PR’s model is outdated

Over the past year, I have seen two major trends in PR. Many, too many, good and experienced people have been laid off. We like to think experience is valued, but agencies and corporations are saying experience is too expensive. Looking at who has been laid off in PR, and not been rehired, makes you realize the industry is undergoing a transformation. Part of the transformation involves the PR industry trying stress its value a digital world.

Like it or not, the PR model that has served us for the past 10 years is broken. Thanks to Al Gore and the Internet three things have smashed the model:

• Companies can get the word out on their products via their own Web sites;
  
• There are too few media outlets to pitch;
  
• Social Media makes it easy to engage directly with the consumer.
  

Let's face it, search and company Web sites have reduced the need for advertising. I am not telling you anything new when I say that if you want to buy a new computer, you don't run down to the magazine shop and pick up three or four magazines on computers. Instead, you'd read them online for free, visit CNET or consumer reports online, fish around Amazon, look for discounts on the computer maker's Web sites, and well, you get the picture. You can do an awful lot of research without leaving home or spending a dime on publications.

Companies need PR less if a buyer can pull information about a product when she wants it, as opposed to having information pushed at the consumer when she's just glancing at the headlines looking to find out how many schools closed early even though the predicted blizzard never materialized.

Conclusion: you don't need PR as much as you once did. I am not sure PR people understand that, or more accurately want to admit there is a problem. It's always been hard to measure PR. Now, companies are finding it hard to justify PR. The industry's recent desire for self-promotion is a way to address this conclusion. I'm not sure it will work.

To be honest, PR's image problem and its apparent need for self promotion requires a post of its own where we can explore the issue at length. Look for it on this same Bat Station.

RIP idealistic journalism

In a different professional life, my sports journalism years, a publisher said a magazine is like an envelope filled with ads. The content is only there to make people open the envelope.

Journalists believed the content supported the publication. Anyone who follows TheMediaIsDying and sees all of the publications that have shuttered due to lack of ad revenues knows it was always about the money.

Today's journalist better have a firm grasp of the bottom line or a good exit strategy.

Where the money goes in communications

To profit in a war, you have to be an arms provider. To profit in the communications age, you have to be a carrier.

My family spends over $400 a month on communications: cell phones, high-speed Internet, cable television and a landline. Except for the last item on that list, twenty-five years ago these technologies were not available in the available in the average American home.

So here is my question. Clearly, twenty-five years ago we were able to live without some of these technologies. If you were unemployed, what would you give up first? And what would be the last thing you held onto to secure some semblance to your former life. I watch unemployed friends make these decisions on an all too frequent basis.

It's not like food or rent, which you need. But for most of us, it's the toys that define who we are. In this case, it's the toys the define how we talk to the world. Where do you severe the lines of communication?

Just curious.

In case you are wondering, I am hanging onto the toys. But periodically, I like to take inventory of the clutter and ditch the debris.