For 2 years, I ran a reasonably successful blog called The Bargain Queen — it was #1 fashion blog in Australia for a while, but never huge by global standards. In the time I’ve run it, the amount of spam from PR companies has gotten higher and higher. Seems like every PR company that doesn’t get social media tells their clients they can do it, hires an intern and instructs them to email press releases to lots of bloggers, with little regard to relevance.

Personally, I get enough PR spam that it takes half an hour or so every day to sort it out. If it’s that bad for a moderately successful blogger like myself, imagine what the ‘big guys’ like Scoble face?

So when bloggers start saying ‘PR is evil’, they possibly mean, ‘I hate the clueless PRs who fill my email with irrelevant press releases every single day’. When that’s their main experience of the whole PR industry, can you blame us bloggers for hating PR flacks?

PS: NO, I don’t PERSONALLY hate PR people. I’m married to a non-evil PR person. Yes, they do exist

The answer is education and training. I talk to a lot of PR firms in my line of work from all over North America. Some of them get it, some of them completely miss the point. The only way we can shift the balance is to keep learning, keep training, and keep exposing the weak links in our chain.

I think self-regulation would be an extremely difficult process, but may end up being what’s necessary. In all honesty, I think what PR looks like in even 5 years will be very different than the way it looks today, and I expect it will be far less siloed and specialty than it is today.

Does that make everyone involved, client or agency, immoral?

I think we all fall victim to myopic, short-sighted, goals and tactics to reach those goals. And we’re allowed, permitted, empowered by the silence of those around us.

PR firms don’t operate in a vaccum any more than any of us do. And this issue didn’t arrive today.

The change is this social media arriving at the time grass roots democracy in politics and business all call for more…honesty, morality, accountability, transparency…just plain decency. It gives voice to all the things we all talk about quietly among ourselves over dinner.

I wouldn’t throw the PR firms under this new bus of transparency (though a few years ago I did, on occasion). They had a lot of encouragement along the way. Now with social media, there’s encouragement and tools and voices to get them and us back on track.

trying to get? evil

trying to give? good

For those NOT in Internet aimed start-ups, let’s say a plumbing business, to talk of Internet communities only and not using traditional PR is franky dumb and short-sighted of a significant magnitude.