THE DECLINE AND FALL OF PUBLIC RELATIONS.

From the beginning, technology marketers have enjoyed a love affair with public relations. PR (according to popular wisdom) gets a buzz going, it generates sales leads, it helps tiny companies compete on shoestring budgets. In turn, the industry's passion for publicity has given high-tech spinmeisters serious celebrity status. Good PR people are now courted with six-figure salaries; top agencies literally audition prospective clients and can demand equity on top of hefty retainers.

Trouble is, there are signs that high-tech public relations has become a victim of its own success. As budgets get fatter, the result is a glut of unread news releases and an acute shortage of talent and experience. Worse, the collapse in PR quality has begun to alienate much of the press and analyst community--the so-called "influencers" who provide media visibility and help build company reputations.

Of course, journalists have always griped about flacks and spin artists. But the gripes were tempered by personal friendships and a sense that PR people played a fundamentally helpful role in shaping news and opinion. "Overall, I couldn't do my job as well without PR firms," says veteran technology columnist Bill Machrone.

Lately, though, the day-to-day interaction between PR people and the media is increasingly adversarial. We just took an poll of several hundred of our media colleagues, asking if they've seen a change in the quality of public relations pitches. The consensus is that PR quality is eroding (see page 2)--but, more importantly, 91 reporters, editors, and analysts also shared specific complaints about the PR process. Here are the top reasons why PR clients no longer get much bang for the buck:

* Lack of media knowledge: PR agencies are supposed to know their way around the media landscape. In reality, journalists say, PR people have become remarkably clueless about the people and publications they contact, despite the availability of press research services like MediaMap and Press Access. And forget the "access" that companies think they're buying: "PR people don't have relations with the media," online columnist David Strom says flatly. "They're just going through an exercise and billing the clients for marginal service."

"Few of the people who call me have made any effort to look at the magazine and see what kind of products and technologies we cover. And even fewer have investigated beat areas so as to approach the right editor. I am getting more and more irritated about this, and grumpier on the phone." --Denny Arar, PC World

"In the era of 1:1 marketing, PR people are still pitching all media the same angle. And they aren't appropriately preparing their clients. More often than not, I find [people] in my office who have no idea why they are there or even what I do." --Chris Shipley, DemoLetter

"I get a lot of indiscriminate pitches. People don't seem to know what we're interested in. I guess they just want to tell their client they pitched us. It's a big waste of everybody's time." --Steve Hamm, Business Week

"I've asked some PR people why they can't sort their mailing lists by what kind of messages [individual journalists] want. The response I get (not the actual words, but the vibes I feel) is, 'Like, wow, that would be a lot of work. You'd turn PR into a job where we've got to tailor our pitch for every individual person.' Exactly so." --Bill Howard, PC Magazine

* Lack of knowledge about clients: In turn, reporters and analysts expect PR intermediaries to provide useful information about the companies they represent. That isn't happening, either: Agencies seem to turn on the phone banks without even a little homework about a new client's business.

"I get calls from PR groups who can't even pronounce the [client's] company name, much less discuss the technology." --Alexis dePlanque, Meta Group

"[PR people] call reseller publications to pitch their clients and they don't know what a reseller is. They also don't know whether the product ships in Canada, its price in Canadian dollars, nor its Canadian distribution strategy." --Michelle Douglass, Computer Dealer News

"It's quite frequent that after a two-minute phone or e-mail pitch I often have little or no understanding of what the company does. This would be remedied if they'd just list who their competitors are so I could mentally niche them, but of course most PR people would rather act as if competition didn't exist in their client's space." --David Kirkpatrick, Fortune

* Meaningless news releases: Hyperbole is an old problem in the PR world. But journalists say they're now being overwhelmed by more pseudo-news than ever before:

"I tend to disregard immediately any PR pitches for Internet and e-biz stuff that includes the words 'first', 'pioneering', 'leading', and 'largest'." --Bruno Giussani, The New York Times

"I've received press releases written entirely in passive voice, press releases so full of self-congratulatory quotes from the company's own executives that it's hard to find the gist of the announcement itself, and press documents that have no contact information about the company- -only contact info for the public relations firm that wrote the release!" --John Ghrist, News/400

* Spam attacks: Journalists and analysts tend to be enthusiastic users of e-mail, but they're becoming irritated by the flood of mindless spam that agencies routinely transmit to every name on their contact lists. And agencies compound the problem by sending out elaborately formatted Word attachments (which often get dumped unread because of the risk of virus exposure).

"E-mail broadcasting is a real scourge. I'm getting more mail that's clearly being spammed to every editor on the planet, which makes the personal messages targeted at me all the more difficult to spot." --Harry McCracken, PC World

"If I get an e-mail with 200 names, so that the address header is longer than the message, chances are it's from a PR firm. If I get unsolicited, huge PowerPoint slides or graphics files attached to a message--guess who! And, of course, I always seem to get them when I'm on the road, dialed up, not through my fast LAN connection. I always send back an instructive note. I'm not always kind." --Bill Machrone, Ziff-Davis

* Meaningless meetings: The analyst firms in particular complain about visits by poorly-prepared executives who can't do much more than read a prepared script:

"Very few execs coming along in tow by their handlers are articulate. They are often unable to diverge from canned presentations that extol the amount of venture capital funding they have and the pedigree of the management team, but say nothing about their product or service." --Eric Lundquist, PC Week

"I won't talk to anyone anymore who insists that I can't interrupt, can't change the order of the presentation, or who can't tell me what their business model is." --Amy Wohl, Wohl Associates

"Look, there are two kinds of people who visit Forrester--those who know their stuff and those who don't. Trying to bullshit us is futile and counterproductive. If an executive has been prepared and knows more than what's on the slides, our impressions are typically favorable. If they haven't been prepared--well, let's just say it's not pretty." --Josh Bernoff, Forrester

"It appears that some PR firms are compensated based upon how many interviews they set up. These people will present a client's products or services in whatever way is necessary to set up an interview. It's like the old joke: 'Hey, Herby! Turn on the blue light, the man wants to see a blue suit.'" --Dan Kusnetzky, IDC

* The experience gap: Journalists and analysts tend to know a lot about the high-tech world--in fact, half the respondents to our survey have been covering the industry for at least ten years. On the PR side, however, most day-to-day contact work now seems to be in the hands of wet-behind-the-ears interns:

"PR firms are relying more on interns to do their footwork--bad idea, folks. Trinket Knowsnothing will just tick off the ranks of embittered hacks in half the time of any other badly thought out marcom ploy." --Mark Gibbs, Network World

"If I ask even slightly technical questions, they have no idea what I'm talking about. I know it's the fault of the agencies who give inexperienced people a list and tell them to start dialing. They ought to be embarrassed by doing their clients such a disservice." --Clint Swett, author

"The demand for public relations people, driven by the glut of startups, has so outstripped demand that the quality has sunk to unbelievable lows. The PR factories long ago stopped hiring people who worked at newspapers. Now the average publicist doesn't seem to ever read the newspaper." --Saul Hansell, The New York Times

(To see the complete file of press comments, visit www.softletter.com)