Come on, it´s not that bad. It´s not an article on PR but a funny read on people (mainly one lady) doing PR, bit of gossip, some clichés, we all know these people. It might not be the best PR for PR but still no reason to try to deconstruct alleged PR myths. Journalists and readers should be intelligent enough to read between the lines.

Hi Richard, nice to be commenting on your blog again.

You know I respect you and your firm's work greatly; I'm still a big Edelman fan. But something about this article and the response has compelled me to defend it. I hope it doesn't cost me any friends.

I saw the article as a "hero" piece that chronicled a unique individual (and the article mentioned how she is unique in her operation/stature) whose approach has changed along with the times in order to get results for her client.

The mini case study at the end demonstrated how to include various forms of media (including traditional + tech bloggers), through an initial targeted online outreach.

Myth 2 surprised me because of how strongly Edelman promotes the importance of relationships (I still a copy of a publication called "RelationSHIPS" by Edelman) and seems to me that this is a semantics argument. The fact that the relationships in the article were more in the name-dropping realm does not preclude other sorts, like the ones you mentioned, from being essential to good PR practice.

Myth 5: I was upset by how quickly she flip-flopped on a client's whim, but we've all experienced those moments when the client feels strongly about something and having to pick our battles for the successful execution of the campaign. Again, I didn't see this having a negative impact if the details of the mini-case study at the end were true.

Lastly, I want to underscore how much I dislike the "empty-headed flack" mythology -- I still remember your post about finally having the PR professional as hero in the movie Fun with Dick and Jane -- but it's a reality that the publicity/promotions side of the industry is perpetuated by "characters" such as the one in the article.

I hope I have offered some food for thought. Again, I share your ideals for the industry and how it should present itself. I can't fault the MSM for latching onto fodder such as it did in this case.

Best,

Eric

Well said (as usual) Richard! PR strategy never goes out of style and "intelligent and ethical" communication strategists will always have a key role in business. We are indeed strategic consultants. Companies hire us the same way they hire lawyers or financiers and generally we have to know company operations as well as (sometimes better than) senior management. The Sidney Falcone stereotype of this biz needs to die.

Love it. Thank you for speaking plainly and simply about something that has clearly riled the entire PR industry up.

You also didn't bash the person involved with the story (so kudos). Great to hear an agency side perspective.

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I'm going to share it with the students in my public relations ethics and corporate social responsibility class. And thank you particularly for your fourth myth...it's so important that young people entering this field understand that it's a profession where substance and intellect rein over charm and connections.

Regarding the second myth: that "the job is all about relationships, with reporters, investors and celebrities." Wouldn't that be easy?

In fact, most 21st-century public relations success centers on providing value for editors, readers, investors, industry influentials, and other audiences... not currying on favors to get press or make a point in the public sphere. This means PR practicioners always need to have something relevant, important, interesting, and new to communicate. It would be easier to share martinis with an editor, sure, but today's ferocious climate values PR pros with business intelligence over dinosaurs reliant on their social graces.

Thank you for restoring order to our universe. Well said.

Thank you for this post - now I can comment rather than write one of my own.

Ms Hammerling's view of what constitutes public relations - and of how to be a consultant and develop a strategy - has probably set the profession back 50 years (and we were behind the eightball to begin with in terms of our own industry's image). Her continued promulgation of the myth that media relations - whether it's media relations 1.0 or media relations 2.0 - is about relationships rather than about facilitating the transmission of information - and about having some actual content that is, in fact, news - leads to so many other myths, chief of which is that if a PR person can 'plant' a story they can also 'kill' one.

I question many of the statements attributed to her in the NY Times piece - especially the one about PR firms returning cheques from potential Silicon Valley start-ups because they just couldn't handle the business during the dotcom boom. The high tech sector in the 90s was quick to realize the value of PR - but notoriously demanding in terms of results and famously tight when it came to budgets.

If you hire an order taker rather than a true consultant, you might just as well do your own PR. I shudder to think how Ms Hemmerling would handle a community and stakeholder consultation or deal with any kind of issue that needed to be managed. Her idea of how to conduct one of those would probably be martinis with the mayor, after which she'd blithely swan off, assuring the client that the mayor was paid to communicate with constituents, not her.

But I think the worst thing about her approach is that she sees herself as integral to the 'story' when in fact it's not about her in any way, shape or form. This kind of delusion of grandeur happens to folks who work in the film business too - they forget that just because they apply makeup to movie stars, they aren't stars themselves.

