EDITORIAL
A ROLL OF NICKELS AND A PHONE BOOTH
Anybody Can Do PR
If you ever get to thinking that public relations is so easy that anybody can do it, then spend a day on the receiving end – the editor’s desk. If public relations is so easy to do, how come so many practitioners do it badly?
From major corporations, and both small and large public relations firms, comes a stream of so-called releases and other material that’s so inept, and so primitive, that you must ultimately realize that those that do it right must have a vast array of skills, talents, and imaginative energy. It must be difficult, because how could it be simple when so many people do it wrong? And of course, the client pays the high price of doing it wrong.
Take mailing lists, for example. The Marcus Letter is a very carefully designed publication. It’s target audience – professional services -- is spelled out, its subject matter is abundantly defined, its thrust is far from secret.
And yet, each day’s mail brings releases about products or services that have nothing to do with anything in The Marcus Letter. Liquor and perfume company pitches. A Fedex package containing a video tape and a press kit for a computer football game (at least $20 worth, sent to a publication that couldn’t possibly use it).Personnel releases to a publication that doesn’t include personnel news. Pitch letters for stories that are so irrelevant to what we do that I can’t believe that anybody over 12 years old is doing it. A press release from a fast food company announcing the appointment of the head of a "new guest satisfaction initiative in the role of Director of Customer Delight." What about that basic tenet of good publicity – know your target publication? Each year, hundreds – maybe thousands – of dollars in wasted mailing.
Press releases. In virtually a lifetime of doing this, one of the major tenets of public relations that I’ve learned is that a press release must cast your story in the same syntax as the major daily papers. You’re competing for space against the papers’ own reporters, and you’d better write your release in newspaper style. How, then, account for this lead on a press release, which arrived with the standard notation For immediate release…
Enjoying a great bottle of wine has never been easier. XYZ company (to protect the innocent, if innocence indeed there may be) is pleased to introduce Cellar, a unique wine-tasting program that brings the world’s private cellar to your front door every month.
Makes you really want to stop the presses and tear out the front page, doesn’t it?
Now, the great universities teach courses in public relations, and I assume their graduates know better. Who then is doing this? Is practicing public relations so easy that anybody can do it? And where are the department heads and chiefs – the ones who used to say to the likes of me, "No, that’s not how you do it. This is how you do it?"
No wonder so many editors hold so many public relations people in such low regard (but, fortunately, hold so many more in high regards. They know when good is good and bad is bad.)
And what about the clients – the ones who are paying for expensive mailing pieces to editors who can’t use them and press releases that no respectable publication will use? How much are they wasting each year? And what happens to respect for the value of public relations when all that wasted money produces so little useful result?
Maybe what’s needed is a travelling exhibit – sponsored by PRSA or somebody – of outrageous public relations practices that embarrass all the good practitioners. A kind of a Grand Guignol of public relations horrors. Every editor in the business could send them new stuff every day.
If Edward Bernays, the self-styled father of public relations, could see these practices, he’d turn over in his grave. But only if he could get a couple of columns on the front page of The New York Times for the stunt. He knew his craft.