MarCom Professional

Should PR people blog/tweet about their client work?

Not wanting to start of this post sounding like an episode of Sex and the City, but what are the rules surrounding PR practitioners talking about their client work in the online space? Does it annoy the people not in PR have to put up with our occasional promotional tweets in between personal messages? Should we be posting/tweeting about or client work at all?

Etiquette would have it that most people would be perfectly happy to put up with a few plugs from a PR person, as long as there was a disclaimer stating that it was client work. I've done it a few times on Twitter (with a disclaimer), but I've seen a few people being pulled up for tweeting about client work but not disclaiming the fact.

There's also the issue of people who put up a link on their blog or a Tiny URL on their Twitter feed, but not informing people where the link leads to. Often it is to personal blog post or a client's site. Is this practice frowned upon?

What about people who blog/tweet on behalf of a client? And what if they then retweet a client's messages sans disclaimer? This confuses the issue even more.

I believe that in PR, transparency and authenticity counts for a lot. I'm perfectly happy for people to write about their client work and even plug it, as long as the wool isn't being pulled over our eyes and there's a clear disclaimer that lets everyone know that what has been written should be read from a certain perspective. Sometimes it can be really useful for people to write about their client work as it may be of genuine interest to people who read about it.

Our personal and business lives are so intertwined in the online community that it is often impossible to seperate the two in some cases. Even then, it is only good practice to let people knwo what's going on behind the scenes.

What do you think? Do you let people know when you write about client work? Do you get annoyed when people write about their clients without telling you that they're being paid by them?

(P.S. Apologies, but upon rereading this post, it really does seem like something out of Sex and the City, especially if you read it in Sarah Jessica Parker's whiney New York accent).

Also posted on puddingrelations.blogspot.com