Begin rant.
What is it with all these angry memes aimed at the PR industry? Kill the press release, fire your PR firm, death to the embargo, all PR people are idiots etc.
Unlike other professions that simply ignore them (e.g., lawyers), we PR people love to jump on the bandwagon (me included) and share the crap out of these memes. Not because it does any good but because it informs everyone around us that we’re the ones doing it right: “It’s not me, it’s them.”
I presume the hope is that if the meme gets circulated enough the person who is doing it wrong is going to eventually wise up. That’s not likely.
The only way to correct the quality issues within the PR industry, is for the PR person who is doing it right to find the PR person who is doing it wrong and kill them. I don’t mean literally kill the person, just the way that person practices PR .
So how do we do this? We kill them with higher standards.
Part of the issue with PR is that anyone can claim to do it. There are no barriers to entry. No required certifications, no degrees, no “bar exams,” nada. We devalue the profession by not requiring a minimum level of proficiency. Some trade associations like the PRSA and IABC have discussed this issue at length but as far as I know there are no mandatory requirements.
Personally, I feel PR people should be required to have a Master’s Degree. This may sound extreme, but if we want PR to be taken seriously and have a seat at the executive table (next to the MBAs and JDs) then we need to have the proper credentials – ones that are universally recognized and accepted (esp. by non-communicators).
Now before you head down to the comment section to tell me that you didn’t need “credentials” to become a senior PR pro at a big agency, let me say this: This is not about you. It’s about creating a noticeable improvement in the overall quality of the profession as a whole. I believe this can be done by simply demanding more schooling from new PR hires.
So what do we do with all the idiots currently hurting the PR profession? Not much. Hopefully a new generation of better trained PR pros will surface and eventually replace them. But in the interim, support academics like Bill Sledzik and others like him. Invite them to speak at PR conferences or better yet at your Agency’s annual meeting. Get Bill to offer an online course in the Summer and make it mandatory for your junior PR staff. Pay them lots of money too. They deserve it.
Demand that Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer write more posts at the Bad Pitch Blog. These guys are the only ones in my opinion who consistently blog about what’s wrong with PR in a constructive manner (e.g., using real examples etc.). By the way, these guys do this as a public service so throw them some coinage next time you pass their virtual home.
Lastly, if you know someone who’s a PR idiot, lend them a helping hand rather than circulate yet another anti-PR meme which does nothing but make the profession look bad.
End rant.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
Some great suggestions here, Andrew.
Unfortunately, your post, while it is constructive, exposes PR’s biggest, fattest wart: There is no barrier to entry. Anyone can hang out a shingle and say they’re in the PR business. They don’t have to read the textbooks, take any classes, join any organizations — nothing. Hell, they don’t even have to write well (and plenty of ‘em don’t).
Maybe that’s why PR has so many incompetent souls who claim to be “professionals” and why we heap so much criticism on our own practitioners. A lot of people who claim to be in PR really suck at it.
Love the master’s degree idea. But good luck making it a “requirement” to entry. What we really need is a professional credential, but the APR (from PRSA) and ABC (from IABC) haven’t caught on and, frankly are not very rigorous.
Any of your readers who’d like to pursue a master’s in PR are free to contact me. Kent State will launch its all-online program this coming January. (I had to plug it.)
As for that summer class, I’ve love to make some extra money, but not this year, OK? I gotta catch some fish and paddle some lakes. Priorities!
Thanks for the shout-out.
Sounds like a Green Day show, “Don’t Want to be a PR Idiot.” Like this post. I try to do my bit in promoting the successes and what works. I like the idea of professional accreditation, when you think about it, it is a heady responsibility – I studied engineering in school (of all things) and remember considering the idea of getting my Professional Engineer certification. So much of a company’s value is related to intangibles like reputation and brand. A Masters Degree might be overkill, it would certainly winnow the field down a bit.
