Moronic

Moronic was the name of an underground email list I managed within Alexander Communications (which was acquired by Ogilvy in 1998 at the height of the tech bubble…Kudos to Pam and team on timing and a story for another day I suppose.)

Morons are what PR people have been called, and if you follow other pr bloggers you already know what I’m talking about.  If you don’t, you missed an entertaining flame war started here which eventually gets into naming names and even more name calling.  I imagine Russ’ casus belli brewed for a while, and if the content of our backchannel emails and especially the original emails that spurred the channel so many years ago is any indication, there *are* morons in the PR business.  There are also hypocrites in the business of blogging (not to mention morons, really smart people, and a lot of everyone in between.)

I think if you’re pitching people like Russ, you may very well be a moron, or at least ignorant.  A well used PR tool is MediaMap, which lists Russ as follows:

Mr. Russell Beattie
Blogger
Russell Beattie Notebook

Email: russ@russellbeattie.com
Contact by: E-mail

Beats: Emerging technology; Technology

Description

Beattie is a Blogger discussing Technology, as well as his own personal experiences and observations. He is particularly interested in mobile, wireless, software and Internet technologies. He is a mobile telecommunications and Internet applications developer at Yahoo! Inc. in Sunnyvale, CA. Topics covered - Emerging technology; Technology.

MediaMap is helpful in terms of traditional media discovery (though I’m frustrated as hell tonight with the interface and the fact that one of my saved lists inexplicably went from 96 contacts to 34 and then after 10 minutes of screaming back up to 96…) but you cannot rely on it for everything. Brian Oberkirch has some useful advice on pitching bloggers which is simply don’t do it.

I took a somewhat different skew on that point in “A Listers Don’t Matter,” where I argue that PR people have an important role in the blogosphere in terms of helping to build and manage dialogue, but not in treating the space like traditional media, i.e. don’t pitch people, rather engage in their conversations where appropriate while building your own.

But back to morons.  I don’t know if Russ realizes he has a MediaMap profile and I certainly don’t have any idea as to how many lists his name (or other "A Listers") appears on, but it seems to me that a few steps are necessary.

1)      PR people should not rely on MediaMap, for information on bloggers – it is not even a very good blogger discovery tool

2)  MediaMap (and its competitors) should remove bloggers from its database(s) until it has taken the painstaking time to interview bloggers and get their permission to be listed in the database. I can’t confirm this, but based on my own entry-level experience if a name was in MediaMap and their beat looked just about right, they were definitely on the lists I passed up.

3)      Russ should consider sending MediaMap a complaint and demand to either be a) removed from their database or b) have his profile updated to say “I think PR people are morons.” I bet you won’t receive many more pitches.

4)      We should all take a deep breath and realize that Russ’ outburst is a good thing, it did what the blogosphere is really good at, it stimulated an open and unfiltered (comment moderation notwithstanding) dialogue and got people thinking. Moreover, it probably drove Russ’ traffic through the roof and based on the ads he runs through his site probably generated a little revenue stream for him too.

Russ, we're not all morons, in fact most of us are hardworking, smart, and creative, and we have a job that is more difficult than you may understand (though as an evangelist you play part of our game without seeing the whole board.)  We act moronic at times, and like bloggers, but unlike many others, we get called on it loudly and publicly when we do make mistakes.  Like it or not, PR people have arrived in the blogosphere and the best among us already have or very soon will understand how we work in this space.  I think a lot of us understand that this is not a medium we can seek or hope to control, but rather one in which we and our clients can participate in a valuable and meaningful way. 

Comments

[david parmet]

I think if Russell had a big fat "I think PR peeps are morons" in his MM profile, he'd STILL get a ton of irrelevent pitches from PR folks.

That's the nature of the business.

And I'm pretty sure MM asks before listing, at least that's my understanding from the media folks I know who are listed there.

[james governor]

not sure about the mediamap point - rubel and beattie are both a-listers, and are surely aware of each other. i dont see how rubel could have avoided beattie. that's what makes the spat so much fun.

[Eric Eggertson]

I agree about the spat being a good thing. If some people in Camp A think all the people in Camp B are morons (or, let's say he used different words and called us insensitive and sometimes sloppy), then it's time to have some dialogue about what Camp A and Camp B are trying to do, and whether there's some common ground.

[Usher Lieberman]

David - I'm not sure about MM profiles, i.e. I know I can add new people to the database (I've never done that) but I don't know if they appear globally. If he did ok the profile, well then, I have no sympathy, he gave his consent to being put on media lists and receiving pitches and being treated like a traditional reporter.

James - Steve should know better, and this has been fun to watch. I find it interesting that Steve also has a media map profile - interesting because there's something inherently strange about one PR person pitching another - which of course has a lot in common with Steve and Russ' little flare up...an evangelist is involved in the business of PR at some level.

Eric - I think we all feel a little better already - I know I do - after this little venting of hot air ;).

[Tom Murphy]

Usher,

Congratulations on the new blog. Should I be worried that the link to my post is entitled 'hypocrites'?

Tom

[Usher Lieberman]

Tom - Just pointing out that you did a nice job of exposing a hypocrite.