This is a real blog post by a real blogger named John Papamarko.

I’m on the job hunt.

Well, not exactly… But I am thinking about which firms i’d be interested in working for. When I told a teacher one of my choices, she greeted it with an uncomfortable silence. She said that they were having difficulties with that specific firm. I won’t divulge who, just that it is a fairly well known Toronto entertainment agency.

The problem was that the agency asked a current Centennial intern to flog for them. Flogging, or “fake blogging” isn’t by any means illegal, but it is certainly frowned upon. For example, a first semester student gave a presentation on field placement and was met with a cacophony of boos when she admitted that she flogged for an agency.

I personally don’t have a problem with flogging. I actually have a much bigger problem blogging for a company under my own name. Any company I work for can make all the money they want from my labour, but the second they try and make money from my reputation is the second I say, “Thanks, but no thanks.”

As a freelance music journalist, it has taken me a long time to earn the respect of readers and other music writers, and asking me to write about how I like RyanDan or OneRepublic under my own name is tantamount to career suicide.

Under the guise of a 15 year old girl…I might be able to live with that. However, if I have the chance to avoid flogging, I will.

We as PR professionals are trained in media relations, analysis and all those great things that allow us to separate the wheat from the chaff, however, most people aren’t.

Noam Chomsky, MIT linguistics professor and acclaimed author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media and many other books with long titles, recently spoke to Adbusters magazine where he addressed this on-line disconnect.

“This is a real terrain of struggle…you have to have a framework of understanding that takes you to the things that matter and cuts away all the stuff that doesn’t. People still lack this framework of understanding. So any factoid is as good as any other one. But that’s the problem about the general cultural and educational systems and the media, which creates a population that can’t make discriminations. Having the media and the internet open is helpful, but you still can’t do much with it unless you have the intellectual culture that knows how to look for what’s important.” – Adbusters 77

As I said, flogging isn’t illegal, but it is contrary to the CPRS code of professional standards, which states…

A member shall practice the highest standards of honesty, accuracy, integrity and truth, and shall not knowingly disseminate false or misleading information.

I can see how flogging might fall into this category, but at the same time, anyone rationalizing flogging can interpret that rule in a far different way. This lack of a succinct, specific policy on flogging means that it’s open season for companies to exploit their interns or young practitioners. And believe me, those are the people being pressured to flog.

Flogging isn’t relegated only to the smaller firm trying to get established. In an article posted on his blog, Intuitive Systems, Dave Taylor explains how respected PR giant and authors of the Trust Barometer, Edelman, got caught flogging for their client Wal-Mart.

Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel both denied any knowledge or wrongdoing thus distancing themselves from the Wal-Mart fallout. However, someone had to take the fall, and my money is on the lowly Jr. PR practitioner.

It’s ironic that the name is derived from ancient torture techniques, because it looks like young PR practitioners who flog eventually get whipped.

PR secrets, not very secretive.

Reading this post on Tech Crunch by Brian Solis got me thinking about Public Relations and the idea of ‘secrets’. Napoleon once said “Secrets travel fast in Paris” and I’m sure Loic LeMeur would agree with that. You can read his response to Solis’ article Here.

Secret # 12 piqued my interest, it suggested, “Follow the conversation and join in”. This is a concept that I’ve already encountered in my short time in P.R, but I couldn’t for the life of me remember where.

It’s a fairly straightforward ‘secret’, Solis claims that you can gain as much or more exposure for your business using social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Get Satisfaction, etc.) than you can through traditional public relations avenues. However, he cautions that it only works “When executed and managed correctly”, that’s where the listening part comes in.

That’s also where it finally dawns on me; the last time I heard someone talking about “following the conversation before you join” was when founder and CEO of Social Media Group, Maggie Fox spoke to our corporate communications class earlier this year.

She said, “For companies that want to participate in it (social media), they have to behave like people, they have to join the conversation. The first thing I’m going to do is listen to what they have to say, decide if it’s a conversation I want to participate in, and make sure I have something to add to it.”

Hardly a P.R. secret, but still a great idea. Here’s an example of the opposite from a music message board I frequent. Someone decided to enter the conversation before knowing who was already engaged. These replies might sound harsh or like flames, but look at the # of posts of the people responding vs. the # of posts of the person who started the thread.