The latest blogger to take issue with public relations and its tactics is Loic Le Meur, a Frenchman who has been involved with a number of Internet startups, including an interactive ad agency, which was later sold to BBDO in 1999.
Le Meur starts off his post by basically saying that PR pros claim to have a "magical sauce" when the precise notion is, in his words BS (to put it nicely). Instead of engaging a PR pro and going the traditional way, Le Meur espouses an updated approach that basically capitalizes on using your social network to the utomost. By doing this correctly, he believes you can do everything yourself better than anyone else could do for you.
He also claims the PR industry holds a number of believes that are patently untrue, including the notion that traditional journalists and media channels hold more influence than social media at large and influential bloggers. Rather than relying on a PR agency to get the word out, he advocates relying on your users and customers to do it for you. In the end, he believes, their fanatical enthusiasm will lead journalists to circle back around and give a company coverage, effectively killing two birds with one stone.
He also advises CEOs and other key executives to be their spokesperson behind their brands. He reasons that the CEO should be the brand, much akin to the way Richard Branson is associated with the Virgin empire.
While there's some validity to the notion that a trusted CEO can be the best person to speak for a company, he completely ignores the fact that messages issued by a company are only one very small part of a communications program. It's not surprising that a serial entrepreneur would view CEOs as the best spokesperson, but he completely ignores the fact that a journalist will see them as a biased source that will only say what they want people to believe. Yes, there are cases where CEOs bluntly and honestly deal with their firm's problems, but even then, they're not the architect of a response in most cases, just the face delivering it. He also ignores the fact that if they're busy serving as the architect of the response, they've diverted their resources from actually dealing with it in the first place; honestly, that's what their customers, clients and investors want them to do.
PR certainly has its problems on occasion, and one of those is the fact that the profession as a whole has done a pretty poor job of educating the public at large in just what the heck it is a PR person does. But equally as disturbing is the fact that there's still this pervasive notion that while you need qualified individuals handling your business' finances and legal needs, PR can be done by almost anyone with the right connections.
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