has always been the case with views of traditional media in my experience where being able to reflect what the press might say has been recognised as influencing company behaviour.

PR isn’t just about saying what an organisation wishes, but also challenging that organisation when the message or behaviour is wrong. To that extent, at the very least, the best PR people are acting as advocates of the public.

It is PR people (as opposed to lawyers) who have advocated increasing transparency in communications and engaging with stakeholders.

“Victory” is often not in getting across a one way message but in ensuring dialogue has a positive outcome for everyone – if only the organisation wins then its very licence to operate may be compromised. So enlightened self-interest is necessary.

It can be difficult for any PR person, in-house or consultancy, when their advice or input is ignored, but by establishing a competency as having valuable understanding of publics – not just as expert persuaders, but as enablers of co-orientation or win-win solutions – will ensures PR practitioners facilitate the opening of doors into the organisation.

The Internet is a democratizer of information. Therefore a lot of hierarchies and “old ways of doing things” are being tossed out the window. I think that the Internet brings the marketing/PR person back to its roots. Marketing is supposed to be the 4 Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Many agencies only focus on promotion. They have no say in the product, the price or its distribution. This is in line with Lucas Conley’s book, Obsessive Brand Disorder. Too many organizations equate “managing the brand” as marketing. This is only ONE of the four other items that need to be addressed. In addition, Steve Cuno’s book, Prove It Before You Promote It is just the beginning of a marketing shift back to “product, place and price.”

Edelman does make a good point regarding policy. Both marketers/PR and lawyers are (or should be) familiar with policy. I do not expect too many consumers getting too deep in that area. In some cases when consumers find out about a policy (and why it was instigated in the first place) they are quite accepting of that policy and the business process. Rather than take extreme position, its a balance between the organizations’ business process/policy and allowing your customers to shape the products/services that results in a wow experience.