[correcting from earlier]
The no. of good media relations pros remains :: to the no. of good journalists. Trouble is, more claim to be pros on both sides
Well said. Kill them all.
However I disagree with MBAs part.
Lawyers need to pass a bar. CPAs also have to pass an exam. Anyone who takes a crappy MBA course from some 4th rate school can say they know business but most of them suck at it.
So I would urge you to refine your ideas to specially mean do you want an exam? Or a degree? Or both?
And one more thing. Bill Sledzik is incredibly smart. Glad I know that he now has a masters program.
Andrew: Thanks for the kind words regarding the Bad Pitch Blog.
The industry memes waste everyone’s time, distract us from moving forward and from dealing with the real problems our industry faces. Unfortunately your issue with certification is IMHO one of those memes. Regardless, it’s not a solution right now.
As far as taking a seat at the executive table. The seat is there…no one is going to hand it to you. I think we need to make it clear to folks that as much as we earn media coverage for clients, we earn respect. We earn business knowledge. We earn results and ultimately said seat. It takes time and effort. At the risk of overgeneralizing I’ll suggest that many lack either the patience or the motivation to pull it off.
The Bad Pitch Blog focused initially on trying to change the habits of the individuals who are committing the crimes. We realized quickly it is the students and recent students/entry level that ultimately will make a difference.
We have some plans afoot to start helping these folks get real live media relations experience before bad habits can be taught, learned, established. We’re hoping it will continue to help.
Thanks again for bringing this up.
Hey, Bill, I’ll be glad to teach in the online PR program at Kent if ya ever need anyone….
With the shameless portion of the post out of the way, I think part of the “bad PR” problem is that public relations itself is just too big and too broadly defined. Media relations, government lobbying, fundraising, financial communications, event planning (gag), corporate communications, community relations, and now evidently we’re supposed to be customer service reps to thanks to social media…. I just don’t see it being feasible for one collective identity to do that much and still retain meaningful substance.
I’d prefer that we as a discipline hand event planning, customer service and weaker topics to others, wipe our hands clean of them so that we don’t keep attracting the “I’m a people-person” types. That would go a long way to cleaning up the bad public relations… even more so than APR certifications (currently useless if we’re honest with ourselves) and graduate work (which I’m still not sure provides material all that different from *good* undergraduate programs).
Andrew,
Good post. And I’m glad to see nods to Dugan and Laermer.
I have to disagree with Sledzik (for a rare change) that the barrier to entry isn’t the problem as much as the definition. Without the definition, non PR firms and people keep grabbing up select tasks and call it PR. So, publicity means PR. Marketing means PR. Promotions means PR. And Propaganda means PR (which is where is started, but good PR has moved on). Lately, social media is PR. And at the end of day, none of it PR but everybody calls it PR.
And the result is all those memes, even if they are wrong. Good releases still work. Some PR firms get it right. Not all PR people are idiots but there are certainly idiots working in every field. (Um, embargoes don’t really work so well, though. Ha.)
So you are right, that more people need to pick up a battle axe now and again. But I have to be honest, it’s not very well supported. And until good PR people support contrarian conversations without being timid into thinking it makes them look like naysayers, it will continue. PR needs to manage its PR.
All my best,
Rich
P.S. for Bill. It’s great to hear about that future program. Sounds like a winner.
Let me riff off Becker for a moment.
It’s not that all of these things aren’t “PR,” because they belong there.
It’s that our current system of certification – the APR – is still predicated on a model of everyone doing everything, to a modicum of proficiency. Add to that the slowness of the APR in getting up to speed with social media and other new lines of practice.
To me, an operative analogy is car care. We are asking why so few mechanics work at full-service service stations, in an age of brake shops, muffler shops, oil-change outlets, and even car washes.
I don’t trust the guys at quickie-lube to re-bore the cylinders in my engine, but I do trust them to change out a filter or two. If I am comfortable with their attention to detail, I might even let them replace the serpentine belt. But if there’s a problem, that’s on me for settling on price and convenience. I don’t know that I want a government-enforced certification telling me that the guy who can rotate my tires now has to learn how to clean a carburetor.
