Public Relations is Dead and Other Thoughts About New Marketing Realities

Mark Twain never exactly said: "Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated"; what he probably did say was something like: "This report of my death was an exaggeration". (How great indeed is the need to tweak another man's prose).

While we are on the topic of deaths, real or exaggerated, and in observation of Dia de los Muertos, let's mourn the classic model for technology sector public relations.  This is the model best and most widely implemented by Regis McKenna Inc. and his many devotees.  If it's not exactly dead, it's on serious life support, just waiting for someone to trip over the cord.

If the RMI PR model is dying the cause is most likely complications related to old age.  Certainly technology has changed around us. As Marshall McLuhan observed so long ago: the medium is the message.  As the medium changes, the message changes, and so does the messenger. In the last 30 years the medium of communications has gone from paper publications to tweets in the blink of an eye. 

The "Mad Me" phenomena encapsulates the changes in our world in the glass jar of the 60s and 70s.  We can watch as the world changes around Don Draper (a fictional character within a fictional character) and feel safer as our world changes around us.  Let's have a martini with lunch today and remember the good old days.