Michael O'Connor Clarke is proud to be a card-carrying flack. Currently based in Toronto, Michael has spent almost 20 years in corporate communications and marketing roles. He started blogging at almost the same time as he first moved into PR - over five years ago. Now he's trying to figure out how to combine these two areas of expertise for the benefit of clue-seeking clients. In his time, Michael has pitched people, products, processes and pop-tarts, but he has a congenital inability to peddle fluff.
Email Michael
I should confess, first, that I've been a little sceptical about this whole "Social Media News Release" thing put together by Todd Defren and his firm, SHIFT Communications. I'm still somewhat sceptical, to be honest, but the problem is that, while I've been thinking this through for a while, I'm having some difficulty defining the shape of my misgivings.
And now I've just read something that has convinced me that my inchoate scepticism may indeed be completely misplaced - or that, at the very least, I need to re-visit the idea and think things through properly. What's changed my mind?
I just came across this post on Todd Defren's blog, wherein he describes, with remarkable candour, an all-too-familiar outbreak of cluelessness on the part of one of his clients, and his agency's response to the same.
Reactions across the blogosphere would certainly seem to say so. Boyd is an Irish Times writer who has just contributed what some view as the Times' own "Attack of the Blogs" diatribe.
I don't know. The Irish Times certainly doesn't do anything to help convince us they might have any kind of a clue, by throwing up a paywall around their stories. Click here if you really want to pay a couple of Euros to read the piece. Or you can go here to read the full article for nothing, courtesy of Gavin Sheridan. (To paraphrase John Gilmore, the blogosphere treats a paywall as damage and routes around it).
For me, I find it hard to tell what position Boyd's really taking in this piece. He bounces around a bit, gets a couple of things wrong, a few other things right, recycles some of the stock inflammatory Chicken Little-ish comments about the "threat" of the blogs, but then settles down into a rather more balanced conclusion:
"There’s a whole new world of reportage out there. It can be fiery, extremist and inflammatory, or it can be unshackled, uncensored and progressive depending on your own leanings or prejudices."
So I'm conflicted. Rather more interesting and insightful analysis from Mick Fealty and Piaras Kelly
And, as he's on his way to Ireland in the very near future, it will be interesting to hear what, if anything, Scoble thinks about this one.
Cherry Beach Sound is this week’s worthy recipient of the Flackster Rancid Kipper Encomium for Ridiculous PR (aka the FRKER).
A friend who works for a prominent enterprise technology publication has granted me permission to pass on this sublime example of hopelessly befuddled pitchery.
Let’s lead with the email.
>Paul,
OK – first problem. The reporter’s name is not Paul. You got one consonant correct, but I’m afraid that just isn't good enough. Please try harder.
>I have a story or press release to deliver. Something in the now, a very hot topic in all the >magazines and talk. Have a look and put it in your next issue. I have more information on the >project and I can also send you a photo of Cherry Beach Sound studios where it was mixed
>upon request.
>Truly,
[Name Removed to Protect the Guilty]
>Cherry Beach Sound
I’m almost at a loss for words. What kind of nitwit would think this was an even slightly appropriate way to approach a reporter?
[About bloomin' time. I know, I know. Sorry. Busy trying to find a job and stuff.]
This is the subject which (if I was still actually employed) could get me fired. In a way, I guess it already did – when I became “the man who knew too much” at one firm.
Irregular, creative, or downright unethical billing practices are the dirty secret in too many PR agencies. Some of them don’t even realise they’re doing it – or they just don’t recognize that what they’re doing would, at best, raise serious questions were their clients to find out.
I should point out, before wading in too deep, that there are many clean, open, transparent agencies – agencies run by people with both the ethical intelligence and the business sense to understand the importance of setting and enforcing rules around what you can and cannot bill. These agencies deserve to succeed.
Sadly, I’ve also learned that the opposite situation is more often the case. There are very few hard set rules in the agency business about what constitutes acceptable billing practice. In extreme cases, the standard seems to be: if you’re even thinking about the client, you should bill it. If I thought this approach was even remotely fair, I’d be able to bill an extra fifteen minutes every morning in the shower, as my mind gears up to go to work for the clients.
To try to characterise the worst kind of billing machine, let’s start with a few horror stories I’ve collected over the years.
