It is, of course, conventional wisdom that in the digital age, it's even more important to move quickly when crisis strikes. But I'd suggest that the opposite is true: because things move so fast, it's important for organizations to make sure they are not being stampeded into hasty but ill-conceived decisions based on transient events.

A perfect example occurred last week, when a video surfaced at a conservative website purporting to show Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod confessing that she gave preferential treatment to black farmers. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, apparently under pressure from a hypersensitive White House, responded quickly and forced Sherrod to resign.

The next day, White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina reportedly praised the decision, telling colleagues: "We could have waited all day, we could have had a media circus--but we took decisive action, and it's a good example of how to respond in this atmosphere."

Or it would have been, had the video not been exposed as a total distortion of what Sherrod actually said. By the end of the week, the White House and the Department of Agriculture were furiously back-pedaling, but the damage had been done: by panicking as it did, the administration was made to look craven and weak.

Sometimes it's worth weathering an initial storm of criticism--however uncomfortable it may be for a few hours or even a few days--rather than to blunder badly because you couldn't wait for all the facts.

At the Online Social Media blog, Debbie Turner makes an argument I have also heard from several public relations experts, that "Steve Jobs Should Blog."

No, he shouldn't. In fact, if there's one American chief executive whose PR people should keep him far away from social media, it's Jobs.

Turner herself acknowledges that "Jobs can appear somewhat aloof" and that "the problem with the way Jobs handled the situation is that it looked as though Apple didn't actually care about customers complaints."

Slate's Farhood Manjoo makes the case in more detail in a column about the Apple press conference at which Jobs managed to neither acknowledge nor apologize for the reception problems experienced by some iPhone 4 users: "I just wish Jobs could have handled this mini-crisis in a classier way. He could have admitted a problem, offered a fix.... Instead, he sounded wounded and paranoid, as if we were all being ungrateful for not recognizing Apple's contributions to the world."

Look, you only need to study Apple's advertising ("I'm a Mac...") to understand that the company's dominant personality trait is contempt for others. Contempt for PC users defines the company's branding; contempt for its own customers--as soon as they demonstrate any independent critical thinking about the products the company sells--came through in this week's press conference.

Give Jobs his own blog, and that contempt would permeate every post. Sooner or later, even the company's most ardent fans would get the hint.

It has been more than 25 years since I have my first speech predicting that management consulting firms would one day go into direct competition with PR firms. I guess the jury is still out on whether I was wrong, or simply further ahead of my time than I suspected... although with each passing year, the former becomes ever more probable.

Having said that, management consultancies have made occasional forays into our field: Arthur D. Little hired a former Hill & Knowlton exec to launch a crisis consulting practice; PricewaterhouseCoopers formed a reputation consulting practice and its leader, Glen Peters, wrote a pretty good book of reputation management; and of course more recently FTI Consulting acquired FD in an attempt to find synergies between its change management work and FD's strategic communications expertise.

And now McKinsey has announced that it is getting into the public relations consulting business, through a joint venture--called NM Incite--with market research company Nielsen, which owns BuzzMetrics.

The new partnership will focus on social media. Nielsen will provide the data, and McKinsey will provide strategic counsel focused on three areas: measuring and improving marketing effectiveness, product launch optimization and customer service experience.

I've argued long and hard that the emergence of social media provides an opportunity for public relations people to move into a more central role in marketing and management. But as companies come to understand the game-changing potential of social media, might it also provide the motivation for management consultants to compete more directly with PR agencies?

I'm not going to argue that BP has covered itself in public relations glory since it began leaking (what seems like) billions of gallons of oil into the Gulf (what seems like) several years ago. But attacks on the company's decision to use Google Adwords--so that a link to its clean-up site pops up whenever people search for information about the spill--are misguided.

The use of Adwords (which seems like a pretty belated move to me) has led to charges that BP is seeking to influence, or even "manipulating" search results.

This comprehensive post by Ross McNamara refutes two of the arguments against BP's new strategy--that it should not be allowed to buy its way to the top of the search rankings, or that Google should have offered the top spot to environmental groups--while conceding some merit to a third argument, which is that this is a poor use of BP's resources.

Social media experts are understandably quick to push back in Arun's story that responds to the suggestion by Privacy International director Simon Davies ( reported in the Daily Mail) that listening and responding to customer complaints online is %u21Cnothing short of outright spying.%u21D

I'd be the first to agree that Davies is engaging in a little hyperbole, and I'd also argue that he is conflating two different issues: listening and responding.

