If you're not talking to the big boss, you're not doing PR

It's a stupid question, but no less frustrating because it also tugs at the very core of a large industry, and whether it can justify its own existence. It's now become an even more fraught area, because old-skool PR people are now under fire from nu-skool Web PR people, who say they can do it better on the Interwebs, without all those pesky journalists. How can you tell who is doing PR, and who is doing something new, but actually entirely different?

We've entered the age of the Voluble Amateur (user-generated reporting, “citizen journalists”), the Web 2.0 Mashup-Space (pulling feeds from a variety of sources to populate a site with content), and Web marketing (which can blur the line between “useful content”, “product catalogue” and meaningless script-generated keyword baiting in new and unintelligible ways). And any number of these types are saying they do something called “Web PR”.

So now we have PR people saying they do communications that have strategic importance (or just get column inches), digerati saying PR can be done directly to audiences without needing PRs, and Web marketing companies offering “Web PR” as a service, normally in the guise of an abomination known as the SEO press release. But there is a very long way between doing PR, and writing and issuing a press release and securing coverage (let's call it “publicity” for simplicity). How do you tell which one is which?

Smell the difference

There are two ways to tell when you're seeing publicity and when you're seeing PR. If you're a marketing communications professional, it's easy. Like Justice Potter Stewart said in the landmark 1960's obscenity trial, “Pornography - I know it when I see it.” You can smell good PR that is based on a business objective and designed to shift a market. Likewise, you can smell pure product or brand publicity, just like you can smell throwaway clip-book stuffers.

If you can't smell the difference, then there is a simple test to separate real PR from the rest. If the PR person is talking directly to the company owner or CEO, or at least the marketing director that reports directly to the CEO, they're doing PR. If it's work done by an agency reporting to marketing or sales staff, it's either product publicity or sales information, or some kind of SEO thing. It's tactical activity.

If the PR agency or PR manager is not engaging directly with the most senior level of management, then what they do can never be a strategically important expression of a company's activities or intentions. It can't be materially contributing to corporate positioning and the core brand, and it's certainly not about moving market perceptions.

Good, clear, accurate information is vital

PR is important - and so is publicity. Product publicity is vital - because products are what your customers ultimately buy, whether they're goods or services. People pay money for products, not brand.

Product publicity has a different role to PR. PR is about the brand: creating awareness, goodwill and preference. Product publicity is about driving sales. There's even an argument for funding it from the sales budget rather than marketing, because it is of immeasurable use in sales communications, like on the Web (on your site and third-party sites), in product brochures, in sales pitches.

In a Web-enabled world, the sales department must be absolutely sure that when customers look for information about the products the company sells, the customers find it. Good, clear, accurate information. When a third-party aggregator site scrapes up a product description, it must be complete and accurate. When a journalist needs info, specs and images, they must available to be broadcast out to readers and viewers. The product publicity team has all of this information.

Now when your Web marketing company says they'll do Web PR for you, you can tell them yes, you want them to, because you see a clear ROI on making sure your customers can find out why they want your product, and you have a great product publicity team for them to work with. Just please ask your Web marketing agency to stop calling what they do Web PR. Because that just irritates us people in PR who use the Web for real PR.

*Bootnote: Seth Godin had quite a good crack at the question here