Some ongoing critiques of PR “professionals” methods, some recent discussion about how we define ourselves and and constant battle to explain what I do to my parents (they’ll tell you I am a teacher) has meant I’m thinking a lot about what we do as public relations professionals and what it means to practice PR.
We can always cite the “bible” of public relations, Cutlip, Center and Broom’s definition which goes a little something like this:
“Public relations is a management function that seeks to identify, build, and maintain mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and all of the publics on whom its success or failure depends”
That’s great, but what do public relations professionals DO? In a final-chapter manifesto from Berger and Reber’s book “Gaining Influence in Public Relations,” they give us a list of things that we DON’T do.
“HEAR THIS: I am not a flack, a shill, a barker, a hustler, or a spinner. I do not stonewall, distort language, construct false images, or blindly follow directions in the interests of my organization or its leaders” (p. 247).
(Thanks to Tiffany Derville for making me more familiar with this work.)
The “doing” part is still unclear. Let’s keep looking.
When I was an undergrad, I’d spend time looking through the used-to-be-free Holmes Report knowledge base to answer this question. If I go into public relations, what would I be doing?
I’d click on something like “community relations” and the database would spit out a dozen or so case studies that fell under that theme. Each case study would provide the activities of that campaign – thus, giving me a sense of what came under the umbrella of “community relations.”
Thanks to the Internet, you can still get access to lots of good case studies:
- Council of Public Relations Firms – selected case studies provided by member organizations.
- The Arthur W. Page Society – award-winning case studies from 2001 – 2008
- PRSA’s PR Resource Center – it’s part of a PRSA membership, but if you don’t have one, someone on your faculty will. Ask them to help you download past Silver and Bronze Anvil winners.
Great… so you have to read a ton of case studies to decide if PR is for you? Or what to expect from your career? Not necessarily.
- Join your local PRSSA or PRSA chapter (or the equivalent where you are). Our PRSSA chapter at the University of Oregon focuses on professional development and bringing in speakers from many facets of public relations to talk about their work.
- Get involved in your student-run agency.
- Do informational interviews.
Public relations is such a multi-faceted field that you need to take responsibility to explore and to figure out how the textbook definitions translate in the real world. But take the textbook definitions with you. They are important and help create a common foundation from which all ethical PR professionals operate.
What do you think?
Comments
15 responses to “So What do Public Relations Professionals Do, Anyway?”
Great Post! I am a senior PR student at the University of South Florida. I found your blog on PROpenMic. As you have described, I am always looking for better ways to define what it is we do to “outsiders.” Unfortunately, I feel like my explanation never gives our field the credit we deserve because I am struggling to “sum it up” or worse, “simplify it.”
However recently, a friend and fellow PR student faced with the same challenge, stumbled upon what we can only describe as the best answer to the million dollar question posted on a bulletin board above the copier at her internship.
The note read:
Why Public Relations/Communications is Important
“I don’t know who you are.
I don’t know your company.
I don’t know your company’s product.
I don’t know what your company stands for.
I don’t know your company’s customers.
I don’t know your company’s record.
I don’t know your company’s reputation.
Now—what was it you wanted to sell me?”
By understanding that the word company is interchangeable with any entity, I think it does a good job of clearing up all that we need to do.
Thanks for the great post! I hope that you can share this with others!
Theresa,
I love that note! I’m glad you stumbled across my blog and left this comment.
I think you could also trade out “what was it you wanted to sell me?” with “what do you want me to do?” We’re not always selling *stuff*. A lot of my work is with nonprofits, where it’s about raising awareness and behavior change. But in those cases, I’m still looking for the publics to *do* something.
Thank you so much for this! I’ll definitely share it. (As should you! start a discussion on PROpenMic!)
I’m glad you liked the note! Upon your advice, I started a discussion in the students group and linked your blog!
Thanks again for the great post! Looking forward to reading more.
Thanks for the post Kelli!
Part of the problem may be that PR often tries to be invisible and hence it is not easy for those unaware of its practises to know what the PR industry does.
