We’ve all been fooling ourselves. While we’ve been high-fiving around about Al Reis’ notion that business needs to drop advertising and replace it with PR, Strumpette tells us today that “business is taking a huge and very risky gamble on Public Relations.”

I don’t really know if Strumpette is a guy, girl, dog or alien, and I still can’t figure out if Martin Turnbull is real or imaginary since you can’t Google him (I have to presume he’s a log home builder), but I do agree with some of the thoughts presented in this post.

Much of communication is common sense, and this pegs the current attitudes that many of use have been intuitively feeling, and danced around, but hadn’t said it as clearly. The chaos of all of the current mediums has made it nearly impossible to keep track of the message, let alone measure results or research message impact. So we’re left with intuition. We are truly living in a stratified world filed with little slivers of media.

I agree that the idea that blogging and the other Internet social networking makes anyone a corporate spokesman is pure rabbit pellets. Sure, you can have advocates and evangelists for your cause, but you still need someone to lead the charge. That remains the essential power of the PR professional; someone who can focus the message, whether it be through intuition, common sense, or research and provide a clear message to the corporate leader. We do not sell, nor market. We work at focusing the message to fit the sliver of media we are targeting.

I think the idea that you pay someone to be ‘of counsel’ or because it was the cost of doing business lost its appeal long ago. Did it catch up with the industry? It probably just did.

Now I have to wonder and worry where that puts me, a government PR professional.