You might expect a writer at Adweek to make the case that public relations people should not "own" social media--just as you might expect the editor of a public relations newsletter to make the case that public relations people absolutely should--but even so this article by crayon's Joseph Jaffe seems spectacularly disingenuous to me.

Actually, Jaffe sets up a major straw man, arguing that "The PR business is really no better and no worse than the digital one when it comes to social credentials. With its claim of being champions of "earned media," it tacked the word "relations" onto blogger, lumped it together with "media relations" and "journalist relations," and somehow went unchallenged.

"Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying PR shouldn't be at the table. I'm just questioning how "relations" between corporations and journalists equate with real people hanging out with other real people."

Which seems like a good argument for why media relations people should not own social media, but rather evades the issue that public relations--as the name rather explicitly suggests--is about helping corporations connect with the public, which the last time I checked was made up entirely of "real people."

Jaffe goes on to argue that "whereas the digital space has very little claim to the 'physical' world and hasn't proven itself in the virtual space, the PR industry resides more comfortably in the physical world, with a superficial grasp of the digital space and an anemic understanding of the virtual one."

I have said it before and I'll say it again: if your business is helping to build relationships between organizations and people, I'm not sure that the principles to be followed in the virtual world are very different from those to be followed in the real world. Jaffe himself cites "authenticity, transparency or peer-to-peer collaboration"--to which I'd add sincerity, integrity, credibility and a few more, all of which are fundamental tenets of good public relations.

A quick reminder, as everyone predicts tremendous growth for social media over the next decade, it's worth remembering that not every western European nation values free speech as much as the United States.

The Italian government is apparently considering regulation that would require citizens to obtain government permission before posting videos to YouTube and other online video sites. Opposition lawmakers warn that if the new law is passed ""Italy will join the club of the censors, together with China, Iran and North Korea."

There are some suspicions that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi--who also happens to be Italy's leading media magnate--may be using the proposed legislation as a way to stem the tide of competition from new media.

Good luck with that, even with new laws.

Following up on the news that Wm. Wrigley Jr. Co. has dumped Digitas, Tribal DDB and Agency.com in favor of three smaller, production-centric digital shops, Ad Age asks whether "big digital agencies are being outflanked by leaner, faster, more-creative shops," as the latter start to deal directly with clients rather than working through the bigger firms, "leading some to wonder whether the biggest digital players are becoming unnecessary, pricey middlemen."

I have been wondering for some time whether the big digital agencies might be a purely transitional phenomenon, in much the same way that digital departments at large PR firms provided a useful--but short-lived transition--between an era in which most traditional PR people had at best limited understanding of digital and social media and an era in which a thorough understanding of new communications channels was an essential part of any successful program.

In PR, the age of the digital department lasted about two years, before pretty much everyone understood that digital had to be integrated seamlessly into client campaigns, that every account team needed to have digital expertise (rather than calling in a digital guru from a specialized department), and that having a separate digital unit didn't really make any more sense than having a separate print unit or a separate broadcast unit.

Certainly, as far as PR and stakeholder engagement is concerned, it seems counterproductive to have separate digital and mainstream strategies and campaigns, and so the only question becomes whether mainstream agencies can learn digital and social media faster than the digital and social media specialists can learn mainstream PR (and the smartest of them surely can, or indeed already have).

There will still be a role for creative firms that understand digital--that can build websites and apps and widgets--because not every PR firm will want to handle the creative in-house, but I don't see much of a role for digital agencies that handle all the things PR agencies traditionally handle, from developing strategy to the actual business of engaging with the audience online.

Or rather, I don't see why that concept should be any more appealing to a client than hiring a specialist firm to deal only with glossy magazines or only with specific broadcast outlets--unless mainstream firms fail spectacularly.

I don't particularly want to add my voice to the chorus criticizing American Airlines for firing one of its web designers because he engaged in act of gratuitous customer service. But there are lessons to be learned.

You can read all about it here and here . You can read the original complaint about American's website here. And you can find the response by the fired employee--known only as Mr X-- here .

It would be easy to snark that by responding in a prompt, polite and informative manner, Mr X was clearly in contravention of American's customer service policy and demonstrated clear contempt for the airline's values, so I won't do that.

I don't really need to, because anyone who reads Mr X's letter will quickly realize that AA's official reason for dismissing him--that he violated a non-disclosure agreement or, as corporate communications director Billy Sanez put it in responding to USA Today, "violated company secrets"--is complete bullshit. Read the response. Find me a company secret. There are none. Unless someone at AA thinks it's a secret that a giant, global airline has a somewhat bureaucratic culture that sometimes gets in the way of getting things done.

So if the official reason doesn't hold up, there must be a real reason, and the snarky one I suggested above--that Mr X responded to the complaint like a human being rather than a corporate lawyer--makes as much sense as any other.

