Musings of a Marketing Maven

The pub­lic­ity team for Putting the Pub­lic Back in Pub­lic Rela­tions asked me for a review in this blog. This is the lat­est book by Brian Solis and Deirdre Break­en­ridge, two emi­nent thought lead­ers in the world of pub­lic rela­tions and social media.

Their book is an in-depth dis­cus­sion of their man­i­festo for “a New PR” — to rein­vent the prac­tice of PR given the onslaught of social media, new forms of peer-to-peer engage­ment, and the emer­gence of con­ver­sa­tional mar­ket­ing. There’s a lot to like in what they’re advo­cat­ing, even though it threat­ens to turn the tra­di­tional prac­tice of mar­ket­ing inside out.

But — I’ve strug­gled for a week now to get my thoughts in order before writ­ing the review, as requested by their pub­lisher. (For my cre­ative pro­cras­ti­na­tion, see this post.)

Much as I agree with the ideas and approaches advo­cated by the co-authors, I have mixed feel­ings about the book itself. The book is chock full of great ideas, but it suf­fers from insuf­fi­cient edit­ing. It reads as if the pub­lisher has con­flated the blog post­ings of two promi­nent thinkers with­out invest­ing suf­fi­cient time, energy (or polit­i­cal cap­i­tal?) to edit out the redundancies.

The book would have been more pow­er­ful at half the length. I read it from start to fin­ish but found it slow going due to the rep­e­ti­tious mate­r­ial. To be hon­est, if I hadn’t been asked to review it, I might have stopped read­ing mid­way through the book. But I’d made a promise, so I had to fol­low through.

Some info­graph­ics would have helped to illus­trate the authors’ key ideas, and break up the monot­ony of the long run­ning text. The page design was pro­saic, which didn’t help.

In ret­ro­spect I’m not quite clear on the intended audi­ence. Prac­tic­ing PR pro­fes­sion­als who have not yet tipped their toes into the waters of social media? Are there any left? It def­i­nitely felt like a primer for at least the first half of the book.

I think the authors’ blogs are actu­ally more com­pelling: Brian Solis’ blog and Deirdre Breakenridge’s blog – both focused on PR 2.0.

In read­ing this book I learned a dirty secret: PR pros have prob­lems with self-esteem. The authors believe that those who embrace “the New PR” will deliver true value to their clients – and soci­ety – and will thereby regain respect for them­selves and their profession.

In no par­tic­u­lar order here are some thought nuggets that I enjoyed, and wrote down in my note­book (quotes from the book):

• a new set of acci­den­tal influencers
• the magic middle
• par­tic­i­pant observation
• the art and sci­ence of mar­ket­ing with­out marketing
• social net­work fatigue
• the abil­ity to lis­ten and engage in con­ver­sa­tions with­out speak­ing in messages
• the shift of PR from a broad­cast machine to com­mu­nity participation

Dis­clo­sure: I don’t know the authors and have never been a PR pro­fes­sional; how­ever, as a high tech mar­keter I’ve worked with PR pros for years. Like all Apple mar­keters I was taught the Regis McKenna model for high tech mar­ket­ing. This approach was also the con­cep­tual ground­ing for high tech mar­ket­ing guru Geoff Moore, author of Cross­ing the Chasm and other ground­break­ing busi­ness books. He worked for Regis McKenna before branch­ing out on his own.

And I fully rec­og­nize that the adop­tion of “the New PR” means that mar­keters have to change their ways too.

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