99.5% of folk I know rely on Google for search. Now it's gone into the news production business. But with a twist. This from Mike Arrington:
Google made an announcement of an "experimental new feature - they will soon be allowing comments on Google News stories. Comments will only be accepted from a "special subset of readers," which includes people and organizations who are part of the story...
Apparently, sections of the blogerati think this is great. Clearly they're the amateurs in the crowd. Mike continues:
John Murrell says this will result in a huge PR hiring boom and to expect "spin, spin, spin" as every negative fact/opinion is countered. Danny Sullivan says Google doesn't know what it's getting itself into. Frank Shaw, who basically controls all Microsoft PR, says this is "stupid" and predicts it will never get out of beta. That's a pretty clear statement from the king of spin. And I agree 100%.
So do I - but with one caveat. There is an assumption in Mike's argument that PR has brains to spin. Email i've received in the last few days would lend lie to that assumption and trust me when I say I get several of these a week. As an example: (email comes out the blue)
PR: Do you have a contact number for media inequires?
Me: Why?
PR: It would be used by the agency as a media contact.
Me: This doesn't make sense. I've no idea why you're contacting me, who your firm represents or why I might be interested in talking to them. If you'd done some basic research you'd know that information is in the public domain.
This is par for the PR course. It is a reason I tend to be strident on this issue. So should we fear Google? Probably. Should we fear PR? Definitely. And its bastard sibling 'marketing' which is usually one brain cell better endowed but just as expensive.
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