A couple of people have pointed me to this really quite remarkably weird story about R&B singer Omarion. There’s something more than a little odd going on here.
First – on the day of the horrific London bombings, Reuters ran a story, purportedly inspired by the singer’s publicist: "In London, uninjured Omarion seeks prayers." It’s an entertaining, quietly snarky little piece.
“Omarion was in London during the tragic bombings that struck this morning,” a statement by the singer’s publicist AR PR Marketing, released hours after the bombings, said. Making no mention of the fatalities or casualties of the blasts, the singer’s statement concluded, “He would like his fans to pray that he has a safe trip and a safe return home. He appreciates your support.” … Asked why anyone should pray for him, [publicist Shauna Gilmore] said, “He wasn’t hurt or anything, but just the fact that he was there and all that.”
As you’d probably expect, my first reaction on reading this story was: "what a wanker". As my friend Chris Wood at Maverick put it: “While tragedy unites us all, it also brings out opportunist maggots.” Sad, but true.
But then my inner fact-checker kicked in and I decided to dig deeper. The plot... curdles.
If you go to Omarion's website right now, you'll find a note denouncing the Reuters story as a hoax:
According to representatives at the artist's record label, Sony Urban/Epic Records, statements and sentiments appearing in a Reuters-syndicated article (Thu Jul 7, 2005 9:22 PM BST) and attributed to the American R&B singer Omarion were never made by the performer. Contrary to statements made in the article, Omarion is in no way affiliated with the pr marketing firm mentioned in the piece. The "publicist" quoted in the article is not a legitimate representative of the artist, is not known to the artist, and is not acting on the artist's behalf. Omarion regrets any association with the article and hopes that fans will not be taken in by unfounded and unauthorized statements.
Strange. Stranger still is that this is a revised version of the original disclaimer that went up the day after the Reuters piece appeared:
"Statements and sentiments appearing in a Reuters-syndicated article (Thu Jul 7, 2005 9:22 PM BST) and attributed to the American R&B singer Omarion were never made by the performer. Contrary to statements made in the article, Omarion is in no way affiliated with the firm, AR PR Marketing, nor is "publicist Shana Gilmore" a legitimate publicist acting on behalf of the artist. Omarion regrets any confusion and sends his thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims of this horrific tragedy."
Curiouser and curiouser. The totured layering of deniable disavowal hints at much lip-biting and hair-pulling at the record company.
Yet two minutes of Googling brings up a couple of stories seeming to confirm that Omarion IS "affiliated" with AR PR, including this puff piece about the agency stating: "AR PR Marketing has also successfully planned events for Omarion's album release..."
The AR PR website appears to be down at the moment, but Google's cached version of the site last week showed they were still prominently touting their work with Omarion at the top of the page.
Before the site went down, it went sideways. For a few days the front page of the AR PR site went unchanged, except that all of the links went to Google, Yahoo or MSN search pages. Now all you get is a default Windows IIS error message.
So what the fjǿrk is going on here? Is someone screwing with AR PR, or with Omarion, or both? I’d love to see a statement from the PR agency explaining their side of this puzzle. You’d think they’d want to do a little reputation management here, before the flying fickle finger of fisk flicks them into the wastebasket of failed agency startups.
This week's Flackster Rancid Kipper Encomium for Ridiculous PR (aka the FRKER) goes to this quintessentially cack-handed pitch, received in the Corante mailbox earlier today:
From: Four Corners Communications
Hi,
As your site is all about the Foo Fighters, I thought you would be interested in the September issue of Guitar World magazine which features an in depth interview with Dave Grohol. The below quote is just a part of the larger story which I know your readers will want to check out. Thanks for your time, hope you can put this up for the fans!
As Hylton put it in his message to me: "Um...Gets what we cover wrong, spells the name of the person she's promoting wrong..."
Indeed. For the record, as far as I can tell the exact number of references to the Foo Fighters on the Corante network (prior to this post) was zero.
Anil Dash has a smart, funny post about the horrors of misguided PR people pitching bloggers. Classic Anil - dry, charming, well-written, and absolutely right on the money. All PR people with their sights set on the blogosphere should read, digest and act on Anil's advice. Hell - even if you're just pitching a regular reporter, his post is still sound counsel.
