Social Skillz

Recently finished Putting the Public Back in Public Relations by Brian Solis and Deirdre Breakenridge. I had high hopes for this book based on the previous readings for my class, but man, this book was a stinker.

Setting (not lightly) aside mortal flaws of editing, this book was clearly written for a less web-savvy and probably older audience, for men and women already ensconced in a PR career. But this doesn’t excuse the fact that, despite having been published just this year, the text already seems stale, failing to reflect an accurate picture of the rapidly changing web. “Myspace is one of the most popular and successful social networks online,” the authors tell us, “but Facebook is quickly becoming a dominant force in its own right.” O RLY?

I’m not sure what the official date on MySpace’s headstone is (here are some candidates) , but I think it was well known since shortly after Facebook threw the gates open to the public that MySpace had become a ghost town. (I quickly googled “myspace vs. facebook” and found the following comment on a blog post: “The only people left on [MySpace] are unpopular teenagers from whom the rest of the high school has managed to keep Facebook a secret.” Yup.)

Here’s another gem of a quote: “As they say, it’s FTW (for the win).” Am I the only one getting the distinct impression that Brian and Deirdre are trying to prove they’re still relevant? Compare with this recent post on Crazy Things Parents Say:

Nan: WTF, well done.
Me: What do you think WTF means?
Nan: Wow That’s Fantastic.

This is the level of irrelevance and inanity Solis and Breakenridge struggle to avoid.

And it’s not just Brian and Deirdre: After a chapter or two, you’ll find yourself thinking of PR professionals as living fossils, vestiges of an earlier epoch, thanks to the authors’ constant reminders that  (1) Public relations is a dying field, and (2) as a PR professional, this is largely your fault. Any persuasive power the book has is widely undermined by the authors’ need to perpetually justify their own existence.

There is an important point to take away from this book: The Audience is dead, and your precious messages aren’t going to work anymore. Spamming a press release to a list of contacts is now considered gauche; Audiences and messages are out, relationships and tailored communications are in. Solis previously authored an article entitled “Social Media Is About Sociology and Not Technology,” which would actually have been a better title for this book, come to think of it. The authors also quote The Cluetrain Manifesto: “The human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.” And people will know if you try.

Of course, this is really just an extension of my theory of the groundswell as the new grassroots — you can’t treat people like a number and expect to engage them in a meaningful way. Sure, the Sierra Club sends out mass emails, but there’s also many mechanisms by which individual volunteers are supported, encouraged, and commended as they climb the ladder of social engagement.

Solis and Breakenridge touch lightly on a few other topics covered in more depth elsewhere, such as the necessity of listening (Groundswell), the “tyranny of geography” (The Long Tail), and the idea of “and not or” when it comes to social media (Here Comes Everybody).

Additionally, there are some nuggets of good information about optimizing releases for search engines and negotiating embargo dates with bloggers. The book also includes the full text of a number of seminal blog posts by more of those “thought leaders.” And while these posts are great (mostly because these posts are so much more readable than the rest of the text), it would have been helpful if the authors had included URLs of the original posts, so readers wouldn’t have to experience them in a vacuum, divorced from comments, links, etc.

Maybe I would have felt differently about this book if I had read it before some of the others, particularly Groundswell, but as it stands, I feel it offers only watered down versions of the keen insights found in the other books. There is some wisdom here regarding how to most effectively interact with bloggers and other online tastemakers, but it’s hardly worth suffering through this book to learn something I think most people would put together on their own after reading the others.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 9:55 pm and is filed under groundswell, social media, the long tail, Putting the Public..., facebook, myspace, crazy things parents say, cluetrain. 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.