The Age of Specialization requires a system of certification that isn’t so all-encompassing as to kill progress.
Besides — I keep hearing about how much of good PR is human relationships, and cultivation. Those are the sorts of things that don’t show up on tests anyway.
That said, I can’t wait for my life to slow up enough to enroll in Bill’s online courses.
I think we just kill them, literally.
Just kidding!
Public relations about making connections and sometimes there is just not one good way to do that. Press releases might work for one group and fail for another. Talking on the phone (whoa, who’s this dumbass?) might work in another instance. It’s not about streamlining and finding the optimum solution. It’s about thinking about how to reach an audience. Currently I work with a lot of audiences on a multitude of subjects (generalist) but soon may be focused on publicizing the efforts of a single group (specialist). I will have to adapt. That is the main thing PR must concentrate on; adaptation to new paradigms and tactics as they arise. And, most importantly, cultivating relationships along the way.
I think that when someone writes a blog post about making the PR world a better place (and ridding it of the awful PR practitioners who mess it up for the good ones), a lot of people who do PR in the worst possible way sit there shaking their head: “Yeah, THOSE PEOPLE are so awful.” So, Andrew, instead of complaining about bad PR (which I could do every single day I’ve got so much material in my in-box), what Kevin and I with Bad Pitch is show rather than merely tell who’s awful out th ere. Then for giggles we say what they did that was wrong in case it’s not obvious, which it usually is.
You say: “Hopefully a new generation of better trained PR pros will surface and eventually replace them.” I could not agree more.
And Bad Pitch 2.0 (sorry to have to use “2.0″ but it really is an upgrade) will be, as Kev said, a shout-from-the-rooftops manner to help the Next Generation get some no-BS learning before those truly yucky habits are established.
And here’s the shocking thing: Kevin and I are doing the upcoming seminars out of the goodness of our hearts, which I’m not necessarily known for (he is, by the way).
If you got it, flaunt it, right? And we possess a lot. See, over the last five years we’ve learned more than we ever thought we would from PR folks and journalists who have took time from their overcrowded days to share their pain via email, tweets, Facebook status updates, IMs and even a few pieces of actual snail mail..
Starting this year we’re going to teach the newbies how not to become a victim of bad behavior and maybe in some cases simply ignore their ignorant bosses or supervisors or “peers” (quotes mine).
If you want to learn more about what we’re doing, tweet @laermer or @prblog and we’ll clue you in. Happy Saturday.
Now get back to work!
Although the educator in me pretty much always wants everyone to get more schooling, in this case I don’t think it’s the solution. It might help at the micro level, meaning it could improve individuals’ behavior among the kind of paid professionals I assume you’re talking about. But it falls apart at the social level. In fact, I disagree with Bill and argue that “no barriers to entry” although frustrating at times is actually a positive thing in a democratic society.
One of the primary justifications for the existence of PR is that we help make sure all people get a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas. As it stands now, big institutions that support that status quo (federal government, big corporations, etc.) already have an unfair advantage in that marketplace because they can afford to hire professional public relations advisers. In the case of the legal bar in the U.S., all clients get representation — if nothing else, through public defenders. There is no equivalent –no public opinion defenders– at the bar of public opinion. If you try to eliminate amateurs, who’s left to advocate for radical or unpopular causes? I absolutely agree with Ike that someone else shouldn’t get to decide who you can or cannot hire to represent or advocate for you in public discussion.
Accreditation and educational requirements could be used to create a specially-titled kind of PR person, but they wouldn’t stop ordinary (paid or unpaid) citizens from advocating for causes, ideas, candidates, etc., and often doing it badly. It’s messy, but it’s part of the deal.
Not sure Dr. Russell and I disagree all that much. While I’m a staunch advocate for more education to enhance professionalism in PR, I wouldn’t want to see it become mandatory.