Meanwhile, Russell Beattie - whose blog I've been enjoying for some years - responds to Anil's comments with a somewhat over the top rant against the PR industry as a whole. He's not wrong, but I don't think he's being entirely fair either. It's a sweeping generalisation and, like absolutely all generalisations, it's inherently flawed (yes, there's a joke in that, btw. Not a very good one, but it's Friday afternoon...)
In a post titled "PR People Are Morons", Russell says: "now that people in Public Relations have "discovered" blogging, I'm seeing a notable downward trend in the quality of the discussions online."
It's harsh. A lot of what he says is absolutely right, of course. I see no cause for debate in the point he's making. But the casual dismissal of the entire PR industry hurts.
Here's the comment I've just left at Russell's blog.
There are flacks and there are flacks.
That the PR business has more than its fair share of clueless mouth-breathers is pretty much a universally acknowledged truth.
And yes, it's insanely irritating and depressing to note that so many of these idiots and the dinosaur agencies that employ them have woken up to the existence of the blogosphere and are now trying to figure out how to "game" it.
But to suggest that the PR industry's discovery of blogging has directly led to "a notable downward trend in the quality of the discussions online" is hyperbolic to say the least.
I am a PR guy. I'm also a blogger. Have been since March 2001. That's a long time in blog years, but it's not even as long as many of the other PR people out there have been blogging. Personally, I don’t think I’m responsible for adversely impacting the signal-to-noise ratio. Nor do I think many of my colleagues in the PR world deserve such calumny either – people like Jeneane Sessum (blogging since November 2001), Steve Rubel, Constantin Basturea, Renee Blodgett. All fine, interesting, clueful writers – all people who “get it”. All, incidentally, PR people.
But lest I be misunderstood, let me be clear: I’m not upset by your post. In fact, I agree with you in most respects.
Let me say it again – there are an awful, awful lot of horribly bad PR people out there doing jaw-droppingly stupid things to try to get some kind of attention from the blogosphere. Wankers, without exception. Pitching blogs and bloggers, in particular, is a just a ridiculously bad idea (an issue I ranted on at considerable length, here).
Couple of quick pointers to interesting AdAge pieces.
First, the horror continues at Marketing and PR industry giant Interpublic Group, with news of a deeper and wider SEC investigation into their rather...um...interesting accounting practices (hey - they're a creative company, what do you expect?). As AdAge also notes: "...in what has become an annual summer event, Interpublic announced the departure of another chief financial officer."
What a mess. I witnessed some of the ugliness in my relatively short stint with one of the Interpublic companies. More on that topic another time.
"Nearly one-quarter (21%) of Web users who do read newspapers now read the daily paper online," according to the AdAge piece. (The Nielsen news release is rather more conservative - they tag the result as "a fifth". I agree with them - 21% is much closer to a fifth than a quarter. But I'm quibbling).
AdAge goes on to cite ABC numbers that indicate the fall in newspapers' average daily circulation in the six months to March 31, 2005. Dailies are down 1.9% to 47.4 million - Sunday papers fell 2.5% to 51 million.
What I'd really like to see now is a much more direct, single-survey comparison of growth against the fall off. Maybe the numbers are in the full Nielsen//Netratings report, which I haven't read.
One fifth of all readers choosing to get their news primarily online is an interesting stat - but I'd love to see a hard stat that proves the correlation between falling print circulations and growing online news audiences. It seems intuitively right and obvious, but where's the research? Guess I've got some Googling to do...
Mark Twain is reported to have once said that you should "never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel".
As the Internet continues to level the playing field between reporters and the subjects of their stories, Twain's quip (sometimes erroneously attributed to Bill Clinton) could probably stand some updating. It's still not smart to go after a newspaper if you think they've done you wrong, but as some reporters have learned, when the battleground is online, it can also be pretty dangerous to pick a fight with punters who purchase pixels by the pound.
A reporter at Moneyweb, a South African business news website ("South Africa's leading source for independent investment information"), recently waded into a scrap with Elan Suisse Capital - a somewhat less than transparent investment group.
[N.B. I'm not taking sides here - but there's precious little information available about Elan Suisse online. Hard to form an impression of the firm when their corporate website is so elegantly content-free, and Google can only dredge up four rather uninformative hits].
Moneyweb reporter Julius Cobbett penned an investigative piece, digging into the background of Elan Suisse, and finding very little good news with which to encourage investors.
