Flackster is backster
Michael O’Connor Clarke has started up his blog about PR again. Yay! The new entry is the first in a series called “The Seven Deadly Agency Types.”
And on the topic of PR blogs, I checked in with Richard Edelman‘s only to find out that last week he blogged a conversation he and I had. That’d be perfectly ok, of course, even if (disclosure statement!) I weren’t on retainer to Edelman PR, but I feel bad that I fled the country immediately afterwards and thus missed the interesting discussion of the post.
I argued that PR needs to get out of the way, connecting passionate clients with the public. That’s always been what the best PR people do: They find the right person in the organization for you to be speaking with, which is not necessarily someone in marketing. Richard puts forward other ethical and valuable roles for PR agencies, and I do appreciate the role a PR agency can play in actively pulling together interested parties, and sometimes even as a content creator.
I like Richard’s phrase that PR is about building public relationships. I continue to believe that in most cases that relationship should be between the client and the public. If the PR agency is in the middle, it will usually be assumed that that’s because the client can’t be trusted to speak for itself. That’s one reason why blogs are so important: They are public relationships.