To say that her 'strategy' (which was actually not a strategy at all) has done her client a disservice is putting it mildly. She seems incapable of understanding - much less explaining - what the value of her latest client's offering actually is (and I say that having reviewed the company's web site, not just based on the NY Times article). But then I'm probably the old-fashioned one: I'd rather write a media release or a backgrounder that will get global media coverage than have a two-martini lunch with a single journalist or blogger.

Too bad you didn't have the guts to comment in the actual article when they gave you the chance!

The article doesn't say the things you point out are unimportant (I wouldn't assume that simply because it doesn't read from your PR manual of 'we do strategy' doesn't mean it's not important). What it does chronicle is how one person actually excutes strategy, which is far more valuable to paying customers than thinking ivory tower thoughts.

Looks like you lost a valuable employee in Ms. Hammerling.

In addition to perpetuating stereotypes of your industry, I thought that article peddled an outdated, stereotype-ridden view of Silicon Valley. If it had been a short, cute snippet it would have been one thing, but it was the lead article in the Business section, breaking to a full page inside.

Really poor judgment on the part of the NYT.

I love it too. Don't know if order has been restored. But this debating is a great example of influence and power of the web on what I call collective learning. Opinions seem contradictory, there's just too much to digest if you follow many opinions on the web. Where is the truth? With social media seems to be many truths.

As happy as I was to see the article initially appear in the NYT, I felt rather empty after reading it. Soon I realized that was because there wasn't anything there of much value other than shining a big media light on what I consider an important topic: the significant change in the way we do business today and our underlying need to adapt. The real value of the NYT piece for me was reading between the lines, as it were, and performing my own personal analysis as to why the subject did what she did, or felt compelled to do so. I seriously wondered (and perhaps still do) if this was actually meant to be a parody of how business is done in Silicon Valley and in doing so explain to those in the rest of the world why California is in such a financial mess. I simply can't believe the time and effort and space that the NYT put into the story. It's pretty easy to take shots and there is no shortage of targets as Richard notes in hitting most of them. Interestingly enough, a much better analysis and more professional study has surfaced on this subject in the last 24 hours, the white paper entitled "The Coming Change in Social Media Business Applications" by Josh Gordon available at http://is.gd/1qgHs ... which I am more than happy to recommend.

What a weirdly thin-skinned blog post. Richard, I always thought you were much savvier than that.

Sorry that it's so hard for you to see an ex-Edelman person get a good article written about her and her work.

Seems to me she generated a ton of online coverage with this media hit, intentional or not. Bet traffic to her client's site is way up. The public doesn't care if a post is positive or negative. They'll click on the link to her client's web site, and if the service seems useful, they'll use it, despite what anyone says about the PR strategy behind it. In fact, a negative post is more likely to garner eyeballs and, as a result, drive more curious surfers to her client's site.

Richard,

Stakeholder relations may be a more relevant term than public relations, as it encompasses a more systemic worldview and communicates the importance of influencing interact among stakeholders.

The biggest myth that the article perpetuates is that PR is publicity and buzz. It's so, so, so, so much more than that.

That said, I admire the hard work of Ms. Hemmerling. She is building a brand for herself, and as this blog post notes, with today's fragmented media landscape, it's important to be able to incorporate social media influencers into the PR plan.

As for the name dropping, the articles makes clear that she doesn't just drop names, she delivers them. If you've got relationships with business, entertainment and political influencers that can help your client directly, of course you should be using them! Isn't that far more effective than having those same influencers read about your client in the paper? What am I missing?

The PR as rock star approach has problems, for sure. Most importantly, it's not scalable and can't be replicated across a massive agency. Unless Ms. Hemmerling is going to start selling t-shirts and licensing her image for lunchboxes and mousepads, she's going to have to keep up the travel, long hours, and high profile.

If she hires a rock star herself, history is bound to repeat itself and her protege will go out and gig on her own. It's another conundrum of the industry that the NY Times piece touched upon.

What I felt was missing were the numbers. Why a business profile with no information on the business model? Rates? Revenues? That's also another area where the piece went soft.

I completely agree. I read the NY Times article and was pretty dismayed. Relationships are key, but intelligence, strategic thinking, creativity and concise writing skills are the elements of a competent p.r. pro. Great rebuff!

Enjoyed this post. Couldn't agree more. Time for the PR industry to overhaul/reposition itself but not clear who is going to lead the charge.

Richard, your comments are excellent and reflect many of the same thoughts I had when I read the Times article. I was most disturbed at the portrayal in the article of the PR "counselor's" failure to advise her client and willingness to make a 180-degree turn to do whatever the client wanted rather than stand up for her own suggestion and explain why it was a better course of action.

