Business Blog: Hoover’s Business Insight Zone

If you follow the world of social media, you could be forgiven for thinking that the bloggers and the public-relations folk have descended into the same sort of East Coast / West Coast feud that turned Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls into martyrs at young ages.

The gauntlet thrown.

Earlier this week, Gina Trapani of the popular Lifehacker blog issued, shall we say, a beatdown to the p.r. firms that she thinks have been irresponsible in their pitches to her. She set up a wiki (find it here) that lists all of the firms — not just individual p.r. practitioners — that she has now blacklisted from her e-mail inbox.

This is just the latest salvo in a war between p.r. folks, who say they are just trying to do their jobs (but who are sometimes tone-deaf to the ways that the social media operate) and bloggers, who say that they can’t stand p.r. spam (but many of whom are just as open to a good p.r. pitch as any old-school magazine editor).

A voice of reason.

Into this chaos rides Mike Chapman of the Every Dot Connects blog, who hoses down the respective parties with a cold blast of common sense:

New Rules

” . . . No standard set of rules applies. For the millions of blogs now in existence, each is their own nation, with their own local laws and customs. If it sounds like too much work, then it’s probably not the work you should be doing.”

That sounds remarkably like common sense to me.

My own experience.

As I said in the comments to Mike’s post, this makes me think of two things:

1. In my bachelor days, I came to the not-very-groundbreaking insight that different women liked to be approached different ways. Some women didn’t want to be flirted with, ever, even if you were dating them. Others would flirt with you while they were holding hands with their boyfriend — not because they were unfaithful, but because they liked the playfulness of it. Some would only date you if they knew you very well; others might go out with you if they barely knew you. The point: PEOPLE VARY. [Wait, where have we heard this before?]
2. In the business world, I’ve had bosses who wanted airtight documentation to back up every decision, and I’ve had bosses who would never, ever read an e-mail that was more than six lines long. Which way is right? DEPENDS ON WHO YOU’RE DEALING WITH.

Honestly, you’d think it wouldn’t be this hard. Kudos to Mike for the note of sanity.

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More context:

• Brian Solis: Making Mistakes and Amends in Blogger and Media Relations
• David Parmet: PR vs The Bloggers part XXVII
• Yours truly: Hell hath no fury like an editor bombarded with p.r. spam.

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(Image of the Battle of Najera from Wikipedia.)