BIG treat today! We've got a genuine reference piece on the topic of the professional digital divide.

What's that? Well, it happens to be all the rage in the PR Biz today.  It's that HUGE, uncomfortable, and growing contradiction that exists presently between PR and PR 2.0.  Web evangelists proselytize a paradigm shift; the PR traditionalists cry the end of the profession. And the split isn't just happening from one firm to the next. The battleground is within firms, as well.

Recently, a top exec at powerhouse Ogilvy PR Worldwide was quoted in a major industry trade as saying, "Controlling the message is the old way to do PR and is not applicable anymore." Of course, that set off alarm bells here. We went to battle stations and readied the cannons. "And how would 99 percent of your clients respond to that?," we asked Marcia Silverman, the firm's CEO.

Well... she responded like a seasoned even-keeled pro. Marcia not only navigates the great divide but also articulates the bridge. It is surely a must read and something we all should subsequently discuss.

Without further ado... here's Marcia Silverman:

Got our first responder to yesterday's PR Leader Challenge. It's bold. It's dead-on righteous. Frankly, it's totally exceeded our expectations and set a pretty aggressive pace for our C-Level peers. Joel Postman, EVP of Eastwick Communications submitted a piece titled "The Costcofication of Media."

Joel needs little introduction. He is presently the head of Emerging Media at Eastwick. Prior to Eastwick, Joel was director of executive communications for Hewlett-Packard’s Technology Solutions Group. And prior to that he led executive communications for Sun and was the primary speechwriter for Scott McNealy.

Here, Joel puts it all in perspective. In a little more than a thousand words, he totally captures the dynamics and drivers in today's PR marketplace. He calls it "a crisis of quality for clients." DAMN!

Without further ado... here's Joel:

The Costcofication of Media
By Joel Postman
EVP, Emerging Media
Eastwick Communications

As PRWeek reported earlier this month, a recent study found that a majority of 55 PR agencies surveyed “have competed with advertising and interactive agencies for social media campaigns, and occasionally, even for traditional PR functions.”

Consolidation is inevitable in all commerce. American consumers have discarded all notions of quality, product differentiation and brand allegiance. Consumer goods are purchased at Costco by families queuing up 10-deep with extra-large $350+ cartloads of clothing, food, furniture, electronics, camping gear, tires, "entertainment," and anything else for which the company has been able to make a profitable deal. It's easy to vilify Costco and Wal-Mart, but consumer preference for one-stop shopping and the lowest price are obviously key drivers in this.

And so goes the Costcofication of media. As corporate marketing budgets tighten, and internal communications staff is cut, and turned over to junior (read less expensive, more easily abused) people, it is inevitable that corporations will look to outsource more and more communications functions and projects to PR and advertising agencies and marketing firms. Giovanni Rodriguez terms it "a crisis of identity" for agencies. I would call it a crisis of quality for clients. The result is that many corporations have inadvertently chosen to do one-stop shopping for a cart full of generic, low-cost media.

Large corporations are becoming increasingly interested in "integrated communications" providers. (See Craig's List for a unique, modern definition of "provider.") Often this is advocated internally as a means to "more consistent messaging," and "more integrated planning." More often, though, the drive to reduce the number of communications services vendors is just that -- a vendor consolidation drive. From a business perspective, having fewer vendors, fewer points-of-contact, fewer budgets, and fewer P.O.s is a more visible and measurable goal than the success of any communications program. When a new CMO or VP of marketing comes into a company, one of the first things he or she can do to impress the CEO is to do a clean sweep of communications vendors, reducing accounting and management costs in a way that is much clearer to an MBA than any media coverage or web metrics report.

Messaging, writing and media relations, along with analyst relations, are at the core of the universe of things that PR agencies do very well. Better than anyone in fact. It's why we exist. And clients who understand the importance of these three things, pursue them, commit to them, budget for them, and listen to counsel, get results.

Radiating from this core are concentric rings of extended communications competencies that eventually creep beyond the reasonable expectations of what the typical PR agency can do well for its clients. The second ring might include social media, community building, e-mail marketing and web writing. The third ring, where things can begin to get a little dicey, might include direct mail, advertising, e-newsletters, trade show graphics, and corporate identity. Certainly within one agency or another, there are people of supreme competence in each of these areas. I am not speaking about the ability of any one particular agency to competently provide any or all of these services. I am making sweeping generalizations to which I have a high level of confidence that most PR professionals would agree.

