Our offices in Natick are about twenty minutes outside of Boston. If you’re not familiar with Boston, there are only three words that can describe what is on everybody’s mind this time of year: Red Sox Baseball.

And guess what? Curt Schilling, our outspoken pitching ace who has never been afraid of the media or calling into the local radio station to make his point has taken it to a new level – he started a blog.

What strikes me most about Schilling’s blog is that he gets it. If you’re accustomed to the sanitized newspaper version of what goes on at the ballpark, you should check out 38pitches.com and get the real story straight from the horse’s mouth. Even after a disastrous opening game for Schilling he still had the guts and the good sense to be truly authentic and let the fans know what was up – just terrific on his part.

As a huge baseball fan, I find it utterly fascinating to look at such an unfiltered view of what’s going on inside a player’s head. If MLB is serious about better serving its fans, we need more of this. Hey Commissioner Selig, you want us to feel more involved? Okay, then, get us involved – we’re here…

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Here's just the latest warning, and this one comes out of the UK. It's about a whitepaper in which a media entrepreneur says that PR better get its act together quick or it'll be marginalized by search engine optimization and search marketing firms. I agree with the author's conclusion, but not for the reasons he cites. He writes:

“The worst case scenario for PR, and this is in the real world and not fantasy, is that PR loses significant ground to an apparently more dynamic and imaginative profession – search marketing. The danger is that this new discipline will take a bigger slice of the marketing budget at the expense of PR and search marketing agencies will start to take on communication roles which were previously part of the PR function.”

It's already happening, and it's about time, but it isn't about being more dynamic and imaginative. Exactly the opposite.

PR is a dynamic and imaginative business. That's the problem. It is a soft, subjective, and emotional practice. As an industry it has consistently thwarted countless attempts to be measured except on the basis of goofy metrics like column inches and pass-along readership. As such, PR is about as easy to measure as the effectiveness of psychiatric counsel… which is why psychiatry is now drug driven and PR is being swallowed whole by SEO types. People want real, tangible, analytical, working-or-not-working results. They are sick of the "Maybe this, maybe that" school of PR.

The SEO/Seach marketing types measure things. When you measure things, you can measure the changes in things. After a while with this approach, you learn how to optimize, where to spend the time and money. That's in stark contrast to the PR professional's dynamic and imaginative strategy du jour about which he or she can predict nothing in advance nor reliably evaluate in any quantifiable way after the fact.

If right now you are doing anything in PR that isn't being or can't be measured — or which, if measured, would reveal a disastrous inefficiency, you should stop immediately. If you're in the traditional PR business use this down time to read up on the new world and find a way to play.

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