The woman the journalist followed in the Times article was certainly not a fair portrayal of our profession. The article shows the typical cynicism about PR expressed by many journalists. It's ironic that large numbers of the same people who have made a sport of ridiculing our profession over the years are now eager to jump the fence and are looking for jobs in PR.

"PR people should allow others to take the credit ..."

"But I think the worst thing about her approach is that she sees herself as integral to the 'story' when in fact it's not about her in any way, shape or form. This kind of delusion of grandeur ..."

I just wanted to highlight those two points made by Mr. Edelman and Ms. Seeley. Not anywhere in this and many other posts regarding the story do I see the name of her client.

We're a strictly industrial agency with a decidedly different mission than you folks on the consumer or even the misnamed B2B side.
That said, we're a Chicago agency and I've long admired the Edelman brand. Have had many friends there.
Because of the technical nature of what we promote, it's vital that we have a cursory understanding of it, when we speak with media of any type. This has been a challenge for one Old English major for 35 years now!
Mr. E's right to cite the myths and the recurrent trend I've seen over my years to conquer, capture, then abandon the "new paradigm" has always amused us.
Good PR, especially in our world, is the result of hard work, net work and often the dirty work of entering the world of our clients' customers, rolling up our sleeves and getting intimate with the product, the technology, the applications of same and the results derived therefrom BEFORE we draft the first release.
That said, I do still subscribe to the Trumpism that all PR is good PR, for reasons I'll leave to another post.
Let's keep talking, kids...
Tim Daro
President
Bernard & Company
A full-service, strictly industrial ad/PR agency (yes, Virginia, you CAN do them both successfully; we're 34 years of living, thriving proof!)

Richard, Posts like this make me quite proud to point to my years at Edelman. Thanks for your continued efforts to educate.

Richard,

Spot on. I have shared your column with my team. Inasmuch as we embrace social media in this office - as well as the role of influencers - our best work is done by partnering, consulting, and listening to our clients, let alone getting coherent press materials out to our media colleagues in a timely manner.

Best,

Steve

One of the things that bugs me about PR is that our luminaries take it so damn seriously.

Disagree with your proposition. It is not about being thin-skinned. I believe I made important points about how PR should be done.

Great points in response but all a bit too serious. This from a city whose best known "PR person" to the rest of the world is Samantha Jones from Sex And The City? If the NYT subject is making a coin with her version of events, good for her. I'm just glad it's not my job description ...

Great post, Richard. One additional thought: many people in Silicon Valley and in the social media space believe PR is one-dimensional: they define it as media relations. PR is not a “one-hit wonder”. It does not stand for “press release”. We build brands, enhance and protect the reputation of our clients and are here to stay.

To use a music analogy, we are the Bruce Springsteen of the communications world. Not Right Said Fred.

http://www.techprnibbles.com/

My objection to the NYT article had to do with its portrayal of PR professionals as name-dropping, conference-hopping party girls, starting with the publication's decision to photograph both subjects at parties. Of course, the subjects had to agree to this, which seems at odds with a desire to be taken seriously as professionals and does little to debunk stereotypes.

Richard,

Right on. This article sickened me. First, it reminded me of dot com boom articles. Just sub in Pam Alexander's name for Brooke's and a few late 1990's dot coms for Wordnik, et al. and you have the same article. How old is this reporter? Was she not alive in 1999? Second, I sincerely hope that Brooke's clients did not pay for her work on this article. I read it wondering if it transpired as the result of some kind of back door way in for a mention for her clients while simultaneously garnering quite a lot of promotion for Brooke. Obviously, she is a bright, fabulous woman, but really...if she wants glam, maybe she should go to LA and be a real publicist -- work with A-list celebs, not geeky start-ups. Just a thought.

Richard,
You are right on target. I was disappointed in the NYT business section. It could have been written in 2000, with Pam Alexander's name substituted for Brooke's. Was Larry on his lunch break when this article got pitched internally at the NYT?

I was at least happy to see that Brooke feels that that old guy, Quentin Hardy, is still an influencer. ;-)

I sincerely hope that her clients didn't pay for her time to work on this article. Much better for Brooke than for Wordnik.

Great post Richard. And for the commenters who think Ms. Hemmerling did us practitioners a favor, I have news for you: if my mother read this article, I'd be embarrassed. For people who don't know the ins and outs of our profession, I think a big blank space instead of this article would have been far better. I once worked in a SE Asian country where "PR" meant the same thing as "attractive female hotel greeter". If the NYT article was accurate in the way it portrayed Ms. Hemmerling, we've got a bigger image problem than I thought.

