PR People Are Morons
You know, now that people in Public Relations have "discovered" blogging, I'm seeing a notable downward trend in the quality of the discussions online. These are the people who think they understand communication and people in general, yet seem to be the last ones to be arriving to the blogosphere... But arrived they have and now the signal to noise ratio seems to be skyrocketing in the wrong direction. I mean, the great thing about blogging is we were finally able to cut out these morons and get to the opinions and ideas of the people who actually contribute to the world! Yet now these bullshit artists are sort of weasling their way back into the conversation somehow and it's annoying. And don't misunderstand, these people aren't trying to participate in the conversation, they're trying to "influence" it.
The most annoying, of course, are the emails I get from PR folk wanting me to talk about this or that product - especially the spam-like form letters. Anil just wrote about this. Morons. I've also had to go through my comments recently and delete crap from PR people pretending to comment on a post to promote some (usually completely irrelevant) product or another. What are these people thinking? Do they really think the same lies and manipulation that they use on the corporate media establishment is going to work on me? Blogging isn't my "job" - I do this for fun. I'm not looking to fill column inches or dead airtime with your crap, I'm looking to provide real information and opinion to my readers who in turn return the favor and educate me.
But beyond these morons, are the PR Bloggers who claim to "get it" or at least understand blogging in general and are now spewing uninformed idiocy out onto the world. Follow the links on these pages and it's essentially, a how to guide on how to manipulate bloggers, or how your company should start a blog and how that would in turn help you manipulate your customers and media. These blogs aren't worth the kilobytes they're taking up on some hard disk somewhere.
If you're a blogger and get an email from these people, delete it. Don't even respond. Don't link to their websites either. If someone claims to be some sort of PR expert, just ignore them. Don't give them a voice. Let them link to each other in their own sesspool of pitches and press releases. They're not adding anything, they're just trying to figure out how to game the system. Don't let them.
-Russ