The people behind Elan Suisse have responded by registering juliuscobbett.com, and using the site to launch an ad hominem attack on the reporter.
It's certainly an unusual approach, and not one I can ever imagine recommending to a client - but it's entertaining as hell to watch this one play out.
I’m indebted to the estimable Constantin Basturea for doing the little bit of Googling and extra research I should have done myself, and helping to reveal the full perfidy of a pitch I’ve already taken one swipe at elsewhere.
I leaned in hard on what I read as a particularly brain-dead piece of blogorrhea, and fisked the living daylights out of the post over at my other blog, here. If you want the full context, start with reading that piece, then come back here.
I tend to keep topics that aren’t directly related to the worlds of PR or marketing off this blog, preferring to post them at my personal site. As it turns out, this particular issue has now revealed itself to be very clearly a PR-related one, so I’ve chosen to move the discussion back here to Flackster.
In the AlwaysOn piece that inspired my invective, one jesse tayler (sic) wrote a confusing and inconclusive bit of puffery – “Why smart companies don’t use corporate weblogs” – trumpeting the virtues of something he described as “blogworking” over the failings of “traditional weblog publishing”.
I ripped into his rhetoric for a range of reasons; the principal point of push-back being the fact that nowhere in his ode to “blogworking” did the author take the time to explain what, exactly, blogworking is and how it differs from plain old vanilla blogging.
Thanks to a note from Constantin in yesterday morning’s inbox, all has been revealed – and the truth is even more clueless and odious than I’d suspected.
Pause, if you will, and offer up a small happy bunny dance in honour of American Business Media - the association of business publishing houses, whose members include CMP, Crain Communications, The Economist Group, Elsevier, Hearst Business, IDG, McGraw-Hill, Penton, PRIMEDIA, Scholastic, Ziff Davis, and many other print and online powerhouses.
Kudos is due in this case for their courage in taking a position on the blurry line between advertising and editorial - calling on member companies to keep a clear separation between the newsroom and the schmoozeroom.
In their release, Gordon T. Hughes II, president and CEO says: "The cornerstone of editorial integrity and credibility is the ability of media to make content decisions based on mission and the needs of the reader, and to make these decisions without undo influence from outside interests such as advertisers."
He points members to the association's Editorial Code of Ethics, released in March of this year, which is a worthwhile read in itself.
The real test now, of course, will be to see how many of the member media companies follow through on this call to action. Specifically, how many publishers will have the balls to decline lucrative advertising from the likes of BP or Morgan Stanley, in cases where the contracts include slippery ad pull clauses?
This Deadly Agency Type is a little harder to characterize – the type more often manifests itself in individuals than entire agencies. I’ve seen some agencies, however, especially smaller ones, build their entire business approach around the Flack Of All Trades mentality, as I’ll attempt to explain here.
Some of the best PR people are, almost by definition, good generalists – expert communicators who happen to have a reasonable amount of knowledge about many different areas of business and society.
At the very top of the game, there exists a small group of PR innovators whose experience extends well outside of pure flackery, and whose ability to understand and, more importantly, to guide macro-level corporate strategy, sets them far apart from the usual.
These rare individuals operate at the level of trusted business advisors to clients enlightened enough to understand their value. At best, truly strategic PR advisors can go far beyond crafting the publicized version of the corporate story – helping to actualize the strategic arc of the long-term narrative itself, as it’s played out day-to-day through the company’s vision and operations.
While it’s fair to describe these unusual professionals as generalists, in truth their level of insight makes them more like the PR world’s version of A.E. Van Vogt’s nexialists.
At a level some rungs below this, one finds a species of PR generalist whose chameleon veneer of talent exists in being able to know (or to learn) just enough to fake their way in just about any market sector. These are the Flacks Of All Trades (and the masters of none).
This is not an episode in the Seven Deadly Agency Types series, but it could be - except that here we're looking at an example of an apparently deadly PR person, not an agency type.
Long time blogger and citizen journalist Christopher Frankonis (a.k.a. The One True b!X) whose razor intelligence I first encountered on email discussion groups about six years ago, currently writes, edits and publishes Portland Communique - a blog b!X modestly describes as an "ongoing experiment in amateur journalism and hobbyist reporting".
In my opinion, Portland Communique is an example of the very best in citizen's journalism. What may have started as a hobby site has become an absolute must-read for politicians and pundits in the Portland area, shining an unflinching spotlight on the machinations and manoeuvrings within the local political scene.
