Thanks to Shaun Milne, Ben LaMothe and Glasshouse for this one… ClickThrough Search Engine Marketing Services have put up a piece saying Online PR should focus on mobile internet.

Now, not only is it an atrocious piece of journalism, it’s also terrible from a PR point of view. One thing at a time though…

Terrible Journalism

• For a start you have a heading with a quote in it – and nowhere in the actual article is said quote uttered or the statement backed up past that of a vague suggestion.
• It’s a vague article – even the person they quote in it says he isn’t sure if the data is meaningful.
• The article doesn’t define mobile internet – is it internet on a phone? That would be mobile, but so is internet on a laptop – which is identical to internet on a desktop.

Terrible PR

Next up – from a PR point of view:

• Any Online PR company worth their salt is already looking at mobile PR possibilities because in India the desktop has pretty much been bypassed by mobiles and in the Far East the mobile is used for so much more than what Western consumers do with it.
• Suggesting an Online PR firm should stick their eggs in one basket is a great way to put a company out of business? What next, telling Online PR firms to concentrate purely on YouTube?
• The article also completely skips the fact that for many mobile internet and desktop/laptop internet are one and the same because of the larger screens on phones now. Many sites no longer do mobile-only websites.
• See the above point on the definition of mobile internet.

This sort of article really angers me, not just from the viewpoint of poor journalism, but also that you’ll have business managers go read this, think it’s the way things should be and then cause all sorts of grief for the agencies they employ and have totally unrealistic expectations. Informed accuracy is what we need in this area, not digital tosh.

Clickthrough? More like clickoff.