Yes, Even Small Companies Can Flam

Posting yesterday on the WSJ's "Independent Street" under the headline of "How Not to Pitch a Reporter," Laura Lober showed remarkable charity. In presenting an example of auto-edited flam, Lober changed the names to protect the guilty.

While genericizing the offending pitch may have lessened the sting, it also made it all the more instructive. The pitch now reads like a flam mad-lib. The sentence structures are there, and all you need to do is fill in the blanks, and then send the invoice to the client.

The Journal's "Small Business" section currently focuses on public relations, offering three mini-case studies on how the dark art can best be used for small business.

The first examines the idea of pay-for placement, in which agencies basically work on commission. If nobody bites on the story, then nobody gets paid, which certainly seems superior to billing clients for simply flamming journalists.

The second showcases sheer numb-skullery, telling the story of ePrize, an agency that focuses on entering its clients in award contests that the clients can then use to impress customers. How about putting those same resources into actually helping the customers instead?

The third looks at a simple, yet effective, campaign designed to prompt hospital food suppliers to bring better offerings to their client hospitals, highlighted by a "Battle of the Hospital Chefs." After all, nothing sells sizzle like actual sizzle.

What PR story would be complete without an industry association representative trying to convince the journalist that public relations transcends good old flackery? In the first piece, Simona Covel dutifully reports:

Public relations "is more than being in the media," says Rhoda Weiss, chairwoman and chief executive officer of the Public Relations Society of America, a trade group in New York. "When you work with a [full-service] public-relations firm, they will develop a communications strategy."

In other words, get that a-la-carte, pay-for-results stuff out of here.