Then there are the outer rings, those things that PR people are being called to dabble in, but which can be dangerously unrelated to the core capabilities of the agency. On a 16th century map, these rings would be marked "there be noxious gasses here." An ideal example of outer ring capabilities are Search Engine Optimization, Google Ad Sense, web metrics and all of the other inherently technical stuff that makes up behind-the-scenes web marketing.

We live in a world measured by clicks, pageviews, keywords and conversions. I know -- better page rankings = more ad dollars and more web site hits = leads and revenue. Hard to argue with. And harder still to ignore that clients want and need these services. But any company whose mission statement extols leads and revenue as primary business objectives, forgetting what it needs to offer the marketplace in order to generate that revenue, will ultimately fail.

One area in particular where agencies need to be diligent is SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which ought instead to be called GO (Google Optimization) because no one gives a damn about any other search engine. Unless the agency asserts its primary goal -- the production of clear, concise writing that helps clients tell compelling and relevant stories -- fully understanding the implications of SEO, and that improperly managed, it can be a distraction from that goal. The competent agency will manage the twin goals of good content and SEO in tandem by closely managing the SEO process and policing the output of SEO providers. The marginal agency will idly stand by while overzealous SEO specialists mangle their clients' content.

Ultimately, the decisions made by any agency as to what services they will offer to clients are made on the basis of a number of criteria, not the least of which is actual competence in those areas. And of course the well-intentioned agency wants to provide first-rate client service and a more integrated communications offering. But there are other drivers which are not always conducive to first-rate PR client service, like growth-for-growth's sake, account control without consideration of client needs, and the fear of losing a client when that big bad new marketing VP comes in to the client's organization, does a clean sweep, and sends out the RFP for an integrated communications provider.

The agencies that will survive are those that do not over-extend themselves, and who stay focused on those core PR capabilities: messaging, writing and media relations, and on those inner concentric rings wherein lie the additional services that a 21st century agency can, and ought to be able to provide. Good client counsel dictates that we speak up when clients are taking the wrong approach, or are focused on the wrong outcomes. As in all areas of what we offer our clients, we need to speak up and let them know which services are appropriate, given all the factors mentioned here. Otherwise, we run the risk of diluting the value we offer clients, which could ultimately lead to a death spiral for the industry.

Or as Detective Harry Callahan said, "a man's got to know his limitations."

Ya know, every so often, lightning strikes here. Every so often, the muse will drop by with a gift. This is certainly one of those times.

The following is truly a reference piece. Our colleague Ike Pigott was recently inspired to write on the modern age of PR and its present dilemma. Using a fundamental postulate of quantum mechanics, Ike sheds light on PR's present uncertainties. It's genius.

By way of background, Ike Pigott is a veteran reporter turned communications coach. A 16-year veteran of television news, he was an Emmy-winning writer with a reputation for storytelling. A gifted coach, he taught broadcast storytelling to stations before moving on to corporate interview coaching and crisis communication preparation. Pigott is now the regional Communications and Government Relations Director for five southeastern states for the American Red Cross. He's also a widely-respected social media expert who blogs at Occam's RazR.

Without further ado... here's Ike:

Heisenberg's Curse: How it Killed Social Media
By Ike Pigott

Not to get too technical but.... you're reading this because tiny little fuzzy packets of energy called "electrons" are slamming with pinpoint accuracy against color-coded targets on a luminescent screen - dislodging photons that excite receptors on your retina. As long as the gun stays accurate enough, the pattern of these photons and the various colors they represent create lines, curves, and pictures that your brain interprets as words and concepts.

If the first paragraph blows right past you or evokes Science Class Anxiety, then we'll sum it up this way: as long as the gun stays accurate, your world remains in focus.

Okay? Well, since electrons are so important, you'd think we'd know more about them. From a distance they are quite predictable, but as you move in closer they become impossible to measure. They are so tiny, the only way you can learn anything about them is to bounce something off of them, magnetically or physically. And as you do so, you end up kicking that poor electron in a completely different direction. Quantum physics tells us you can't know everything about an electron. Werner Heisenberg explained this concept as the Uncertainty Principle - in essence, the act of observing distorts the observed.

Hold that thought. There's a great lesson there. Enter the modern age of PR and its present dilemma.

The PR Purists are pitching a fit today because the Marketing and Advertising people are encroaching on sacred ground, with no reverence for the glory days. They're using PR tools and PR tactics without PR ethics. They're shaking us down not for more than our lunch money... they're after our legitimacy. Hence, we have a veritable frenzy of navel-gazing and kumbaya, contemplation of PR's DNA, and a lot of "whither blogging" and "will PR 3.0 arrive fast enough to rescue us?" At the end of the day, we've got a lot of dead trees, and tools too dull to cut a path to salvation.