In an article earlier this year, b!X waded into the matter of the Portland Development Commission (PDC) choosing to award a $200 million development contract to a Minnesota-based company, Opus Northwest. To quote the Portland Mercury's story on the topic:
"...in the days following PDC's decision to award Opus the development contract, questions have been raised about the tight-knit relationship between Matt Hennessee, PDC's executive chairman who oversaw the selection of Opus, and Nathaniel "Than" Clevenger III, the public relations representative for Opus. Over the past few years, Clevenger has informally served as a political advisor to Hennessee."
b!X applied his forensic reporter's mind to this issue, and wrote a couple of posts exploring the links between the flack and the bureaucrat.
What happened next is simply astonishing.
Through a series of email exchanges and public postings to the comments on b!X's blog, the "PR professional" went completely and utterly off the deep end.
To get a real taste of the whole thing, read b!X's post here, then follow the war of words as it plays out through the 70+ comments. This is just plain ugly.
I find it hard to comment further without spilling over into a full-blown rant about the damage being done to the reputation of the entire public relations profession here.
Let's leave it with this -- for fellow PR people or other readers, can you possibly imagine ever finding yourself handling a client crisis by sending something like this to a journalist:
This is a long one, so here’s the three line summary:
Good PR is people.
People with relationships.
People and relationships don’t scale.
Over the past 10 years or so, the agency world has seen wave after wave of consolidation, with most of the tier one PR firms getting rolled into one or other of the three main marketing conglomerates – IPG, WPP and Omnicom.
These three already owned most of the advertising companies in the world – now they’ve added the upper echelons of the PR market to their portfolios. The agencies within the WPP Group alone include Blanc & Otus, Burson-Marsteller, Cohn & Wolfe, Hill & Knowlton, and Ogilvy PR – plus 22 other PR and public affairs firms listed on their website. That's a lot of flacks.
Even at the level below the holding companies, some of these agencies are, in themselves, huge – with hundreds of billable staff in offices all around the world.
A key part of the value proposition these behemoths offer to clients is the apparent advantage of homogenous, fully integrated PR representation in every region you might want to target. The promise is that you’ll be able to get the same quality of service, the same methods, the same reporting tools, and complete coordination of all activity wherever you need PR.
There is a creative void at the top of a lot of agencies, with burnt-out VPs who had one great campaign idea somewhere in their career and haven’t been able to come up with an original thought to match ever since.
Whether it's a particular kind of launch event, a poll, a grassroots program, or a certain flavour of guerrilla branding initiative – too many agencies survive on recycling the same core ideas for every new client they meet.
Apologies to all about the huge gap between posts. Things jumped the rails for a while, but I’m back for good now. Looking for a new job again too, btw – if you have any good leads, I’d be eternally grateful for any and all referrals or suggestions.
Meanwhile, one of the topics that’s been stewing in my mind in the last few months is the question of why so many PR agencies are just so horribly bad.
I’ve worked at three different agencies now – including two of the very biggest in the world. I’ve also had the task of selecting and managing the agency of record at three different tech firms. And I’ve faced off against competitive agencies on many, many occasions and learned a fair deal about their means and methods in doing so.
Not all agencies suck - the ones I've worked with have had both good points and bad. But far too many firms out there seem to be just fundamentally dysfunctional.
The ones on the dark side tend to fall into one or other of the categories I’m going to call The Seven Deadly Agency Types. Over the next few days, I'll write up my thoughts on these, and some ideas about how to diagnose (and avoid) each type.
"Companies Need to Raise Employee Awareness Regarding Blogging and Associated Threats … Blogging is rapidly emerging as a threat to Internet users."
I’ve been shaking my head ever since I read this ham-fisted, inflammatory piece of fear-mongering, but I still can’t quell the shrill noise in my ears. It’s the chilling bleat of innocent young clues being slaughtered in a mahogany-panelled boardroom somewhere to the south...
Just hours before I posted my note, below, Forrester analyst Charlene Li posted her own thoughts on corporate blogging policies and a "Sample Blogger Code of Ethics", complete with a public Wiki wherein she's encouraging edits, comments and discussion on the drafts.
Interesting stuff. I'm not sure I could ever agree with two of the points in her Code of Ethics:
4. I will preserve the original post, using notations to show where I have made changes so as to maintain the integrity of my publishing.
