There seems to be a theme about ‘giving it away’ in the PR blogosphere this week.  I guess it’s a sign of the times, but what about those green shoots we keep hearing about?  Either way, here’s my top 5 blog posts from the past week.

1. Lloyd Gofton has a go about ‘devaluing PR’.  He says, “PR, as an industry, needs to wake up to a whole host of challenges, and the last thing we need is to be destroyed from the inside. Have we really been demoted to scrabbling around fighting each other for an ever decreasing pool of clients?” I hope not Lloyd.

2. Emily McDaid also says we shouldn’t be giving our services away.  She’s recently had to pitch against some one whose price tag was zero.  Don’t worry Emily.  Remember: no cost equals no value.  This is not a sustainable strategy.  Your client will be back before long with hat in hands.

3. Mitch Joel seems  a bit more optimistic with his ‘Six steps towards a new economy’ post.  He says that digitisation, new business models, nomads, customer care, contact and analytics will become key PR drivers as we work our way out of the recession.  I agree that all these will play a role. But the single biggest change will be that the  ‘mass communication’ dream will finally become a thing of the past.  Recognition that each individual is part of community will be come clear, and this will impact everything we do.

4. The Bad Pitch Blog makes the top 5 again this week with Get the picture or get lost.  Kevin Dugan explains, “Visuals decrease our word count and increase our effectiveness. And in a Web 2.0 society it’s become cheaper and easier to make our efforts über visual. The evolution of news and search is making this visual leap essential.”

5.  Tom Reidt is running a series of posts on reputation measurement where he revisits the fundamentals. In part 5 he says, “If PR is to be considered a management function, it has to earn its right to it. The principal way it can do that is through measurement, by demonstrating its direct contribution to an organization’s goals and by using verifiable evidence to base its decisions upon.”  I couldn’t agree more.  So why do clients still insist on AVE as a measure of PR’s value?

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