Rotnem: The Bass-ackwards PR Scam Also Employed by Ad Biz

By Matt Van Hoven on October 26, 2009 5:08 PM

PRNewser’s Joe Ciarallo has a story (sourced from the Chicago Tribune) regarding the work of Edelman, a PR firm known to be ze biggest in all ze verld. That’s German. Anyway, the story goes like this: agency needs PR strategists, doesn’t know any, hires 23-year-olds. Yeah, this is a PR story, but it also lives in the advertising business. Take Converseon, for example, which is a success story and also employs some young’uns. So, it’s probably not a bad thing.

Also, older folks admittedly don’t know how to do this stuff. As in: admit it or get schooled by companies like MIR and Carrot &#151 both of which are staffed mostly by the youthful among us.

Key quote from Edelman pro: “We grew up with social media,” said Matthew Clay, 23, a media executive at Edelman. “We spent eight hours every day on AOL IM.”

Yes, it’s true, we grew up on the AOL IM. And yes, it’s true that if you use anything other than gmail for your email services, you are old. Examples of other email that will give away your age: comcast, aol, yahoo, anything else we missed. Somewhat curiously it’s not uncool to use Flickr (in fact, it’s quite cool) which is a Yahoo! (read: old person) owned company.

Image

Oh and btw, “Rotnem” is the word mentor, backwards, and it is also the name of Edelman’s reverse mentoring program (get it!) whereby youths from within the company teach elders to socialize media-ly.

More: “AgencySpy’s Secret to Social Media”