In the UK, the public is quite savvy so people will see straight through an article if it is obviously written by a PR. Because of this, PRs are getting ever smarter in hiding their work – although I do realise that this is just one part of a PRs work!
and thanks for the link to Allen Hall’s website – I hadn’t managed to find it before!
Thanks,
Ben
Great advice. Another suggestion would be to job shadow. I did this at an agency and fell in love with it.
Ben,
I think you’re right that PRs *try* to be behind the scenes – or should – and so often the work is invisible. I think that’s true in a lot of the work. Good point! That’s probably why undergrads have to dig in a little deeper to understand it.
The AHPR Web site was down until very recently. So it’s not surprising that you weren’t able to find it. Major technical problems.
Thanks for the comment!
I agree with the previous comments, about public relations seemingly being “behind the scenes” – it is something of great interest and indeed something that need to be addressed; but does anybody think that the way in which public relations is viewed in the ‘here and now’ is due to the way in which a lot of current public relations is practised?
Anonymous is actually Tony Monks, a student at the University of Central Lancashire, he emailed me earlier to let me know that. And this is my reply:
I agree with your comment, Tony. Strategy and tactics are inextricably entertwined. You can’t have meet your objectives without effective strategy and you can’t be effective without creative and doggedly executed tactics. Often the tactics are relegated to junior staff without including those staffers on the strategic planning – and that’s setting the campaign up for failure. If those who execute the strategy are involved with the planning, then everyone will be singing from the same songbook, so to speak.
Not to mention, of course, that junior staffers and entry level practitioners often have the best ideas!
An article in PR Week seems to be of great interest to this topic; one surrounding soon to be graduates like me.
Recent research from Hotwire PR shows that the industry as a whole is floundering to recruit graduates, with PR ranked 9th as a career choice out of 12.
This could be down to as has been discussed the way in which PR is both discussed and viewed.
Especially as the graduates are the ones who have the ‘finger on the pulse’, with for example new media that their lack of interest could be of detriment to the profession as we know it.
My main point being, as Kelli’s discussion surrounds what exactly PROs do, the confusion and uncertainty is actually putting off graduates?
Tony, that’s an interesting perspective. I’m curious about the Hotwire PR study. That hasn’t been our experience at the Univ of Oregon. We have an increased number of PR majors (which I suppose doesn’t translate directly to those who want to practice PR).
I would guess that even if you surveyed the eager undergraduates at the Univ of Oregon (particularly underclassmen), there would be a wide variety of responses about what they expect to “do” in their careers.
We can thank PoweR Girls (MTV show) and Samantha from Sex and the City for some degree of misunderstanding in the general public and among those embarking on their careers in the field.
If you have the link to the Hotwire study, I’d love to see it.
ohh come on.. us advertising folks get the same rap… PR/Advertising/Car Salesmen.
There’s that old advertising moniker you hear in every Advertising 101 class/textbook about “My mom thinks I play the piano at the local brothel.. don’t tell her i’m in advertising.”
But in the last few years – advertising, PR, social media, interactive (programming, information architecture/user experience, project management, QA, etc..) all are meshing together. In the last 2 years I’ve already heard a few widely recognized PR folks (I’m not naming names but some have written textbooks/articles you most likely use in lectures/class) preach on and on about how it’s going to the be the death of PR as we know it.
Then you hear from those of us who have grown up in advertising, especially those who deal with or even are bootstrapper type companies themselves (those that attempt to try and get small startup companies going on practically no money with hopes of making it big) who, out of necessity, have found ways of merging ALL three forms of industries resulting in countless new “forms” and “idealogies” of pr when in fact it’s just business evolving into one cohesive marketing/pr/web conversation. It’s not a new for of PR, no more than it’s a new form of advertising….
