Why Hire a PR Firm?
The perennial “bash on PR” meme started up again this week.
First Scoble knocked us. Then Arrington took aim. Even Steve Rubel, “one of our own,” took a potshot. Thankfully, both Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Mark Hopkins at Mashable stood up for PR pros (thanks guys! – much appreciated, believe me) …
Scoble, Rubel and Arrington basically made the point that PR firms are unnecessary if you have a great product and are willing to spend a lot of time engaging in the blogosphere.
I started drafting a lengthy rebuttal … but was gladly interrupted by a client meeting. It was a get-together with Mike Volpe, the marketing chief at Hubspot – and arguably one of the most Social Media-savvy marketers I’ve ever met, period. And, in fact, Mike is the first to wonder aloud about the themes espoused by Scoble, et al.: he definitely understands the merits of their arguments. After all, Mike is one of many Hubspot bloggers; he is active on Twitter; he’s a prolific content creator; he’s a guy with strong media relationships in his own right.
Yet in the course of our chat, without prompting, Mike started promoting the value of PR agencies! I was verklempt, as my Gramma used to say.
Mike was kind enough to sit down for a few minutes after our meeting, in front of a video camera, to capture his Pro-Agency feelings for posterity.
Mike Volpe, VP Marketing HubSpot – Value of PR Firms.
What better rebuttal to The Media’s PR gripes than to hear from an Actual Customer?
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As a professional SEO, I work in concert with companies’ PR firms to get their content to work harder for them, whether the PR firm ‘does’ digital or not. Together we get better results and more sales/visibility for the customer.
I think the best argument against PR firms is that you are usually paying for about 25% of one mid level and one junior staffer’s time on your account – and then the occasional cameo by one of the PR firm’s founders. That’s the experience of the overwhelming number of vendors that work with PR firms, despite *every* PR firm’s solemn promise in the pitch process that they do not do this.
So hiring a single smart person to do your PR in house and having 100% of their time seems to make a heck of a lot more sense in most cases. Not only do you get the full immersion of that person and their intimate knowledge with your product set, but they sit on every single call and experience every facet of that company’s PR (and can tweak and grow accordingly), as opposed to these inconsistent levels of participation by third parties.
I think the counter argument is that PR firms bring the advantage of existing relationships to the table, and can often get the superior results by virtue of having gone through it time and again. Definitely something to be said for working with someone who’s launched many similar companies in the past.
But I think that “relationships” are severely overstated notions in PR – and that it’s almost always the quality of the story (versus the person telling it).
Of course, there are infinite variables that change the equation. I think that smaller IT vendors should hire an in-house person. I think larger, more established IT vendors get a lot more utility out of PR firms because they have a lot more to lose (in crisis communications) and a lot more sophisticated requirements.
Just my two bits …