Bad pitches, Richard Laermer and the Gumby factor

Sally Saville Hodge

I recently had a conversation with PR professional, author and blogger Richard Laermer, and my (failed) challenge was to write this resulting post fast because he talks fast, and I was worried over being able to recreate the sense of all the threads that were spun from the discussion if I waited.

Alas, other work got in the way of a speedy turnaround. But my ace in the hole is the fact that I’m no longer a journalist; accordingly, I offered, “Hey, want to look at it before I post?” He can always add his own quotes if he doesn’t he think he sounds smart enough.

Richard Laermer, however, isn’t that self-important to worry about sounding smart. (I’m pretty sure, though, that he’s smart enough to worry about sounding cogent.) In fact, self-importance is something he deflates with regularity, and one of his vehicles for this is The Bad Pitch Blog. Read his post debunking a journalist-turned-PR-pro’s pontifications on how PR should be done, and you get the picture.

What led me to his door was a recent post about a news release that was bad for so many reasons, starting with the unfortunate overuse of the ® symbol after the word “Bone” as in Milk Bone® Dog Biscuits. And, as these things happen, when the release was distributed over the wire, the little circle around the “R” was lost, and the first, ahem, boner of many was identified.

The ensuing discussion made me both laugh out loud and pray that we never are on the receiving end. And I decided I’d like to talk to him for a blog post of my own. Happily, he was agreeable – it didn’t hurt that his latest book, “2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade” recently hit the newsstands.

The whole notion of trends is integral to Laermer’s main business (RLM PR), which focuses on “placing clients ahead of trends.” And, indeed, his various blogs seize upon trends as a point of departure for many conversations.

The Bad Pitch Blog exposes mediocre-to-really-bad writing – and thinking – being put out by too many in public relations, going beyond the simple carelessness of the poorly placed ®. Indeed, the “boner” news release was a fine example of that, trying to cover so much ground in one piece that it left the poor reader dazed and confused as to the point. Laermer didn’t name the firm (“that’s easy enough to find”) because he really faulted Milk Bone for the problem.

Indeed, why would Milk Bone settle for that kind of “counsel” and output? And if the company – any company – really just wants its PR firm to serve as order-takers, then it needs to do a better job internally of monitoring and overseeing what’s being produced and distributed.

“Too many people in this business spend a lot of time at it, but there’s no rhyme or reason to what they’re doing,” Laermer suggests. “A lot of first drafting goes on, for example, because no one wants to take responsibility for words – they want to let someone else take care of it.”

Likewise, he thinks there’s an overabundance of folks entering into the field who don’t seem inclined to sit down and figure out what it takes to do the job well. “I have seen too many just sit there with the ‘just tell me what to do’ attitude. There just isn’t enough thinking going on.”

As Laermer puts it, “We (as PR practitioners) have an incredible amount of power. But as a profession, we have to wake up and get better at it.”

You might say we need more “Gumbitude” – and actually, that’s exactly what Laermer does say. Gumbitude is his word playing off the characteristics of the green Gumby character from the 50s and 60s children’s television show – and adopted by Laermer as the “Mascot of 2011” for the way he represents this trend: “People discover that flexibility is among the few basic qualities in which to excel.”

“Gumby’s power is more than flexibility,” Laermer writes in 2011. “Gumby is attitude… Gumby is confident, ambitious and willing to get the job done… Gumby is action… Gumby is results… Gumby learns… Those that have Gumby participate…Gumby isn’t about yes and no. It’s about how and why.”

We in the profession need to get Gumbetized. It’s all about doing our jobs better. And maybe avoiding getting skewered in Bad Pitch Blog.