The Professional Blur
By, Asif Husain, Director, Los Angeles office, Fusion PR
Here’s a blog post about a blog post discussing another blog post. Awesome!
So, why you ask? Because I want to do two things: 1) Remind everyone about the level of professionalism we need to maintain in an increasingly more casual world and 2) Reiterate just how far an isolated incident can spread on the Web.
Things are changing. More of the average PR person’s daily targets are focusing on (less formal) blogs written in a tongue-and-cheek fashion. Cross this with the fact that reporters and PR people are frequently starting to use IM and text to communicate. Add in the fact that many are migrating across social networks from LinkedIn to Facebook – so the lines between our professional existence and social life are blurring.
The natural inclination is to approach some of these new media types with a less than old boy professionalism. The perils, however, are that at the end of the day you have your job and reporters and bloggers have theirs. If you don’t get it right it could ruin critical relationships, cost you coverage and end up all over the Web (no thanks to this post).
These lessons are punctuated by a recent blog post on Millions of Us (an agency specializing in Virtual Worlds) regarding a piece on Valleywag (“Sillicon Valley’s tech gossip rag”).
The take-away is simple: Do your job and maintain a level of professionalism. Don’t worry about being perceived as “too stiff.” As the old saying goes, “it’s better to be over dressed than under dressed.”
So, read this: http://millionsofus.com/blog/
Don’t do this: http://valleywag.com/393044/renee-blodgett-brings-oversharing-to-the-world-of-tech-pr
And don’t end up here: http://prspammers.pbwiki.com/
P.S. For the love of your career clean up your Facebook profile and picture or at least set up your co-workers and media contacts on a limited view profile!
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