First, let's acknowledge the rules are changing. The same technological disruptions that are causing the Marketing and Ad people to cloak themselves in PR garb are affecting us in a different way. The channels that used to be asynchronous are no longer one-way streets. "The audience" is no longer content to sit back and have a message broadcast at them. They want a pinpoint beam of electrons specifically targeted for them and them alone. It's a change of expectations borne by a change of technology - we're at a weird point in history where 'memory' has been usurped by 'search'.

Think about it. We're getting away from the notion of 'remembering stuff.' Simonides pioneered the use of rhyme and verse to memorize epic poetry. Now we don't even remember seven-digit phone numbers. Today, the real skill of importance is 'finding stuff.' Who is more useful to your company, all time Jeopardy champ Ken Jennings or a die-hard Google Ninja? It's the Google Ninja. Every office has 'the one' who knows how to quickly snag some piece of useful information out of the internet. If your supervisor is smart, 'that one' has job security. We don't need to know what - we just need to know where to get it. That's great if you are looking for a fact, not so great when looking for a recommendation. That's the job of social networks. Social networks have been around for eons, and are fueled by the trust of the individuals in the circle. Good advice is the club dues for the sense of belonging.

But the Social Internet changes the dynamic by several orders of magnitude. Instead of spending the time to develop a small network of general friends for recommendations, you can now have dozens of networks attuned for a specific purpose. I'm personally registered on a number of forums and services - some are single-purpose, some more general. But I know which ones to plumb for job contacts and which ones to ask for music recommendations and where I can discuss physics or PR. I can change directions as often as I please, participate in several about as simultaneously as anyone can. I can also dispose of any networks that are no longer useful to me, because I didn't invest a great deal of time getting to know the people. General relationships give way to the specific - and each individual retains more autonomy than ever in charting a course.

All of this spells trouble for the people who have been tasked with controlling the message. You can't be in every channel. And as we are learning, disruptions of the disruption have rendered a lot of our calculations meaningless. Measurement was always alchemy at best - every practitioner had a Philosopher's Stone, and everyone else had Fool's Gold.

Online measurement gave us some hope, but the pageview and the clickthru and even feed subscription totals are now suspect. We can't compare apples to apples, because mashups make applesauce. The consumer is picking and choosing his own electron stream, and the picture on our monitor is one of irrelevance and chaos. That's why today's buzzword is "influence."

The idea goes that if you open the measurement beyond one channel, you can see what people actually do with information and identify who the "influencers" truly are. This is a central tenet of certain white papers floating about, and even though they are silent about the details, there are protocols for following atoms of influence as they pop from stream to stream. Think RFID as a microformat. We could apply better analytical tools to see who has the pull across multiple communities - who is ahead of the curve - and how likely the crowd is to follow. Of course, that comes with one minor problem: people at their core don't like to be tracked and hate to be manipulated.

That's why I am so fascinated by a recent white paper recommendation that PR alchemists get out of the lab jackets and jump into the test tubes. The rush appears to be on for everyone now to get involved in relationship-building - an old-school approach to a new-wave challenge. The new-wave zealots will tell you that PR can save itself, if only it abandons results and gets dirty in the trenches where influence is won! But it's there we meet Heisenberg. It’s there we're doomed.

Here: Those who congregate in virtual groups - be they forums or platforms or just circles of friends - are following a trend. They want a specific network for a specific use, and they don't want to spend the extra time dealing with trivia. The moment things go off-topic, they are done.

Outside observers kill communities in a hurry, regardless of the transparency of their motives. The only tolerated agenda is pure: thrash metal fans don't want Mr. Labelpants from Arista watching over their shoulder. The Curse of Heisenberg: The act of observing disturbs the observed. So that leaves us with completely Naked Conversations. The PR guy now has to be the biggest fan in the forum - the king of the community - top Twit in the Twitterbin. And then corporate expectation will be nothing less than maximum influence. That means that only the rabid fans will have the inside track to be PR representatives. Even transparent, the lack of Motive Purity changes the dynamic of the group.

Bottom line: Corporate expectations being what they are, some degree of control will remain on the agenda. The message might be out of their hands, but then again it never was firmly in their grasp to begin with. The illusion of control was a product of a tiny number of outlets - slits that kept the electron beams somewhat coherent with a minimum of interference. A few years ago, the slits became close enough together to blur the results, and now the screen is gone altogether. We're all bathing in our own complex streams of radiation, and PR's challenge is to create relevance once again.

You can choose to be immersed in the community.
You can choose to be an advocate.
You can choose to be transparent as to your motive.

But you can only pick two of the above, because the communities won't let you have all three.