Why PR can’t be automated

I’ve often lamented that if I were to start all over again and really think about starting a business, I would not create a service organization. (I also would not name it after myself, but that’s another story for a different time.)

A PR firm is made up of human beings. The product is our brains. Do you know how hard it is to scale a business that is reliant on people’s brains?

In a product business, if you want more widgets, you just make them. It isn’t reliant on a human being’s brain. Sure, there needs to be a person to run the machine to make the widgets. You might even need to hire two or three more people—and buy two or three more machines—to create 100,000 more widgets. To scale 100,000 more brains is impossible.

Well, not quite impossible, but you get my drift.

Scalable technology in PR

In February, I jotted down in my “blog ideas” notebook, “Penn’s blog post on PR automation.”