Sure, some companies are looking for full service PR as you describe in Myth 1. Others clients though simply want to work with a PR or AR rep who has personal experience working with influencers in their market and can leverage these relationships and understanding of media and analysts interests on their clients behalf. The article didn't miss an opportunity at all as your last paragraph suggests, it was just one spin on an old story. Kudos to the publicist in the story - in an industry where we spend our days making our clients famous, she got got some publicity for herself!

Sorry, feel obliged to weigh in again here. Wordnik (as of earlier this week ending July 11, 2009) had a grand total of 300 Twitter followers, having been on Twitter since mid-March 2009. While there were many mentions of Wordnik from bloggers on Twitter, it wasn't driving an increase in follower numbers. Furthermore, despite two mentions prior to launch in the New York Times (one by William Safire, no less), Wordnik's own tweets failed to supply the links to the articles, both of which stressed the credibility of its founders.

If you're going with a social media strategy and launch, I'd say the results were less than adequate and that the client, if doing its own tweeting, had not been adequately prepared/trained.

Rather than getting all bent out of shape about the reinforced stereotype of a one-dimensional (and quite successful) publicist, I found the end results the key take-away - and a wake-up call to recognize Twitter as a disruptive technology in public relations.

(Excerpt) "By 6:30 p.m. on the day Wordnik went live, Brew's staff had calculated that 1.43 million people had seen tweets about it. CNET and a handful of blogs also wrote about the site. None of the coverage was in print, and most wasn't by professional journalists.

The publicity sent 40,000 people to Wordnik's Web site to perform 170,000 searches the following week and caught the attention of reporters at USA Today and The Wall Street Journal who hoped to write articles. A couple of media companies have contacted Wordnik to talk about potential partnerships and mentioned that they read the tweets of Mr. Adelson or Mr. Rose."

Who wouldn't want these kinds of results?

Richard, I'm curious to know why you're using a search marketing link that is clearly tagged as being measured on CPC basis and sending traffic from Google to your client, Brita. Wouldn't that mess up their traffic tracking?

Richard,

I found Don Phillip’s (hemscott.com) 7/31/09 interview of John Bogle, which follows, relevant to you “Leadership in Tough Times” post:

Don Phillips: As a card-carrying capitalist, how do you feel about--or what lessons are there about capitalism from what's happened here, and how do you feel about the increased and expanded role of government?

John Bogle: Well, business brought it on themselves. This is certainly a crisis in capitalism. Judge Posner blames it all on the capitalistic system. He's the great Chicago School man everybody knows. University of Chicago Law School, Chicago Business School all teach us this.

The markets have to clear. They will produce great gains for us. Competition, free markets unimpeded.

So capitalism has basically failed us, and I think even worse--although Judge Posner does not agree with this--I think capitalists have failed us as well as capitalism.

I blame the capitalists actually more than capitalism, which gets to, Don, the endemic part of the system, which means that the idea that capitalism brought this crisis upon itself is even more acceptable, more understandable, in the whole scheme of things.

That is, these businessmen--take the bankers. All the other banks are doing these low loans, so their earnings are growing faster than ours are. So our directors and the analysts on Wall Street say, boy, you better get on the bandwagon and follow.

I've written on this in a number of different contexts, but it's a little bit like the old ethical standard. Think about this, all of you, if you would. There are some things that one just didn't do. That's the way I was brought up. It's not gray; it was black and white.

Now the ethical standard seems to be if everybody else is doing it, I can do it too. Carry that over into the banking. Everybody else is doing these funny loans and having earnings grow faster, building up their margins, leveraging those margins.

The more leverage A gets, the more leverage B feels inclined to get. So the system fed on itself and drove bankers to making decisions that they, presumably, should have known better than to make.

I don't--like Judge Posner does, however--I don't blame government for this. I was at a meeting of CEOs, even though I haven't been to one for quite a while, and someone asked me to sum up the morning. This was a bunch of bankers and other CEOs. They said, what do you think about all this?

I said, you know, what I'm hearing here is you're blaming the government for allowing you to do what you should have had enough brains not to do in the first place. I think there's a lot to that. So it's endemic to the system, and we have to learn to have a better capitalistic system.
I don't call it nationalism. Call it what you will, Don. If the government owns 35% of the bank, it's not their fault they own 35% of it. They had to bail the bank out. Frankly, other than the fiscal issues, I don't see any difference in having Washington, D.C., own 35 percent of Citibank than having Dubai own it except Dubai would drive a much harder bargain.

Phillips: [laughs] Well, it seems at the end of the day, character still counts.

Bogle: Yes, character still counts, and we have lost a lot of that.