Let's take the first of those first. I personally can see no objection to companies monitoring what is said about them on the Internet, or at least in public forums (including services such as Twitter). For one thing, there are plenty of non-public forums (such as Facebook, its recent privacy issues notwithstanding) in which people can complain without attracting unwanted attention; for another, one of the reasons people complain on social media sites is because they have come to understand that they can get quicker service there than they can by calling 800 numbers.

The way in which companies respond to customer complaints is a slightly different issue, and one that should be cause for greater concern. I would argue that messages in public forums should be responded to publicly in those forums. Companies should be wary of using complaints as an excuse to initiate direct contact with consumers, even if consumers leave e-mail addresses with their messages. On Twitter, therefore, companies should avoid direct messages. (That's best practice anyway, I would think, because one of the benefits of working through social media is that other customers can see and appreciate the company's service.)

Having said all that, I have two additional observations.

The first is that this debate underscores once again that in the social media age, customer service is a function--and for some companies, perhaps the defining function--of public relations. So much of a company's reputation will be determined by how it responds to customer concerns that PR people cannot hope to manage corporate reputation without managing the customer service component.

The second is that while the positions outlined above seem entirely reasonable to me, and will probably seem reasonable to most corporate communicators, the ultimate decision about what constitutes legitimate customer service and what constitutes invasion of privacy is going to be made by consumers rather than by companies. That means companies--and their corporate communications teams--should be engaging groups such as Privacy International (and their customers) in a respectful but robust debate about the concerns raised by Davies. They certainly should not simply assume that the public will see these things the way companies do.

The Independent has an intriguing story that takes Edelman's recent hiring of two high-profile U.K. journalists--the BBC's Richard Sambrook as director of content and this week the FT's venerable Stefan Stern as director of strategy--to look at the changing role of PR, and to ask whether we are seeing "the emergence of a new hybrid of 'journalicist' media workers, who combine editorial and public relations skills to tell a client's stories in credible 'publicitage.' Or is it just PR playing at advertising?"

Quite aside from the coining of two ugly new words I trust will never become part of common usage, I'm not sure that's the right question. At the very least I would have phrased it differently.

The changes in PR's role are coming about because of the convergence of several trends: fragmentation of the media and growing consumer sophistication, which together render advertising less effective (and less cost-effective); increased transparency, driven by intense NGO scrutiny of business as well as by new information channels; the decline of mainstream media credibility and the rise of social media (which I would argue are separate--though not unrelated--trends); and the heightened expectations of consumers, both in terms of corporate behavior and engagement.

All of these trends impact on the primary role of public relations, which involves building, nurturing and leveraging the relationships between institutions and their publics.

The reason that PR has traditionally had such a close, symbiotic relationship with the media is not that public relations and publicity are synonymous but because the media delivered two things that public relations needed: the ability to reach a large audience and the credibility to offer a "third-party endorsement" that would render stories more powerful and believable.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been losing its monopoly on both audience and credibility, while new digital and social media channels have offered PR people the ability to reach audiences directly, while also creating new "opinion leaders"--bloggers and other social media influentials--who can offer the valuable third-party endorsement that used to be the exclusive province of journalists.

This certainly isn't a matter of "PR playing at advertising." There is clearly an opportunity--as Sambrook says in the article--for PR people to create the kind compelling content that reaches consumers directly, but that content will have to earn the attention of important stakeholders (rather than buying it, as advertising has done) and to do so will need to be informative as well as entertaining and--most critically--about engaging consumers rather than simply delivering a message.

It is this ability--the ability to engage, to spark conversation, to initiate a dialogue between client and consumer and ultimately to build relationships--that will define public relations going forward, and differentiate it from both journalism and advertising.

A Forbes article by consultant Jeremiah Owyang takes the recent Nestlé crisis as a jumping off point to argue that when it comes to social media "many marketers jump the gun" and to warn marketers once again that the Internet can be a scary place.

The article touches upon--almost accidentally--one of the most interesting aspects of social media, which is that they are making the line between public relations and marketing even blurrier than it already is. When Owyang talks about the role of activist groups like NGOs in the social media realm, when he suggests that marketers create response crisis plans or appoint community managers, he is assigning to marketers roles and responsibilities that have traditionally been part of the corporate communications function.

I continue to believe that social media should be part of the public relations domain precisely because it involves engagement, conversation, interaction and lots of other things PR people are theoretically more comfortable with than marketers. But I can also recognize that marketers are learning these skills quickly, and that more corporate communications are not participating in social media to anything like the extent their companies need them to, in part because they don't have the budgets and in part because they don't have the balls.

