PR and media response to the Inconvenient PR Truth campaign launched yesterday falls into two camps: broad agreement or a direct challenge, not to the key message of the campaign, but its style.
The irony could not be more delicious. The campaign has utilised a well worn PR tactic, namely powerful content, to get attention. It’s pulled in opinion from across the industry and is now an open platform for discussion.
There have been lots of positive comments. Conversations are taking place on the campaign site itself, blogs, Twitter and an article on the PR Week site. There has been lots of positive input.
But the campaign’s language has also been the target of criticism. It stands accused of opportunism and dramatising the issue, yet much of the content is collated, or crowdsourced to use digital parlance, from articles and blogs where PR spam has been debated over the past two to three years.
Realwire and the campaign in general have been called “arrogant” for its approach to raising the issue. I caught up with its CEO Adam Parker for breakfast this morning. He has strong opinions which he is forthright in sharing but he certainly isn’t arrogant. Engage on the issue and you’ll find out for yourself.
Parker’s objective was to create a discussion around the issue across the PR and media industries and work towards some solutions.
Yes of course it would be great if a PR or media industry organisation or publication was campaigning on this issue – but they aren’t and none have picked it up until now. In his latest blog on the campaign site Parker goes as far as offering to start-over and calls on the CIPR or the PRCA to take up the issue.
Final thought: maybe PR spam isn’t really the issue that it is claimed to be by bloggers and journalists, in which case the campaign will die a natural death. But I doubt it.
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Blogged on this yesterday http://bit.ly/dfiS1h
Interesting gamble from RealWire given it, er, distributes press releases… but to be fair I use RW’s services from time to time and they always call up to recommend target groups so this IS something they take seriously. I’ll be using it again, too.
RW’s campaign achieved what it wanted to – widespread debate – and Parker was excellent at responding quickly to all the buzz about it so an example of a brave and well-executed campaign in my view.
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