Those Flaky Flacks

By Michael Willard

The Flaky Flacks

Many people can hum at least some of the lyrics to Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria, but few can sing it without it sounding like a wee hour barroom scrum around a tinny piano.

This is not a discussion about the soaring heights of Andrea Bocelli — very few of us are there — but more one of adequacy, rising to a respectable level over time to that of a “wise guy” in public relations.

I have a complicated relationship with public relations — some call it a discipline — but most of what we do in PR is what knowledgeable, community-minded, and honest people would do without advice from a public relations professional.

However, that veneer of always “doing the right thing” sometimes vanishes under the pressures of making quarterly earnings.

I am talking about strategic forethought in marketing ideas, not about hawking trinkets for quick sale or analyzing the number of widgets on a shelf at Ace Hardware. Real PR. Real marketing.

In this arena, pretenders abound, lurking often in the weeds. They are Charlatans, though, in truth, most have good intentions, like Barney Fife in the old Andy Griffith series. The difference was Fife was not allowed bullets for his gun. These pretenders simply saw a field where the entry requirements were less than that for selling encyclopedias.

The PR pretenders offer small .22 caliber advice without the requisite experience. For the most part, all…