Enter the Leper Messiah

I am pissed off. The PR industry has recently received one black eye after the other – and you know what? It’s our own damn fault.

Yes, I said it. The recent bad press for the PR industry (and individual practitioners) in TechCrunch, Forrester and the New York Times came from the work of horrible PR people. These ranged from bad pitches to scamming a small business.

That pisses me off even more than anything. Instead of being a source of news and information from the media – our industry is being looked at as nothing more than a bunch of snake oil salesmen.

While every industry has its share of bad apples, it seems like we’ve had more than our fair share. Sure bad news and our symbiotic relationship with reporters makes our follies easy fare to sell papers, but it’s still no excuse to promote shoddy workmanship.

So how do we fix this?

Well, some suggestions I have heard include standardizing the industry with some kind of licensing certification, like lawyers or accountants. I will leave those kinds of fixes to smarter folks. I think we all need to do some self policing -if you see someone acting shady or blatantly spamming, give them a kick in the ass or point them to better ways to do their jobs.

If we don’t, well, we might just use this Metallica song as our greeting cards…

What are your thoughts on fixing the space? We’d love to hear below.

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