Here's what I'd like to believe happened: Some mid-level manager at AA who felt affronted by the extremely mild concession that the airline's culture might not be as nimble as it should be launched an immediate witch-hunt. (According to one report, it took AA about an hour to track down Mr X via his e-mail account and give him his marching orders.) At that point, the rest of the company reflexively closed ranks around the manager who fired Mr X and came up with the best rationale it could for his decision, which the PR people were then obliged to reiterate.

It is inconceivable to me that PR people were involved in the original decision to dismiss someone, because I know AA has several very good in-house PR folks and I know it has an extremely good--and social media savvy--PR agency. They would have known--as would anyone with half a brain--that the firing would be perceived as an over-sensitive over-reaction and would trigger a firestorm of criticism and even further scrutiny of the airline's customer service, plus mockery of the airline's failure to "get" social media.

The lesson here is not that companies need stricter guidelines to restrict employee use of social media. It's that they need stricter guidelines to restrict idiot managers who believe any frank and honest dialogue with a customer is a breach of company's secrets.

Digital and social media present obvious challenges when it comes to managing clients' reputations, but they also present a new challenge to PR firms.

It used to be that, with relatively few exceptions, the worst thing that could happen to a poorly-written or ill-directed press release was that it would get thrown away. (This led to the infamous "scattergun" approach to media relations, which held that if you fired enough pellets in as many different directions as you could, one of them was bound to hit some kind of target.)

But bloggers are less polite, less respectful, less deferential than mainstream journalists, which means that the authors of today's misdirected press releases are likely to find themselves "named and shamed" in front of the recipient's readership (and I can't help suspecting that rival firms are only too happy to draw the blogger's reaction to the attention of the client, just in case he or she missed it.

Here's Matthew Stibbe at the Bad Language blog castigating several PR firms (some of the names on the list are no surprise; others really should know better) for sending "the most absurd press releases" to his blog. "I'm pretty sure that all the PR companies concerned are billing their clients for their 'blog outreach' campaign," he muses. "What a waste."

And here's Tim Trent of Marketing By Permission (surely, the name of the blog makes it obvious that spam press releases won't be appreciated) taking to task a specific PR firm in even harsher terms: "I have no idea who they are, nor do I care what their service is. What I care about is that they are spammers. That fact is going to get their domain blocked soon. I won't be the only blogger they've annoyed today."

(To his credit, the principal of the firm involved responds in the comments, here .)

Clearly, one person's informative outreach is another person's spam. Best practice in this case is probably defined by the third word of the name of Mr Trent's blog.

Todd Defren asks a question I have been asking a lot myself in a post entitled: Is social media too boring for the advertising industry?

I've been talking to PR people worried that advertising agencies are going to hijack the social media space, and I've been dismissive of the possibility in part because I believe that while ad agency leadership understands the crisis facing their business, ad agency cultures are simply too wrapped up in the 30-second commercial as the ultimate expression of their creativity.

Over-simplifying somewhat, the people who work in ad agencies get a thrill out of being able to point up at a giant television screen and say: "See that Russian-accented meerkat or that talking gecko? I made that." They're never going to feel quite as witty or clever or artistic saying: "See that online community, I helped my company engage with it."

Todd, not surprisingly, offers up a slightly more sophisticated analysis of the ad industry's challenge, via an imagined (or perhaps remembered) conversation between a PR person and an ad exec.

PR Guy: "I get it. You guys craft brilliant campaigns but the 'relationships' part feels low-level, mundane, hard-to-do, and fraught with risk as you engage with every Tom, Dick & Wierdo online."

In The Cluetrain Manifesto, Christopher Locke writes about his experience in corporate communications, explaining that at some point he stopped parroting the company's key messages and started talking to reporters about what they were interested in. "That's how I discovered PR doesn't work and that markets are conversations," he concludes.

Ten years later, in What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis argues that the public relations industry is one of two groups--the others of lawyers--who will find it difficult to adapt to the social media age. Why? "It should be the job of PR advisers to convince clients that it is in their interest to be transparent and honest now that obfuscation and lies can be exposed so easily online. That is PR turned upside down."

Meanwhile, in his new book Digital Strategies for Powerful Corporate Communications (co-authored with Courtney Barnes), Dartmouth University's Paul Argenti--who I respect and admires--says that "the business of managing relationships... has changed dramatically in the last decade.... Before the digital explosion corporate reputations were shaped by one-dimensional messaging that the senior-most managers pushed down the corporate ladder and disseminated to stakeholders separately and without discussion."

Sorry, but I don't buy it.

I understand that the rise of social media has made a quantitative change--the sheer volume of discussions about brands and corporate reputations has increased exponentially--but I don't see any way in which it has made a qualitative difference to the principles of good communications. In fact, in most respects it has made good public relations easier.

