I’ve finally cleared off my desk (that’s the loud crash you heard earlier this morning) and have begun to focus on getting my book finished so we can roll the presses and start trying to sell the darn thing. We’ll begin running excerpts here sometime soon, so you can decide for yourself whether it’s worth the 20 bucks on Amazon.

People familiar with Media Orchard — generally, if you were blogging about PR in the 2005-2007 timeframe, you know about us — understand that I’ve always seen social media and online marketing through an old-school lens.

While some have attempted to come up with shiny new names for what we do, cool-looking press release templates and so forth, and others have hit the speaking circuit to pronounce press releases dead or PR fundamentally, like, changed, like, forever, I’ve always pinned my sails to the truism that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

I know, it’s not sexy. But it does have the virtue of being true.

Calling BS

PR, and marketing communications generally, have always been about telling stories. Stories still need a beginning, a middle and an end. They still need a purpose and a message. All that’s really changed is the variety of media we use, the complexities in identifying our audiences, and the tools at our disposal to measure success or failure.

I won’t name names, but back in 2006, many of the so-called top influencers in social media were spouting a lot of nonsense about how PR would be rocked to its core. For example, most declared that CEOs who weren’t good writers shouldn’t have blogs — because ghost-blogging was verboten as “inauthentic.”

I always knew this to be BS. It was inevitable how things would evolve — our economy dictates it, not the so-called “thought leaders.”

As I told my friend Geoff Livingston when he interviewed me back in March 2007:

When you think about it, Web 2.0 started the way Web 1.0 started. That is, you had a bunch of techies and academics and anti-corporate types running everything and thinking they could make the rules for everybody else. But guess what? They can’t. We live in a deregulated market economy, and ultimately, where there is money to be made, the market will make the rules.

I’m not saying that this is a good thing or a bad thing; I’m just saying it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable in the same way that cable news stations will cover Anna Nicole Smith 24/7, no matter what is going on in Africa. All this social media stuff is going mainstream; it’s all going to be owned and operated by companies that are trying to wring every dollar they can out of it.

And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. Look around.

Stories That Stick

Meanwhile, a lot of gurus who are making big bucks from the speaking circuit today are saying very different things from what they said in 2006. Truth is, they’re not “thought leaders” — they’re “market followers.” They come up with new “leading thoughts” based on realities that are very different from what they previously projected.

It’s like listening to sports talk, where the radio host says the team sucks and the coach should be fired the day after a loss — but that the coach is a genius after the team wins the following week.

Guess what: the coach didn’t get better. The radio host’s job is to come up with something to say every day, to get people to pay attention and respond. No one pays much attention to what he said the day before.

And so it is with too many of the social media gurus.

There’s only one problem: while this “guru” model works for self-promotion, it doesn’t work as well for brands. In fact, the techniques that get some gurus attention are often the very same techniques that companies should avoid like the plague in their own communications plans.

You see, companies aren’t like sports radio hosts. And they aren’t like speaking-circuit gurus. Companies can’t hold their finger in the air every day to decide which way the wind’s blowing, and then sell something different, the way a guru can spout new opinions.

The best companies invest in their products, services and brand identity for the long term. This requires a consistency in storytelling — across all media, and to all relevant audiences. It requires creating stories with staying power.

Or as I put it in my book’s title, “Stories That Stick.”

More later…