Given that far too much has
already been written (see also
this) in the PR-related portion of the blogosphere about
the announcement from
Ketchum that they were launching a
new media practice -
without having any real publicly visible presence in those new forms of communication - all I really want to do here is summarize for my own future recollection some of the links and issues around the entire incident.
It basically began on June 13 when
Steve Rubel posted a mostly neutral article "
Ketchum Drinks the Blog Kool Aid" - but then the comments to his post almost immediately began to point out issues with Ketchum's announcement.
Neville nicely summarized the issues with his June 14th post "
Can Ketchum walk the new media talk?" where he pointedly said:
Yet I can't help but wonder how much credibility, if not faith, you'd want to place in a PR agency which enters this area where:- they don't have a blog,
- none of the people named in the press release has a blog (none that I could find with a bit of Googling),
- there's no RSS feed on their website,
- the new offering announced yesterday isn't mentioned anywhere on the website apart from in the press release, and
- the offering appears to be a separate service, not integrated with PR.
Picking nits? you may ask. No, I don't think so.
The comments to the post are worth a read and Neville later pointed out that Ketchum did, in fact, have a
pseudo-blog, except that it's not
really a blog, in the sense that it has no comments, interaction, etc. It's really more of a timed-release of various articles with really klunky navigation.
In the week since that posting, there has been a veritable flurry of postings from PR bloggers on the subject. Constantin Basturea had perhaps the most withering dissection in
"Dear Ketchum, welcome to the blogosphere", although others were equally harsh.
Some of the other postings are (the titles are sometimes the more entertaining part - and the comments to many of the posts are worth reading):
In the midst of all of this, Shel and Neville also covered the Ketchum launch multiple times in their
For Immediate Release PR-related podcast, specifically show
#42,
#43, and
their special interview with Josh Hallet.
Shel Holtz provides a good wrap-up today (although I'm sure this will go on for a bit) with his post "
Ketchum's iffy ideas" when he says:
If this is the kind of advice Ketchum plans to offer clients of its new service, prospective clients should beware. It’s just further indication that the company is jumping into the blogosphere for no other reason than that they don’t want to leave billables on the table. It certainly doesn’t seem to have much to do with an understanding of the environment in which they plan to help clients communicate.
It's too bad, really, because I'm inclined to agree with the sense I took from Steve Rubel's original post that in many ways it is a
good thing to see a large agency like Ketchum launching a practice into blogs, RSS, podcasting, etc. That launch lends a certain degree of credibility and validation to the new media forms. It's just too bad that they didn't have any existing "real" examples to show for it when they launched (or had anyone on their staff who was already publicly blogging).
What is also too bad is that in the week now since Neville's original post, there has been
no response from Ketchum in any of the forums... not even as comments in existing blogs. One does have to wonder if their "blog monitoring service" is catching all of this!
The world of blogs is a conversation... it's about interaction... dialogue... engagement... one can only hope that Ketchum will join in that conversation sooner rather than later.
P.S. Niall Cook has an
interesting response to the whole situation with regard to why his firm, Hill & Knowlton, has not yet launched a new media practice. Worth a read.
UPDATE: Adam Brown, director of eKetchum,
has responded in Constantin's blog.
Tags: newmedia, pr
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