PR people shouldn’t do brothels

Posted Friday, August 24, 2007 at 4:05pm in Blogging, PR General |

There’s been an interesting discussion taking place in the blogosphere relating to the relationship between PR and bloggers. It all started on Yahoo! employee, Tom Coates’s Flickr page where he added a very striking picture titled “This is not a brothel…”. Tom added seven paragraphs of commentary to the picture detailing his dislike for PR people sending him press releases.

Within the commentary, Tom references this blog, my blog, as the reason why he receives so many releases from PR people. His claim is because of a blog post I wrote in October last year replicating the Technorati 100 blogs but making it UK specific. In short, I created a list of the top 100 UK blogs that were deemed ‘influential’ by Technorati. You can see the global Technorati 100 on Technorati’s website.

Instead of adding my own opinion to this post it’s probably better to direct you to where all the discussion is going on. You’ll see me commenting in some of the comment strings of these blog posts and also on Tom’s Flickr picture. Here they are:

* Tom Coates’s Flickr picture.

* Drew Benvie’s post.

* Ben Ayers’s post.

* Sally Whittle’s post.

* Jemima Kiss at the Guardian.

* Ged Carroll’s post.

This probably isn’t a comprehensive list of the discussion that it’s generated thus far and I’m only directing you to the posts I’ve read and/or commented on.

What does anyone else think?

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14 Comments

Walker Hamilton

Friday, August 24, 2007 at 4:24pm

I didn’t realize you were so widely read in the PR world. I found your blog by accident more than a year ago and thought it a good read.

Something that furthered my misunderstanding of your position in the PR world was that the “call to de-lurk” you posted a while ago didn’t really get _that_ many reponses….

Welp. Shows what I know.

Stephen

Friday, August 24, 2007 at 4:28pm

Heh! “call to de-lurk” Great phrase; almost sounds foreign.

Tom Coates

Saturday, August 25, 2007 at 7:48am

I do want to make it clear, Stephen, that I’m not blaming you for the actions of the people who sent me endless press releases for any and all products that they thought might be interesting after reading your post. I understand that you consider this to be a clumsy form of PR.

I do however, still think that you’re being a little disingenuous when it comes to that original post. I don’t really understand how anyone can argue that writing a post describing the 100 most influential UK bloggers on a blog for PR people can constitute anything other than a tacit statement that—if you work in PR—these are the blogs that you might want to explicitly target one way or another.

At that point, our disparate positions on PR in general kick in. I’m afraid I’m far from comfortable about PR generally, and I’m deeply troubled by the idea about being targetted by any PR person at all, even as I understand that white-hat PR people aren’t ‘as bad’. For me it comes down to one thing, that people view my site as just another way to sell their stuff and they believe that I’m quite happy to play along because I should understand the rules and stop being so naïve. Fundamentally, they think my voice is for sale or that I am available to be influenced and that, bluntly, pisses me off. And when it’s done at scale! God that’s even more infuriating.

Saturday, August 25, 2007 at 7:49am

By the way, on a separate issue, I’ve always thought your site design was particularly beautiful.

Stupid, lazy PR people, bloggers and media databases

Saturday, August 25, 2007 at 10:38am

[...] If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Tom Coates of the excellent plasticbag.org blog has quite rightly complained about the frequent incompetent pitches he gets from PR firms. Tom thinks the reason is because Stephen Davies included him in his list of the Top 100 UK Blogs. [...]

Ian Delaney

Saturday, August 25, 2007 at 4:06pm

The PR industry has a few lessons to learn about not spamming anybody - whether their job is writing or not. No-one should be considered a ‘potential vehicle for messages’, and they won’t respond positively if they are. I get shit, untargeted releases 7 days a week - one about cake recipes yesterday. I hear one of my colleagues at least reports these as spam to gmail. Sounds like an effective and deserved deterrent.

On the UK Technorati 100. It was an interesting exercise to me, and I learned about a lot of very well-executed blogs that I wouldn’t have through other means. Anyone that took it as ‘these are the guys you’ve got to target in the blogosphere’ is an idiot. For obvious reasons.

Saturday, August 25, 2007 at 4:37pm

Tom,

Appreciate your comment and your kind words about my blog’s design. I can take no credit whatsoever for the design unfortunately. I’m lame when it comes to anything like that. I just gaze in admiration at people’s design skills.

