Outrage Against Poor Media Relations Practice Continues

When debuted in 2006, the excellent Bad Pitch Blog had the PR community buzzing, as it was the first outlet to aggressively confront poor media relations practices. Unfortunately for the PR industry as a whole, it was only the beginning.

Over the months that followed the blog's debut, it was the subject of articles in many PR trades and was responsible for launching a broader discussion on media relations practices and how they could and should be changed for the better. At the same time, a move grew to "modernize" many media relations tools, including transforming the media release into a new format that would allow the incorporation of multimedia tools and other content and features. The resulting Social Media Release template, which you can read about here is still a work in progress of sorts.

Unfortunately, while the debate over media relations practices and how they should change or adopt is occurring, the reputation of public relations continues to decline in large part because of poor media relations practices. Witness the prspammers wiki, which is basically a collection of e-mail addresses contributed by leading blog authors and other social media enthusiasts containing the names of PR pros from some of the industry's most familiar names.

Problem is, this isn't a good list to be on. The list itself denotes off-target pitches sent to leading bloggers over the past few months, and it reads like a virtual who's who of the biggest firms in the industry, ranging from Atomic and Bite to Shift. The latter is particularly unfortunately because it's Shift that's been one of the main drivers of the social media release.

Ever since the emergence of blogs and other social media platforms, I've become concerned that the industry is too concerned on cashing in on the craze at the expense of strengthening its core competencies. To me, PR as a whole pays too much attention to the development of "new and improved" ways to get its message out and way too little attention to developing messages devoid of hype that clearly communicate what a company is about and why it's worthy of attention.

It's always bugged me that PR is considered a "buzz creating" industry, when I personally believe that if you correctly position a useful product or service, the buzz will come on its own. I also believe this need to always create new and improved tools, while it may be good for the bottom line, is also disproportionately responsible for the industry's high client turnover rate.

Let's hope we start worrying more about the message and less about the medium.