First of all, the traditional process of public relations applies to the majority of new media. Traditionally, PR people told their stories to third parties who had influence because they had either (or preferably both) a wide audience and strong credibility. They then relied on those people to tell that story to others. In many cases, those third parties were mainstream reporters, but good professionals out to a variety of influencers or opinion leaders.

The process for dealing with social media is virtually identical. You tell your story to people who have influence--bloggers, Twitterers, active participants in online communities, anyone with credibility--and then hope that they will communicate that story to their peers, fans and followers.

Not only is the process substantially similar to the process of traditional PR; the principles are the same. All of the buzzwords being thrown about to describe effective communications in the digital realm--transparency, engagement, conversation, dialogue, authenticity, integrity, credibility--are principles that have always been at the heart of good public relations.

The transparency and honesty Jarvis advocates did not suddenly become good practice because of social media; the obfuscation and lies he says are easily exposed in the digital age have always been short-sighted and counterproductive. Similarly, the "one-dimensional messaging" Argenti talks about was never best practice. I haven't gone back and re-read his earlier works, but I can almost guarantee you that before the digital revolution he was not advising companies to push messages "down the corporate ladder" and disseminate them "without discussion." That would have been lazy malpractice 20 years ago just as it's lazy malpractice now.

Social media experts talk about the need to surrender control of the message; PR people did that every time they spoke to a reporter.

Social media experts talk about the need to listen as much as you talk; good PR has always been as much about bringing an outside perspective into the company as it has been about delivering the company message to external audiences.

Social media experts talk about engaging directly with the public; that's what good public relations people have always tried to do, especially in the community relations realm, although they have been limited in terms of the media for such engagement.

Social media experts talk about measuring the success of campaigns by the level of engagement, the creation of ambassadors, the strength of relationships; that's been a Holy Grail for the PR industry (which has never been well served by metrics focused on media clippings and advertising equivalency) for as long as I've been writing about it.

In other words, if you were practicing public relations the right way 10 years ago, you're probably practicing public relations the right way today. Because all of the things that social media has supposedly transformed have always been a part of good public relations.

What has changed is that those organizations that don't practice good public relations--and there are plenty of them out there--will be discovered far more quickly in the digital era, and punished much more severely.

That may be the best news of all for good public relations people, because it will make clear the difference between good public relations--public relations driven by integrity, authenticity, engagement, conversation--and indifferent public relations. And it will allow those offering the former to charge the premium prices their experience and expertise deserve.

United Breaks Guitars, a lament--country and western style--from a Canadian passenger dissatisfied with the handling of his Taylor guitar, is now approaching 6 million views on YouTube, and provides an excellent example of how a single instance of lousy customer service can come to define a brand for at least a certain segment of the public.

Interestingly, viewing the video on YouTube will lead you pretty quickly to much of the mainstream media coverage of the story, as well as a smart response from Taylor Guitars that--without taking sides--provides you tips for transporting your guitar safely. But the only United Airlines responses I could find were parodies.

(My favorite parody, though, is yet another subtitled version of the movie Downfall, in which Hitler learns that United broke his guitar. You only need to watch about 30 seconds to get the gist, although the whole thing is pretty good.)

I don't have a lot to say about this that hasn't already been said, except that it provides yet another piece of evidence that in today's world, customer service has to be a part--a key part--of the public relations department.

Ashwani Singla of Genesis Burson-Marsteller in India, was the very gracious host of my recent visit to Delhi and Mumbai, and just posted a conversation we filmed in his offices to the Genesis YouTube channel.

Here's an interesting PR Week (U.K.) article--Google Sidewiki Could Damage Corporate Brand Reputations--that sums up what's wrong with the PR industry's attitude to social media.

"New social media technology will cause major headaches for PR professionals," says the publication in a subhead that's based on the quotes of the PR pros interviewed for the article: "Managing corporate reputation online just got harder" and "it's like having a heckler at a press conference you're not allowed to do anything about."

The article in question is sufficiently short that it's not entirely clear whether these quotes are representative of the industry as a whole, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if they were, because an alarming number of PR people continue to react to the emerging power of social media in general by focusing first and foremost on risk rather than opportunity.

In fact, there's generally--and I recognize that I'm generalizing here--a stark difference between marketers and corporate communicators when it comes to social media. Marketers see only opportunity, and they want to try anything--although they're still much better at talking (shouting?) than they are at listening. Corporate communicators see only risk and they generally don't want to do anything except listen, to make sure nothing that's being said online is going to bite them on the ass in the real world.

Both approaches have their flaws, but the former is clearly preferable to the latter, which I believe carries a huge opportunity cost.