Again, appreciate and understand your comments but let me pose you this:

At the time I wrote the blog post I was working (exclusively) for a PR agency in London. The PR agency scene is very competitive and most PR people are competitive in nature. I wouldn’t call it a dog eat dog world, but there is a lot of rivalry between different agencies.

So with this in mind, it would be deemed stupid of me (and my peers) to post a piece of research that could be used as an advantage to my company’s competitors. Maybe I was being naïve because I presumed PR people would understand that it would be idiotic to spam a press release to anyone on that list.

Honestly, my intentions were not to make a resource for dumb ass PR people to use to spam you or anyone else on the list. Ask anyone who knows me; I have an interest in how the media is changing and how individuals like yourself can have such influence in ways that weren’t previously possible. But I’m not saying I want you to carry my messages or trying telling one else you’re a vehicle to do so.

As an example, take these two posts where I looked at two bloggers and compared their traffic and readership compared to mainstream media titles. This, to me, is significant in the whole media fragmentation theory, but it wasn’t a way for me to say “now because these people have such a high following, go and send press releases to them.”

You’ve openly said that you’re not comfortable with PR and I respect that. Given your past experiences, I think you have a good right to be uncomfortable with PR and the wider marketing mix. But as the comments in my original blog post prove, not everyone shares your thoughts and a number of people commented on the post itself or emailed me to include them in the list.

The last thing I want to with this blog is piss someone off and for that I apologise and take full responsibility for pissing you off. If it helps I’m going to remove your blog from the two posts (I wrote two posts on titled the UK50 and then another titled UK100) and put up a holding statement linking to your Flickr picture and this blog post.

As a sidenote and just to defend my profession a little. PR covers a broad spectrum of industries and not for profit organisations. Some people in PR work tirelessly for small charities or indeed in third world countries using their PR skills to actually save lives and make a difference.

I’m being cheesy here I know, but it’s true and I can’t claim to do either.

Sunday, August 26, 2007 at 9:04pm

Thanks again for your response Stephen. I do really appreciate how decent you’ve been about the whole thing and I’m sorry if I’ve made your life difficult.

Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Brighten the Corners » Blog Archive » Dark side of the moon

Friday, August 31, 2007 at 3:01am

[...] Last week he - rather explosively, and with a fair bit of strong language - hit breaking point, and the ensuing storm’s driven UK web-based PR into full scale retreat. From the last of those three links, Ged Carroll writes: In fact, the last time I felt like this, was in April 2000 when I had just done a meeting with an incubator fund and had been confronted with the realisation my pension had gone up in smoke as the inmates were running the tech sector asylum. Basically it boils down to this: PRs have ****** up: as an industry we’ve managed to alienate one of the UK’s most prominent bloggers. [...]

Will Critchlow

Saturday, September 22, 2007 at 1:15pm

Hi Stephen,

I’ve been behind on my reading and have only just come across this whole malarkey.

Sounds like you and Tom have pretty much explained yourselves to each other by now.

I respect both of you, and the debate seems pretty much over so I’m not going to chip in too much.

Just one quick comment - Tom mentions that he thinks it’s disingenuous to claim that there cannot be another reason for posting a list of influential bloggers in a PR blog other than to ‘target’ them in one form or another.

I don’t want to claim that this was your reason for posting the list, but there *is* another reason it is interesting: I very often point people who aren’t yet familiar with blogs and bloggers at lists of influential bloggers in order to help educate them about what works online and what people want to read. One of the biggest lessons of lists like this in my opinion is that you need to tell clients (and no doubt some clumsy PRs and SEOs) that so many of these people who *are* influential have little interest in being influential for their product and that if they want to raise their profile, they can’t do it by ‘targeting’ them in any kind of way you would target a journalist or someone blogging for money.

Hope the whole thing is pretty much sorted out now.

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Tuesday, August 5, 2008 at 12:35pm

[...] zwangsbeglückten Nachrichten-Redaktionen. Die wilden Blogger aber bringen ihren Unmut mit PR-Spam häufig auf drastische Weise zum Ausdruck. Das schmerzt die Tanja-Anjas. Seither beginnen einige von ihnen [...]