It’s easy to have conflicting feelings over Lisa LaMotta’s Forbes piece on public relations (The Single Greatest Marketing Tool). It’s always nice to see the business press acknowledge that PR has value. Still, the number of inaccurate and questionable statements in the piece left me shaking my head. Take, for example, LaMotta’s definition of PR: “the discipline of shedding a benevolent light on a person, company or cause, mainly by tapping the news media.”

There’s no doubt that a lot of media relations goes on in PR agencies. To suggest that PR is mostly media relations is simply wrong. (I like the definition, “The discipline of managing an organization’s relationships with its core constituent audiences.” And Edward Bernays’ definition isn’t bad, either: “Public Relations is a management function which tabulates public attitudes, defines the policies, procedures and interest of an organization followed by executing a program of action to earn public understanding and acceptance.”) So where did LaMotta get her definition? I think she made it up.

In fact, most of LaMotta’s article seems to address the practice of publicity (defined as “the deliberate attempt to manage the public’s perception of a subject”), not PR. That’s a common mistake, but not one I expect to read in Forbes.

Noting that 200,000 people in the U.S. work for PR agencies, LaMotta writes, “Sadly, most aren’t very good at what they do.” While she praises the value of the good ones, I have to wonder about that “most.” According to what research? And what constitutes “most?” Fifty-one percent? Eighty-eight percent? Or has LaMotta simply had bad experiences and assumes that there are more lousy practitioners than good ones?

Tossing off a term like “most” without substantiation strikes me as bad journalism. But then again, most journalists aren’t very good at what they do.

(I’m kidding.)

Next, LaMotta suggests that the “best” place to look for a practitioner is PRSA. PRSA is a terrific organization and I might refer people to them, too, but again, I wonder if “best” is a qualified term. Are the results of querying PRSA uniformly better than those you get when calling IABC? According to whom? What about the Council of Public Relations Firms? Or, perhaps, might it depend on the kind of work you need done? If I needed PR done for a hospital in San Diego, Healthcare Communicators of San Diego might be my best bet. In Canada, there’s CPRS.

LaMotta warns readers to ask the right questions of practitioners, leading with “What publications should I be targeting?” This presumes that any PR engagement will focus on media relations. A better question would be, after stating the business goal you’re hoping PR will help you achieve, “What would be the best approach to achieving that goal?” It could be that getting ink won’t help at all. Once your counselor suggests that a media outreach effort would be appropriate, then ask which publications to target.

She also states that the first deliverable you should seek is a press kit. Again, LaMotta seems hung up on tactics rather than strategies that achieve real business objectives. I can’t remember the last time I counseled a client to do a press kit because press kits would not have helped them meet their goals.

Then there’s this nugget:

Before you write any checks, set some performance yardsticks. While PR remains a squishy science, there are ways to loosely measure progress. The most common is the number of media references to your company in a given month. But there are subtler metrics, too, such as how many of your “core messages” were expressed in each article.

Hmm. Maybe we should count column inches, too. And how about trotting out some Advertising Value Equivalencies? Funny that there’s no reference at all to seeing if all that media coverage actually produced any tangible business results, such as shifting public opinion out of the negative column (assessed by establishing a benchmark) and into either neutral or positive territory.

The Forbes piece is aimed at entrepreneurs, which may have led the author to focus on entry-level fundamentals. But first-time PR effort or not, I still believe in a strategic approach, which starts with the business goal, not the toolkit. And, as we all know, there is a ton of PR that goes on that never touches the media.

Even though a few PR practitioners (including Giovanni Rodriguez) quoted in the piece, most of it struck me as personal opinion and not researched fact. What’s your take?