by There’s nothing the PR internet loves more than when someone declares PR dead. That used to happen all the time 10 years or so ago when blogging was (relatively) new and certain evangelists claimed PR would be supplanted by legions of employees all armed with individual blogs. Plenty of hyperbole has followed, but what do you know, PR is still ticking.
The latest beat in this ongoing tune comes to us via PR Daily, which recounts the story of an author who apparently hired five PR firms in an effort to have at least one of them do a decent job promoting his new book. Alas, it seems, they all let him down. And so he’s declared PR firms to be worthless in light of what he – and you, it seems – can do yourself.
There are some good rebuttals from PR firm representatives in the story, but I think there are some basic tactical things that are still overlooked.
One, there’s the scale issue. Sure, Calderone (the author and accuser) seems to be doing a great job of getting his own message out, but can he achieve scale? Meaning yeah, he can reach his social media audience, but can he get the same sort of reach engaging with mass media achieves? It seems he’s had some success along these lines, but a PR firm is literally built for this.
Second, is the message he’s giving the agencies one that contains solid ROI? So is he telling his agencies what they need to know to ship books, bring out attendees at signings and so on? Calderone doesn’t go into, it seems, what exactly he’s been arming the agencies with, so he may – may – be holding them accountable for goals they were never set up to accomplish.
Third and final – Just because he hired five agencies doesn’t make this any sort of legitimate representation of the entire industry. There are great firms that put their all into every client. There are others that just want to collect their retainer and don’t have any hustle in them. It’s entirely possible that he picked five losers who didn’t get what he had already been doing, didn’t know – or care – what his goals were and just generally weren’t trying. This isn’t an industry where agencies are interchangeable. If he didn’t do his due diligence and make sure he had the RIGHT five agencies, he was doomed to failure. But then again if he’d done that work he wouldn’t have needed to hire five agencies and run a test. He would have kept searching until he found the right relationship fit.
