Via Jeremy Pepper, news that the Ketchum PR agency has now launched a blog to support its ‘personalized media’ offering.
Regular readers will know the story of Ketchum and how their entrance into the PR blogosphere in June attracted almost universal derision by members of the PR community. If you didn’t follow that story, let me recap for you why such scorn was heaped upon Ketchum.
In June, Ketchum announced a new service offering called Ketchum Personalized Media. Their fanfare announcement (complete with a podcast) suggested the agency already had major expertise in new media communication involving blogs, RSS, podcasting, etc, as integral elements of PR, yet there was no evidence at all that they did actually have that expertise – no blog themselves, no evidence that any of their people had a blog, no RSS feeds, etc.
In short, lots of smoke and mirrors surrounded their bandwagon – paraded with spotlights and loud fireworks – which inevitably stretched their credibility a great deal.
The agency did not quickly respond to PR bloggers’ critical posts which fueled further critiques. It’s all nicely summed up in the Hot Issues | Ketchum Personalized Media page on The New PR Wiki (which is also a great resource for PR students looking for a case study).
Finally, they now do have a blog as Jeremy reported. Looking at it, it appears that it was launched at the end of September. Quietly, no fanfares with this.
Jeremy doesn’t think much of it:
[…] The blog just doesn’t do it. It doesn’t cut the mustard … and no, it’s not because it’s a large agency blogging, but because, well, it’s lame. The posts have no dates, so it’s hard to see if anything is current. There’s not much interaction going on. The posts just aren’t that interesting.
I tend to agree, especially the bit about posts not having dates. They don’t!
But, let’s cut Ketchum some slack for the time being. See how this blog and their offering evolves. Perhaps help Ketchum engage by commenting on some of the posts.
Let’s see if Ketchum can now walk that June talk.