The Alphaville Herald

Uri does Amanda Chapel

by Urizenus Sklar on 19/11/06 at 9:02 pm

What happens when the baddest bad boy of virtual tabloid journalism and Strumpette‘s Amanda Chapel (Amanda Vale in SL)– the baddest bad grrrl of the PR biz — get together? Get your minds out of the gutter! I meant *before* they retired to the sexy skybox above the Herald Headquarters. Well, in this interview Amanda dishes it out on her brethren in the PR biz, including Crayonista Shel Holtz, the “web pariah” Edelman Agency, and the general sorry state of the profession in the era of social networking. She also tells us why she/he/they is/are always in avatar.

(I’ve promised a Crayon’s Joseph Jaffe an interview too, but no skybox visit for him. Stay tuned!)

Urizenus: Amanda, first of all let me just say how lovely you look. What can you tell me about your outfit?

Amanda: Oh this! Today, I am totally business casual. I am wearing a Silk Kimono Wrap Top by Vera Wang along with Black Wool Pants by Armani Collezioni. These Gray Mules are Manolo Blahnik. The necklace is by Harry Winston.

Urizenus: I notice that your avi has had a very serious make-over. Did you have some help with that?

Amanda: I owe it all to Marilyn Murphy here in SL. What a total doll. She took me from crayons to perfume.

Urizenus: Again, just lovely, but let’s get down to business. I’ll begin with a few general questions, and then move on to some specifics. The first question has got to be this: Why on God’s green Earth are the PR and marketing firms so clumsy? From where I sit, it is like watching bull hippos in rut racing to get to the cow (if that is what a female hippo is called). Did I mention that there is a china shop between them and the cow?

Amanda: The “new new thing” is always the coveted opportunity for PR firms. Hype factories certainly believe in their own product. If they can get in there “first” and claim to the THE experts… well that’s cash in the bank.

Now, why are they so “clumsy”? Excuse me but there is very little barrier to entry in PR. Well, I take that back; there is NO barrier to entry in PR. As such, there is a plethora of knuckleheads and flimflam artists. For the record, there certainly are a few good eggs but they don’t make near the amount of money the weasels make.

Urizenus: Is this just a problem with Second Life or is it a more general problem? I’ve seen you mention that PR and marketing firms have had a disastrous time trying to operate in social networking environments.

Amanda: It is an interesting time for the PR business. Lots of money has shifted away from traditional advertising to what I call the “industry of surreptitious selling.” That makes it almost impossible to get them to change. There’s not a lot of born-again-anythings found whistling on their way to the bank.

But social networking just might be the PR industry’s undoing. They’re heavily invested here. A lot of BIG WIGS have made some pretty outrageous and self-contradictory claims. It is going to bite them in the ass….And it already has. Forget Crayon… take Edelman for instance. They’ve recently had their heads handed to them. They’ve gone from leaders to Web pariahs.

See it comes down to this: PR can NOT take the words “influence” and “strategy” out of their MO. In the past, the media was the buffer and acted as society’s ombudsmans, so to speak. Now we have no filter and false claims amount to fraud.

Urizenus: One would think that after getting banned from Wikipedia and sending people for the exits in other social spaces they would begin to get the message. Yet they don’t. Why is that? Is it hubris? Sub-average intelligence?

Amanda: I always get a little heavy regarding this topic. There’s a book I recommend often, Trickster Makes this World, by Lewis Hyde. The myth of the trickster character is cross cultural. It is a hungry character that robs from the gods to give us a future.

Actually that character is essential in commerce and politics. It happens to be the patron saint of PR. Unfortunately, there is NO iteration of that character in the virtual world of social networking. As such, it is, and will always be, seen as just a thief… and consequently summarily rejected.

Urizenus: One refrain I’ve heard over and over is that people who reject the PR and marketing invasion are just like the early adopters on the internet who complained when the rest of the world came onto the internet. According to this refrain, the early adopters were just progress-hating spoiled sports who couldn’t deal with the march of history. Does this refrain ring true to you?

