PR 2.0 futures (In)Conclusion - Physicists not Publicists?

Marvellous - watching a whole set of spats about the Brave New World of PR 2.0. On Techcrunch I read Brian Solis talking about the Secret Rules of PR (12 eh - hmmm - not a Prime thing then .

Anyway, in the comments section some wag weighed in with a response largely rebutting them:

Secret #1
Understand You Probably Have Nothing

Your startup is probably a whole lot less special than you think and will probably fail. This is obvious to most journalists and bloggers.

Secret #2
Pick a Friend to Lead PR

If you have funding and have a friend that works at a PR agency, retain their firm. Spreading your funding around to friends and family is a crucial part of getting the most out of the startup process.

Secret #3
Don’t Participate

Most technology journalists and bloggers are idiots who wouldn’t know an interesting story even if it hit them in the face. Therefore, don’t waste your time trying to befriend them. Not only are they likely to ignore you anyway, but you’ll have to put up with their egos and stupidity.

Secret #4
The Blogosphere Is Not Your Audience

Bloggers and first adopters are not mainstream and if you want to achieve success, don’t believe the hype - appeal to mainstream journalists and most importantly, mainstream users.

Secret #5
Launch Anytime You Want

If you have something truly interesting, people will notice. If you have something that isn’t interesting, it doesn’t matter what time you launch - nobody will care.

Secret #6
Most Bloggers are Not Journalists

Focus on real journalists, not bloggers.

Secret #7
Don’t Measure

If you actually get any coverage, it will probably be short-lived so don’t place too much weight on any measurements you take after your PR launches. Instead, come back a couple of months later and see if the people who found you through your PR are still around and still talking about you.

Secret #8
You Don’t Need to Customize the News

If you’ve written a good pitch, it will appeal to people. Period. Customizing a PR is about as useful as customizing your toilet seat.

Secret #9
Don’t Get a Spokesperson, or Do

You probably won’t need one and if you can’t be a good representative for your company, you’re probably not going anywhere.

If you have lots of money, on the other hand, consider hiring a highly-attractive female who is willing to wear skimpy outfits. This probably won’t do much but you’ll get the satisfaction of having an attractive woman talk to you for once in your life.

Secret #10
Your Company Blog is Less Powerful Than You May Think

Unless you’re a high-profile Fortune 500 company, the number of people who will read your company blog is so small as to be meaningless to your company’s prospects for success.

Secret #11
Blogger Relations Are Worthless

Even a review on TechCrunch is unlikely to give you lasting results, so don’t give yourself a hernia trying to reach bloggers.

Secret #12
Follow the Conversations But Don’t Join In

If people like your product, they’ll talk nicely about it. If they don’t, try to take their feedback into consideration but recognize that you usually only get one chance to make a good first impression and if the response to your startup is poor, you’re probably doomed and trying to talk to people to convince them otherwise will be useless.

I am available for PR consulting. $5,000 per month retainer.

I must admit to having a certain sympathy with this chap, the original was - in my opinion anyway - maybe useful if you are already a Silicon Valley Superconnector and funded, but of limited use to the average small company. I later noted PR Natural Loic Le Meur calling Mr Solis's stuff Bullsh*t and coming up with his own 7 points (7 of course is Prime)

I then noted Mr Scoble weighing in with his own 7 points.

Now watching an A list blogwar is all very entertaining, but the conclusion to take from this is that no one really knows what the heck "PR 2.0" is or is going to evolve into. But, having worked in the last year or so with a few PR companies, In fact, I think these chaps are in danger of all looking under the lampost of the existing industry luminaries to find the future of PR.

I don't think that's where it will be - I think PR 2.0 will be run far more by physicists than publicists, because the killer fact about online interaction - whether website, social network, advertising or whatever is that it is very, very measurable and thus lends itself to serious data crunching.

The future wll be less Arcane and more ArcTan methinks.

This was brought out well in a session I attended early this week at the Convergence Congress, where one of the speakers showed how various "experts" in the company (PR, marketing, UE) - armed with opinions about what the customer would do, combined with executives (with sales targets) to pervert the web experience design that the customer research said they wanted. However, it is of course possible to test various website designs live, and that quickly tells you what customers really, really want despite all the fluffy theories.

To an extent this use of heavy maths has already started to attack the Marketing / Ad industry with Google, and in fact metrics are the major issue that - in my view - the smarter blades in this space are really focussed on now, so I suspect that we will see a lot more long equations rather than long lunches in future.....

(Shameless Plug - Last year we had to write some material to get a few PR agencies up to speed with this New New World, and even gave a few workshops - I was giving a session to an Agency last Friday in fact - we are available for consulting on PR 2.0 at our standard very reasonable rates )