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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