I was reading Wil Wheaton’s blog the other day when I ran across his post about the idiotic treatment of blogger Jenny Lawson (known on the Internet as The Bloggess) by some random PR executive, and it brought home to me once again the difference between professionals and amateurs, and the difference between professionals and dilettantes who THINK they are professionals. I doubt it’s a distinction that any of my readers (assuming I have readers) are really unclear about, but that difference explains a significant percentage of the business failures in any given year, and that makes it worth talking about in some detail. It also makes me reasonably qualified to write about it; I’m barely even an amateur blogger, but I’ve taught business courses at one of the best business schools in the US for the last three years…
First off, let’s consider the difference between a professional blogger and a home hobbyist like me. If you know anything about the blogger community, you already know that Ms. Lawson is a major figure, with something in excess of 164,000 followers. If you check the sidebar on this post, you’ll notice that I have one (1) of these, and if you check the counter at the bottom you’ll see that we’ve had fewer than eight thousand visits to this page in the last year or so. Think about that for a moment. There’s no question that Ms. Lawson is one of the better writers on the web, or that she has spent far more time and effort in developing both her skills and her following than I have, but the fact that every one of her posts is read by AT LEAST twenty-one times the total number of people who have visited my blog in the past sixteen months (it’s probably more like ten times that many; a ratio of 210 to 1 or more) is still mind-blowing. It’s like comparing someone who posts his own music recordings on You Tube and gets a few thousand hits to the Rolling Stones – and that’s exactly the point…
If someone out there decides to insult me, there’s not a whole lot I can do about it. The fact is, I’ve had students in my class insult me to my face, and short of marking them down on their final grade (which would require being a bigger douchecanoe than I’m usually willing to be) there’s not much I could have done about it. Insulting someone who has somewhere over 164,000 readers every time she posts (and more likely 1.6 million or more; if it’s the same ratio I get it could easily be 30 million) and all of the people who will hear about it from other bloggers, tweets on Twitter, or other re-posts around the Internet, and it’s idiocy on a truly epic scale. But when you consider that the original flap started when this so-called PR firm tried to get Ms. Lawson to repeat some random SPAM they sent her, and then got snippy when she (politely, in my opinion) told them she wasn’t going to, it rose to a level of incompetence that I don’t even have words to describe. The fact that they were doing this to a well-known blogger who is famous for criticizing exactly this behavior would be bad enough, but even that fails to encompass the true extent of this failure…
See, here’s the thing: there are at least 164,000 people out there in cyberspace who care about Jenny Lawson; there aren’t any people anywhere who care about Brand Link Communications or its vice president. I’ve worked with PR people before, including some quite good ones, and the truth is, all of them are hired guns employed by people or companies who DO have fans, in order to raise awareness, increase the number of paying customers, and so on. The professionals know that and don’t care; they are business people, and they get paid based on how well people know their clients, not themselves. And they can be very dismissive of anyone in the field who starts to believe that the public cares about PR executives separately from the celebrities they promote. But anyone working for some two-bit PR firm who actually believes that he or his company or their inane SPAM mailings are somehow more important than a major figure in the blogger community (or that his imaginary status allows him to be rude to such a person with impunity) isn't just an unprofessional idiot with delusions of grandeur; he's a dilettante playing at being something worthwhile...
Anyone who knows me knows that the word “dilettante” is a swear word when I use it – at least, when I use it about business people. I’m an amateur blogger – and a good one, I think, for all that I only get about twenty visitors each day. I doubt I’ll ever be a big-time blogger, let alone a celebrity on the Web. But what I am not and will never be is some self-important, self-absorbed, delusional, idiotic douchecanoe of a dilettante who somehow thinks he is more important than the real celebrities all around him…
I can live with that...
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