The Face of Public Relations is Changing

I was once in a meeting where four executives from an organization and and two employees from a famous New York PR agency spent two hours interpreting a three sentence email from a reporter at the New York Times and discussing how to respond to it. I was floored. What an insane waste of time!

I was reminded of this because of the posting on Mediabistro.com about Edelman laying off at least four senior executives. In my opinion, the people mentioned above were (and continue to be) old school. Why spend so much time on The New York Times when they could be looking to a broader future by building key relationships with bloggers and creating buzz through social media?

I bring this up because of a recent New York Times article (yes, I do read The New York Times online) on PR in Silicon Valley. I too was in the Internet scene in San Francisco during the boom. I quickly learned that it wasn't necessarily about spinning a story for the Wall Street Journal (which by the way never ran), but more about creating buzz and building key relationships. The "key" relationships, if successful, spread the word more effectively and efficiently than print, even back in 1999.

Today it's not about spin. People can see through that. It's about true passion and a direct connection. It should be interesting to see how the industry of PR evolves in the near future.