5. I will never delete a post.
...but the rest of the points seem generally reasonable.
At the same time, I can't help feeling a certain vague concern about the overall concept. This needs further consideration, but my gut is telling me that the very idea of bloggers signing up for a homogenized code of ethics seems to be a concept in conflict with the nature of the medium.
The idea is clearly not without merit, and Charlene is careful to point out that her points are just intended as samples: "every company and blogger will have to modify them to meet their own needs." But I still have misgivings. I'll sleep on it.
Meanwhile, her "Sample Corporate Blogging Policy" is good common sense stuff.
Her first point, though, speaks to the importance of disclaimers:
"1. Make it clear that the views expressed in the blog are yours alone and do not necessarily represent the views of your employer."
I understand the urge for some kind of "safe harbour" language, but I would still caution that you shouldn't think you can hide behind the disclaimer.
It's stretching a point, I know, but look at the example of Mark Cuban. The NBA just fined him $100,000 for a comment he made on his blog. Would that have happened if he was just some guy ranting about the NBA's rules on a personal blog? The fact that he owns the Dallas Mavericks is not something he can step away from on his blog (nor would he want to) - and no kind of disclaimer is going to separate him from the rules and policies of the world in which he operates.
[Had I the time and energy, I'd have composed this post in Pindaric form, to make the title work. Stuff it. Far too busy to versify. Woof woof.]
I've a couple of much bigger posts in draft, but lest you think I've completely given up on you, here's a quickie to keep things rolling:
Retired mainstream media journalist Eric Enberg channels Capote and is amusingly self-deprecating in this piece at CBS News online, wading into the "blogs are the new journalism" debate.
It's an interesting piece, but I'm afraid Eric makes the same fundamental mistake I've seen so many times in this seemingly endless "journalism vs. blogging" debate.
Eric ends his piece with a simile: "...the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on."
Blogs don't replace the mainstream media. The work product of a blogger and that of a journalist may be similar but they are absolutely not the same thing, for all sorts of reasons.
It's AND logic at work here, not OR.
Christopher Allbritton, of Back to Iraq fame (the only blog, AFAIK, to become a designated cultural artifact, according to The Library of Congress), puts it well:
"Blogs are the garnish to a well-balanced media diet."
And as every good chef knows, sometimes the garnish can be just as important as the main course.
[UPDATE] This bonus link just in: Erin Joyce asks "Are bloggers really journalists?" No, they're not (see above), unless of course they are. Erin has some interesting points. Worth a read.
An email from a Flackster reader earlier today asked:
“What role should my PR department play in supervising corporate blog content?”
Easy: NONE.
Unless you’re actually going to be blogging yourself – or maybe helping promote other employees’ blogs by talking them up to your friends, family, customers, partners, analysts, reporters and so forth – you have no role.
A blog that is PR-sanitized, scrubbed for messages, spun, or otherwise adulterated by over-protective flackery can’t really be called a blog. We need to get it a new name. Maybe it should be called a “press release” – sure bears the same high stink of decay about it.
Mike Golby, in a comment on my first post, below, has raised a bunch of interesting thoughts. Go read his comment, here.
Those are some Big Hairy-Arsed Questions. Important ones, too. In fact – I think they're too big and important to try to address in the dinky little comment box, so I’m lifting the discussion up to here.
Mike’s questions are precisely the kind of BHAQs I'm hoping to tackle through my cogitations, rants and ramblings here at Flackster. There’s plenty of meat in these questions for me to work on in a whole series of posts (thanks Mike -- the cheque’s in the post).
Let’s start with one of the easier ones – and the one that seems to flow most naturally into the thought-threads I’ve been weaving of late. Among many other things, Mike (with his tongue only half-way into his cheek) asks:
“Do we not all, to a degree, engage in the ignoble arts of PR, journalism, and link whoring.”
Michael O'Connor Clarke is proud to be a card-carrying flack. Currently based in Toronto, Michael has spent almost 20 years in corporate communications and marketing roles. He started blogging at almost the same time as he first moved into PR - over five years ago. Now he's trying to figure out how to combine these two areas of expertise for the benefit of clue-seeking clients. In his time, Michael has pitched people, products, processes and pop-tarts, but he has a congenital inability to peddle fluff.