Near the end of his life, Ed Bernays, frustrated over the evolution of public relations, actually became an advocate for licensing PR practitioners. But with licensing comes the need for government regulation. And with that comes 1st Amendment questions that pretty stop the discussion in its tracks. It ain’t gonna work.
I will say this: Some of the very best PR pros I have worked for an with over the years didn’t have PR degrees — or degrees in any related field. One came from English lit, another from philosophy, another from political science, and so on.
But it only takes one trip to a news-release distribution website to see that a whole lot of nonprofessionls are in charge of producing PR messages, many of them marketers who treat PR materials as they do advertising copy. Poorly written fluff reflects on all of us.
To Karen’s other point, where we also agree…
In a recent blog post, I talked about the opportunities in PR for those willing to represent fringe groups and causes. Karen is right, too often these are assignments that “trained PR” types reject. Too bad, as it’s important work that requires a commitment beyond what any corporate or agency PR person ever has to make.
I also see an unwillingness of PR majors to pursue careers in nonprofit because of the lower salaries. I guess when you have a pile of college loans, it’s hard to appreciate the psychic rewards!
I’m late to respond, and concur with all of the above. In essence, bad PR will always exist because it is a broad field and hard to control.
The causes of bad PR are at two levels–the practitioner and the organization. Most bad examples can be traced back to individuals with no education (either formal degree, seminar, or working with a savvy PR supervisor). Sometimes organizational hierarchy, context, view of the PR function etc etc can limit PR. Also, “encroachment” by other functions gives a bad name to “PR” when it’s not being done by it–e.g. lawyers as spokespersons, marketers writing news releases like brochure copy etc.
I conclude by pointing out that Edward Bernays made an impassioned plea to license public relations near the end of his life–I believe it was in 2002 at the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference. His reason was that too many “schmucks” were entering the field and giving it a bad name. But licensing never got far because it is too hard to define, too cumbersome to enforce, and too restrictive on an ever expanding field.
So, I just teach my students well and work with other educators and practitioners to “enhance the profession.”
Andrew – finally, you said it. PR has a tendency to do a lot of “navel gazing” and a lot of agonizing over “getting a seat a the table.” As someone who came into PR without a PR background (international business, then a career in marketing) I found all this fretting over the credibility of the channel, the value of the counsel/tactics to be rather shocking. PR works when practiced by skilled, savvy pros.
I, however, don’t believe we need Master’s degrees or more certifications. We need PR to be taught in business schools. Period.
While PR requires the skill, craft of writing well, it’s the only business discipline not taught in a business school. It’s no wonder that PR folks have a confidence crisis about their perceived value and fret over not being at the table with other business pros. Without a business background, they may not even understand the conversation at the table or how PR as a tactic and communication as a strategy can positively impact company, brand and bottom line.
Thanks for a post to push all of us into the conversation. Much appreciated. Jenny
I HATE those “PR people suck” posts that PR people forward around. I always think “why are you using your influence to basically say we’re useless and dumb?” I’ve been guilty of that on a couple occasions too, but I quickly realized it didn’t help anyone’s perception of me or my industry to tweet about posts that diss PR (unless they’re a self-improvement angle).
Great post, Andrew!
As a student, many of my non-PR major classmates at Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism roll their eyes whenever PR is mentioned. The sole reason for this is that they are often mistake these PR “schmucks” for PR professionals. Unfortunately, because of that misconception, those same students are often unwilling to take PR courses or to learn more about the field. I certainly feel as though if PRSA could continue working toward a better definition of what PR encompasses–especially with the advent of social media–and incorporated that into the APR, the accreditation process could be held to a higher standard and taken more seriously.
However, as PR has dramatically changed in just the last four years I’ve been a student, it’s difficult to predict the future for an ever-evolving and ever-changing field. Here’s hoping that some sort of licensing or accreditation is given more pull in the future.
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