How to use LinkedIn to disintermediate PR: Danny Bradbury

There was me saying that Facebook could be the way forward for PR – and then along comes Danny Bradbury and shows how LinkedIn could help get rid of us altogether (well, almost).

Specifically, Danny is referring to the use of LinkedIn Answers as a research tool:

"I checked out the Answers feature, and oh my, does this contain a
lot of possibilities. Given that I was writing an article on it I
thought I’d test it out, and asked a question related to another
article I was working on, just to see what would happen. I got back
about six answers – all very relevant, intelligent, and right on the
money. And the answers came directly from people associated with the
subject. No intermediaries, no proxies. And I was able to check out
their profiles to assess their background. This lets you know where
they work, so you could call up their company, ask to speak to them,
have a conversation and verify that they’re creditable.

This strikes me as a more honed, targeted way of supplementing your
research and unlike some automated PR services it also means that
you’re likely to end up speaking with people who haven’t paid for PR
(which is a limiting factor elsewhere). It’s not something that you’d
use as your only form of research, of course, but it’s a useful tool
nonetheless."

I know the PR defense – it relies upon people who are on LinkedIn, who are prepared to take the time to respond to the question, etc, etc. But again, I think Danny has rightly identified that there now tools emerging that could easily remove traditional PR from the equation – and is that necessarily a bad thing?