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<< Originally a guest post for the Social Collective blog, stumbled upon it while Googling and decided it deserves to be here too >>

Now, you may be wondering why we’ve called you here for this family meeting. But all will become clear. I just want you to know that your marketing manager and I love you very much and we would never do anything to hurt you.

But what we’re about to say may come as something of a shock.

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As you may have heard, last week my agency Wildfire PR released some social media research which saw some pretty excellent pickup all over the place.

As PRs, we’re all pretty used to the value of good coverage- traditionally,  it’s one of the great magical currencies of what we do and a satisfying achievement.  But it’s easy to start seeing it in pragmatic terms as a commodity listed in Excel, meeting targets and making clients happy.  It’s easy to lose sight of what coverage may mean to clients, not just in the marketing department but for everyone from the founders downwards.

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<< Crossposted from my post on the official Wildfire PR blog. Because I like it. >>

If one thing has become clear in the last few weeks, it’s that everyone loves the Old Spice guy.  He sprung out of nowhere, posted some clever YouTube videos and we all had a good time.

But social media was supposed to be about more than this.  It was supposed to make companies more transparent and usher in a new age of true public relations – it was supposed to save the world!

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A PR career is a funny thing. The account exec role births you into a chaotic world of frenzied media relations and client report deadlines. But no sooner do you get a grip on these fundamentals than the skillset gives way bit by bit to a dynamic of planning, strategy and deeper client management.

In my experience, both requirements are deeply satisfying but in enormously different ways.  What I’m wondering is if there’s a sweetspot somewhere along the career ladder where you get the best of both worlds. After all, there are only traditionally so many positions available- AE, AM, AD/ AssD, MD.

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Graham Goodkind’s recent piece on why PR timesheets should be scrapped seems to over-simplify the issue.  Certainly, they’re an imperfect system as demonstrated by his stats showing how they are inevitably filled out with less than ideal accuracy.

But so’s democracy – as Churchill famously stated, it’s the “worst form of Government except for all others that have been tried” – and you don’t see us turning our back on that institutional bastion.

Instead, Graham focuses on the idea of selling ‘value’ as opposed to simple hours.

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