It is absolutely fascinating to me the way traditional PR agencies leverage the Digital Media world — blogosphere, citizen’s journalism, viral marketing, social media, et. al. — as a means to invoke fear in clients. A few hard-to-believe approaches I have come across recently:

1. The Separate Digital Media Group – One traditional PR agency stakes a claim on having a separate Digital Media group within the agency. Allegedly the people in this group are the “Digital Media Gurus” who hold all the secrets on how to navigate the toxic world of the blogosphere. Huh? What does that mean? That the rest of the knuckleheads in the agency are ignorant and useless when it comes to Digital Media? Here’s an idea: have everyone in the agency become fluent and experienced with all mediums: TV, print, radio and the internet (including Digital Media). This approach enables the entire team to develop truly integrated media strategies that maximize client coverage across the board. At the end of the day, the only thing the client cares about is the coverage.

2. Today Digital Media Is The Only Thing That Matters In PR: Really? My guess is the PR agency that said this couldn’t get a top-tier TV hit to save their life. Let’s look at the numbers. With very few exceptions – like TechCrunch – at best, bloggers may garner hundreds of thousands of unique visitors/readers a month. Again, there are a few exceptions to this, but they are few and far between. This number still pales in comparison to the print readership and TV viewership of top media outlets. NBC Nightly News has 11 million viewers a night and Newsweek has 3.2 million readers a week! It is important clients hire an agency that has broad and deep success with coverage across all mediums. This point becomes exponentially more important when the client is consumer-focused. The blogosphere is really, really important and it is always a critical part of a successful PR strategy. However, few companies can build the kind of awareness and association they need solely through the blogosphere — just as they couldn’t through any single medium.

3. Our Guy Wrote a Book On Social Media: Really? Does he have a profile on Facebook? Gather? MySpace? Does he know what a wall posting is? Has he ever been friended or poked in the Digital World? If the answers to these questions are “no,” run to the nearest PR agency whose entire company is a bunch of Facebook addicts and they’re not afraid to admit it.

4. Sorry…We Charge Extra For Blogger Services: We were recently working with one of our clients on a joint announcement with a large consumer brand who used a New York PR agency. We kept asking the NY agency person what their strategy was for the blogosphere. We couldn’t get an answer to save our lives. After a bit more prodding, the woman said the “Blogger Group” inside the agency told her they “don’t like to reach out to the bloggers because they may write something bad and that wouldn’t be good.” She then went on to say, “the client isn’t paying us for blogger services – that would be an additional fee.” Huh? Let me get this straight. This NY PR agency has a “Blogger Group” but they don’t reach out to the bloggers…what the hell do they do?! And if they don’t reach out to the bloggers, how can they charge an additional fee for blogger services? Am I the only one that finds this disturbing yet completely hilarious?

The good news is traditional PR agencies will not survive over the long term taking the fear factor approach to Digital Media. Clients are too smart and results will speak for themselves.