The latter concerns me. I think marketers look at social media and see only opportunity; their first instinct may be to use it as just another channel--to talk to or even at consumers--but they are learning quickly. Corporate communications people look at social media and see only threat; their first instinct is to listen, to monitor and to make sure issues don't turn into crisis--but they don't seem to want to engage.

They need to overcome that reluctance--and fast.

Online Media Daily reports that the Center for Digital Democracy is urging the FDA to restrict pharmaceutical advertising on Twitter. The CDD's position is simple: "If pharmaceutical companies can't adequately explain the risks of drugs in 140 characters, they shouldn't be allowed to use Twitter to advertise."

My own reaction to this is that if any pharmaceutical company looks at a social medium such as Twitter and can't think of anything more interesting to do with it than advertise, that company deserves whatever it gets in terms of regulatory hostility--and consumer contempt.

Twitter is not a particularly interesting advertising medium; it is an extremely interesting engagement medium, and most good pharmaceutical companies are going to be able to figure out ways to use social media to engage with consumers, to build patient communities, and to provide those patients with the kind of information they go online to seek.

But I suspect groups like the Center for Digital Democracy define any communication from a drug company as "advertising." Certainly there are those who would like to restrict the ability to pharmaceutical manufacturers to communicate and engage with consumers online. The pharmaceutical industry, the FDA, and genuine consumer advocates should resist such efforts: consumers have a right to information; they don't need to be protected from it.

The only kind of pharmaceutical company communication that should be restricted is dishonest, inaccurate or misleading communication.

Just days before the outgoing marketing chief of Unilever, Simon Clift, warned \of a "lost generation" of marketers who don't understand the power and potential of social media, I received the results of a survey conducted by U.K. technology public relations firm Johnson King that appears to support his contention.

According to Clift, "If you are 25 or 20, you know this stuff – you are brought up with Facebook and YouTube. If you are 50, you see your kids do it. Most of our brands are managed by people who have had to learn it.... The people who have most needed it are the people aged between 30 and 45, running global brands because they grew up after it and haven't seen their kids doing it."

According to the survey, meanwhile, 37.8 percent of business-to-business marketers don't consider Twitter to be a valuable marketing tool and 25.8 percent believe Twitter is a personal tool and that companies should stay away.

The survey doesn't provide any kind of demographic breakdown, so the generational differences are not apparent, but one of the quotes in the story--"Twitter is possibly the most narcissistic tool yet developed, but I'm sure someone will come up with an even more egocentric technology soon enough"--certainly doesn't sound like it comes from a plugged-in 20something (or from anyone who has ever spent any time on Twitter).

A smarter man than me would probably hesitate to pick a fight with Lord Tim Bell, who makes more money in a day running Chime than I'm likely to make all year, but nobody ever said I was smart.

In an interview with Gorkana , Lord ("call me Tim") Bell offers his thoughts on social media. "Social media is just a distribution system of messages to a target audience and for some reason people have given them funny names... Marshall McLuhan said in the early 50s 'it's the medium, not the message'. He was wrong then and he's wrong now and anyone who repeats that now is still wrong."

If I thought this was really Chime's philosophy on social media I'd be shorting the stock like crazy, the company's recent stellar performance notwithstanding. It's wrong on so many levels it's difficult to know where to start.

Social media is not a "distribution system." Social media is people. It's people talking to one another. It's a series of conversations. The people taking part in those conversations are not there to receive your "message"; they're there to participate in a conversation and "distributing" a "message" is pretty much the opposite of participating in a conversation. Oh, and if you think about these people as a "target audience," they're likely to think of you as an arrogant jackass.

The approach Bell advocates is the equivalent of walking into a cocktail party, noticing that everyone is talking to everyone else, standing up on a table and declaiming a loud monologue. Try that some time, and then tell me the medium was not your message.

Bell goes on to explain that "television at the moment, no matter what anyone says, is still the most powerful and impactful form of communication...Using what is effectively a television screen as though it is a newspaper (the internet) is, I think, a mistake."

Leaving aside the fact that we seem to have segued from discussing social media to discussing digital media (they are not the same thing: some social media are not digital; some digital media are not social), the Internet may not be a newspaper, but it's certainly not a television screen. Television is a passive medium; the Internet--and the social media part of it in particular--is the opposite. It's participative, which is what makes it more "impactful" than television, despite television's ability to deliver greater reach.

In short, it's hard to read Bell's comments without inferring a longing for a simpler time, when companies could approach communication with a "command and control" mentality and when it was still possible to believe that brands and reputations were shaped by your messages (your advertising, your logo, your sponsorships, your press releases) rather than by all the things other people were saying about you.