Kill your PR Firm

Yesterday was the death of the high-tech PR firm. I had a rather nasty blog post about how 37 Signals got on the front page of the Drudge Report by posting that it was the best designed site on the internet. This morning I was reading a blog post by Jennifer Leggio at ZD Net called Social media marketers can – and must – prove ROI and it got me thinking about what I said yesterday. 

If blogging becomes part of your culture, and you figure out how to get people to talk about you, then what good is a PR firm? It is my argument that by getting enough links and by spending the hard work blogging, the budget you have for marketing and PR merge. You can reduce the traditional marketing budget and you can eliminate your PR budget. This kind of business model change really is what the promise of the internet is all about. 

So here is my ROI. I spend 1 hour a day blogging about our company. I also do blog posts with outrageous titles like this one to get noticed.  I make a blog post and a bunch of Twitter posts. I send out blast emails twice a month using our tool Cosential. I ask 1-2 of my employees to spend an hour a week blogging a story. So My time is 5 hours a week, and my employee’s time is 1 hour per week.  If I figure a billable rate of $165 per hour then my cost is $990 per week or $3960 per month. Last week I got a quote from a PR agency for $15,000 per month. I ask you what is a better deal.