Forget what you say: What do you *do*?

Posted on June 29th, 2006 by Jackie Danicki

Sam Sethi on “Why marketing and PR people kill great companies“:

God I have met so many of these so-called PR professional air-heads, who worry more about the font size in their Powerpoint than the quality of the actual content. The next industry that needs to be disintermediated is the PR business followed by the marketing department. Thank God for Blogs and the fact that now I can subscribe to the software engineers who make the products and thus discuss the technical merits of their solutions directly, rather than go through some jobs-worth.

Love it.

Filed under: Blogging, Communication, Life, Marketing, PR, Technology

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4 Responses to “Forget what you say: What do you *do*?”

  1. Antony Mayfield, on June 29th, 2006 at 11:42 am Said:

    I’m glad he points out that the original article says the problem is with “stupidity of hiring PR & marketing people with no technical background or interest new technology…”

    There are plenty of airheads in PR, just like there are plenty in the world at large. God knows there may even be some engineers with personality defects.

    But there are also plenty of PR and marketing guys who love technology and love talking about - hence they got a job talking about it. And while people who write about the deep tech should be talking direct to the people who do it, good tech communicators often take the product or service to business and consumer markets where people won’t necessarily understand the technical guys.

    I don’t like marketing and PR that gets in the way. And I’m not the only marketing and PR professional that feels that way.

    It’s always true that PR is doing its job best when its hardly noticed. It’s about being a good connector and then knowing when you’re not needed in the conversation anymore.

  2. Jackie Danicki, on June 29th, 2006 at 4:36 pm Said:

    Antony, I agree with your comments completely. What bugs me is when ‘communications professionals’ think that it is all about them. Adriana talks about one agency bringing her in to talk to them about social media (along with, I believe, Mike Butcher and some others). They were getting really into it and excited, and then one of them said, “Wait - where do we come in on all this?” Adriana replied, “Well…sometimes you don’t.” Complete shutdown, “No, this social media thing isn’t going anywhere, it’s for the birds, you need PRs to facilitate conversation,” etc. Getting out of the way is really underrated in the majority of PR firms with which I am familiar.

  3. Antony Mayfield, on June 30th, 2006 at 4:50 am Said:

    Social media, networks, represent massive disruptive change to everything for people who work in the media and communications. We know that, but many out there don’t.

    Often reactions like the ones you describe are based on pure emotion, fear, a result of ignorance. I’ve seen marketing, PR, journalists - for that matter - and ad people have completely irrational reactions to social media.

    What I’ve decided to think instead of “idiots” is “I need to let them calm down and then I need to explain it to them better.”

    Once people understand social media they can start to think about what their job is - and isn’t - when it comes to communications in this new world.

    But, yeah - they need to know when to get out of the way. They/we (for I am of PR) need to know when its not our job to be in the conversation anymore.

  4. PooterGeek, on July 1st, 2006 at 1:37 am Said:

    “marketing and PR people kill great companies”

    I have huge sympathy for Sethi’s views and wish his title were true, but Microsoft’s history, for example, is of bringing a lesser product to software sector after software sector and marketing the competition to death.

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