Amanda: I think there is some truth to that. The first thing a VC wants to do is get the entrepreneurs out of the way.

But for the most part, the story here is about the negation of hope. We came to America for hope. We go to the moon for hope. We’re planning to visit Mars totally motivated by hope. It is absolutely debilitating that the first thing some what to do in paradise is open a McDonald’s. Excuse me, but some communities reject McDonald’s. There is no McDonald’s on Nantucket Island, for instance. I think virtual communities can and will reject over-commercialization that comes in the name of progress.

Urizenus: I’d like to get a little more specific now. I’m going to read some quotes by people in your profession, and I’d like for you to comment on what they have said. First quote is from Shel Holtz:

I saw a post on somebody’s blog about the Nissan promotion in second life. What Nissan did was put up a huge vending machine, and they had, I think it was a thousand and one Sentras that you could get out of the vending machine. And what they said was that Nissan came in here without understanding the economy of Second Life – there are people who build and sell cars and by giving away a thousand cars you’ve disrupted that economy and the comment was that Nissan is one of those organizations that is going to have to learn. And I shook my head and I said no, I think the existing residents are going to have to learn.

Urizenus: Any thoughts about that?

Amanda: Shel “of his former self” Holtz is a self-inflated self-contradicting putz. Like most of his PR brethren, he’s an expert in common sense only comforted by the warmth of his own flatulence.

Urizenus: That seems a bit harsh, but ok… Next quote is from Jane McDaid of Thinkhouse PR.

I have checked … the fucktards article and appreciate that as you say – early adopters pay a heavy price for the attribution of “leader.” That’s a price I am willing to pay as a Trend Leader – but should we have to pay a heavy price for being curious, innovative, brave, creative and effective marketers?.

Is this typical of PR flacks? They can’t distinguish falsely claiming to be first from being a leader? Or is that an unfair reading of her remarks.

Amanda: I think it’s premature to judge Jane too harshly. I just don’t know enough about Thinkhouse to comment. If it means anything, her/their offices are tasteful and stylish, exceedingly conservative and right across the street from a popular Irish bar. That’s promising!

Urizenus: I did notice that the Thinkhouse homepage sports a lovely hue of green and the background music is nice mashup of triphop and elevator music. What do you make of the fact that the residents of the Dreamland continent in Second Life (about 10% of the SL population) have voted to ban unrepentant PR flacks who make false claims of firsts.

Amanda: I think that the “false claims of firsts” is a little limiting and a bit hard to manage ultimately. I understand the rationale but… so they just don’t claim “firsts.” There is a whole world of other superlatives to choose from that make hype disingenuous and problematic in a virtual world.

Urizenus: Do you think people are starting to get the message or is that too much to hope for?

Amanda: We are variously exposed to thousands of sales pitches a day. I think with the dumbing down of the media, we’ve been bombarded by crap for years now. As a result culture has gotten pretty hyper-vigilant. There’s a whole generation now that’s rejecting it outright.

Urizenus: I’d like to turn the question to you for a bit. You claim to be in the PR business, which makes some people wonder why you hate on it so much. Are you jealous of the success of others? Just a bitch? A trouble-maker?

Amanda: We are just stirring the pot hun. Call it a little creative turbulence. See, we believe that there actually is a VERY functional and necessary aspect of PR. The industry has strayed far from that. Hype and all things “surreptitious selling” actually cause tremendous distortions and inequities in an economy. That’s why we have laws to protect us from fraud.

Urizenus: Clearly some of the people in the PR business are troubled by the fact that you are always “in avatar”. I actually think that is interesting from the point of view of virtual worlds, since I think you don’t have to be online to be in avatar. My question, and I do have one, is this: why do you only write in avatar, and do you think it gives you some advantage in your ability to communicate? (ok, that was two questions).

Amanda: Anonymity and pseudonymity are in the fine tradition of dissent. It puts us on a level playing field. Benjamin Franklin wrote to his own paper anonymously!

Bottom line: it is NOT about a person’s identity. It is solely about the strength of one’s ideas.