Fire Your PR Agency

April 13th, 2007 by Wilson Tan

If…
5.  If they have not pushed you to rethink online monitoring and crisis management.  The 24-hr news cycle is dead ( NYT: “Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm.”), long live the .5 second news cycle .

4. If they have not encouraged you to give your customers a voice.  Trust in the corporate authority will likely continue to decline, as peer-to-peer influence increases.

3. If they are clueless about RSS, Wikipedia, or Technorati.  These are basic distribution and search tools that any communicator ought to have an understanding of.

2. If they have not asked you to consider flattening the organization by letting employees collaborate via internal wikis or blogs.  The company culture may not be ready for this but at least be thinking about it.  Keep this in the back of your mind for the day might soon come when Jane in creative or Bob in product design could be ideal candidates for the face of your company.

1. If they have not done Google and Wikipedia searches of your brand and products.  Sometimes the simplest things are easiest to overlook.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 10:38 am and is filed under Agency 2.0, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Fire Your PR Agency”

  1. Brooke Says:
    April 13th, 2007 at 4:02 pm

    Cheers to that! Good stuff, Wilson. I’ll add #6: If the media list for your last announcement, product launch or event included only mainstream media outlets. Is this how you get all of your information? Didn’t think so.

  2. Melvin Yuan Says:
    April 26th, 2007 at 11:50 pm

    Nice post, Wilson!

    You know I’m a fan of effective headlines; and putting this one - “Fire your PR agency” -on an agency blog just screams for attention :)

    This post is certainly worth expanding on because there are many more things that PR companies should be doing today; but the message is absolutely right - if your PR agency hasn’t started giving serious counsel or changed the way they look at things, then they certainly deserve to be fired.

    And on the other side of the agency-client relationship; PR managers on the client-side play an important role too. They need to pay heed to good counsel; accept the change that’s taking place all around us; and adapt!

    Client-side managers who insist that the new media landscape is a passing fad (or who accept it, but do little to help themselves) are dangerous to both themselves and the agencies they engage.

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