PR Week recently ran a small piece citing a survey conducted by PR agency Parker Wayne & Kent. The survey found that many PRs still believe off line coverage to be more influential than on line. Apparently only one in ten respondents thought that digital coverage was becoming less relevant to PR campaigns.

Meanwhile this June guardian.co.uk cited over 20 million unique users (print readers about 1.2 million).

Maybe the reasons some PROs still cling to the opinion that digital coverage is not as influential as more traditional media is because they’d just prefer it, if it were so.

I mean, wouldn’t life be easier if the companies with the most PR spend had the most clout? If product messages could be tenderly crafted, engraved in stone and transcribed verbatim, if all we ever had to do was chant the corporate message loudly and repeatedly, and the world would be so.

Ahh to go back in time, to the days before user generated content, when PROs were the rainmakers.

Now the world’s gone mad. A no-name company with a budget that wouldn’t even cover a PRO’s bar bill, throws a phone in a blender, and puts the resulting footage on YouTube. 5 million hits later and it’s the most talked about brand of the era. Our most sacred tool, The CEO, once only rolled out for speaker slots and interviews with the chosen few, blogs daily and takes time to reply to anyone that contacts him. A disgruntled journalist bleats about some pithy laptop malfunction and a global corporate completely revaluates its entire comms strategy.

Now it’s all about ‘transparency’, ‘listening’, ‘responsiveness’ and, heaven forbid, ‘creating a dialogue’.

These days the world and his dog have a view, a means to communicate it and an attentive online audience to lap it up. Increasingly, it is the maddeningly authentic voice of the individual whether they be consumer or supplier that has more clout than that of the seasoned and oh so reasoned PRO.

So if you worked in PR what would you do?

Judging by the survey results, going into denial is definitely an option and it does seem to work for all the alcoholics I know. And while I still squeal with pleasure when we get coverage in the FT and have I do have to stroke the glossy pages of The Banker should it have a client mugshot within it - in such invigorating times shouldn’t us old rainmakers have a slightly more thought out approach than just to hide behind our umbrellas?