Talk About Spin!
So Jaffe PR has publicly declared an end to public relations for law firms. In fact, they have decided that public relations is no longer relevant to its client base and that instead law firms need to be concerned with public reputation management according to a press release issued this earlier this week. Obviously, their number one agenda item is to promote their agency and its services (completely understandable) but they are doing a major disservice to PR professionals everywhere – not by dismissing the relevancy of public relations but by generating a transparent and self-serving press release with such little substance. Talk about spin! If they take the same approach with their clients’ communications, they really will have some “reputation management” to do!
As public relations professionals, we are challenged every day with leading our clients through the new media landscape. When we talk about managing relationships, we are talking about engaging with critical audiences and, certainly, we are presented with new channels and tools for interaction on an almost daily basis. From Twitter to Facebook to the ever-growing blogosphere, the power of persuasion is in the individual’s hands and reputations are always at stake. Public opinion can turn on a dime and a full fledge crisis can break out and spread to all corners of the earth within a matter of minutes. For these reasons, social media is no longer a niche specialty or “nice to have” add-on to a public relations program. Social media and one-on-one engagement is the face of modern public relations.
Everyone wants to be the first to coin a new phrase or lead the pack with buzz words that usher in the future (e.g. social media release), but please back it up with some substance rather than simple semantics. Public relations or public reputation management – call it what you want. We’re all talking about the same thing here. Jaffe hopes to usher in a “new paradigm” with public reputation at the heart of the new reality. While I agree that there is a new paradigm for public relations in 2010, public relations has always been about reputation management. It is the strategy, tools and tactics that have changed not the end goal.