The PR industry just has to get away from Marketing and marketing thinking.

After all, marketing as practised is an unmitigated failure and should be put back into the Stygian cage it came from. Which brilliant marketer was it that manufactured the credit crunch? Who is the genius marketer who managed to miss out the ‘market segment’ of billions of people who remain ‘poor’ across the continents during the 20th century boom in marketing? Who was the person looking at online metrics who did not understand the significance of Shirky’s book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ or Anderson’s ‘The Long Tail’ as well as many others (anyone read ‘Blown to Bits’ as a PR text?).

Corporately contrived consumer segments, brand values and that tribe of thinking that gave us communism, fascism and mass marketing to alleviate the pain of failed mass production is just so out of date.

To use reach, repetition and subservience as measures of PR is brilliant if you are Big Brother. Today, people counter Big Brother with transparency, porosity and human and technical agency. The old ogre is mortally wounded. Let him die.

Today, the commons is also a goddess fair and free in the networks of networks across many dimensions.

I know that the idea of many dimensions is hard to understand but the math has been with us for most of my life – it is common place. To ignore it, for a profession that has difficulty counting, is just a weak excuse and feeble minded.

The metrics are there, they are tougher than mere ‘page impressions’ or ‘Aves’ and its time to turn from those minds that were so heavily influenced by linear communication such as the telegraph, posters, Pathe News, the ‘miracle’ of two black and white TV channels and mass circulation newspapers.

All too soon, immersive experience will be a norm and then who will care a jot for reach?

Wrong dog, wrong bark, wrong tree and bad hearing.