Instead of the marketing/ad agency creating the campaign, then sending the pr firm (or dept.) off to scribe elegantly written PR releases which will hit the wires syndicating across the country to all the major news sources, not to mention the lunches/dinners/drinks involved with reporters + editors to pitch them that you’ve got a story they need to be writing about – we find that it’s not the industry that’s starting the change… it’s the consumer. If you can convey the same marketing message, even start a personal conversation about the initiative/brand directly with the buyer, then why would you need to rely so heavily on the old major news sources? Don’t get me wrong, i still subscribe, and most likely always will, to two newspapers just because nothing will ever take the place of the hard-copy feel a newspaper gives, but at the same time, I get a similar type of feeling reading the latest news release as it happens via twitter, a blog, an rss feed, etc…
An ongoing conversation i’ve noticed on twitter and blogs recently is that people are seeing news being released to the public on social media services like twitter before they even hit a reputable news source (or even their own company blog sometimes)….
This starts conversations. Conversations WITH the brand… which lead to conversations about the brand…and then back to the brand… rinse and repeat.
Now, and please correct me if i’m waaaay off here as I do come from an advertising/web background, only having taken PR classes back ‘in the day’ because all the good looking girls at my school were in them, but it seems as if the ‘old’ way of PR was lacking the conversation between the consumer and the brand. When the brand had something to say, the PR folks would say it for them… regardless of content, that just added to the “noise”.. so it’s the difference between signal vs. noise perhaps (a semi-stolen idea from i think seth godin… but don’t quote me… in fact.. you should never quote me, i usually am wrong). Noise would be the one-way, press release or story that you’d read in the newspaper and maybe bring up with a coworker or spouse, then it dies. Signal would be a direct inquiry to the consumer, inviting responses whether good or bad but responses BACK to the brand. A good example that comes to mind is Zappos.com. The CEO runs the most successful online shoe store, obviously is rich + probably has very little free time, yet on twitter he’ll come on at times to answer customer service questions or even give out free shoes. Last week he even was in Vegas and invited anyone who was in town to meet-up with him for a free lunch as long as they provided the conversation…..
But what do you guys think? I’m intrigued as to what those on the PR side, both young and old, feel has been the change over the past 3 years – the consumer or the industry? Are you being taught new techniques that once were only used by the poor startups trying to get the word out about their company? Have you ever had a lesson or lecture on blogger/social media etiquette? Or even the difference in writing styles when approaching someone online vs. offline in a press release? (I’ve been told, and practice myself, the method of writing two PR releases – one that goes out to the typical sources, then one that is extremely short, typically including some form of media (also written so that it can be personalized depending on who or where it is sent to online)
As for the blogger etiquette – If your answer is no – stop reading, open up a new browser and do a google search on the subject.. there is no faster way to be banned for life from some of the most influential online news sources than by breaking even just one of the few cardinal rules regarding approaching someone online with a pitch.. for example, there are lists that go around certain groups of blog owners that are 300+ emails long – its a “do not respond” list.. you can’t get off it so don’t think they just delete your email and forget you..bloggers can do more than you think… just look at HP’s recently launched 31 days of the dragon.. 31 diff blogs given each the top of the line laptop with strict instructions to create a contest and give it away via their site… 1 laptop per day..the buzz even in just the few hours since it’s been released has already paid for those laptops 2X).
So now it’s your turn… I think that I’ve typed enough for one night…. Tell me what YOU THINK.
I’ve started identifying myself as a marketing consultant rather than PR because sometimes I touch other parts of the marketing mix– something I have recently become an expert in. I tell my students that PR is what they should go into at the UO if they’re attracted to advertising but want to do more than that. I started calling myself a PR practitioner because my clients hired me to help them build relationships with different publics. 🙂
Brent,
Lots of good points. There’s a tremendous amount of integration and meshing going on in marketing/advertising/pr to point that there is often little to distinguish them.
Fortunately, I define PR much more broadly than media relations and getting coverage in traditional media outlets. It’s about building relationships – regardless of the channel and the mechanism for doing so.
Old school PR folks are likely wringing their hands and wondering about the demise of the control of the message and all forms of delivery. But in my consulting practice, it’s not *just* the PR people that are verklempt about the possibility of people talking about their organization. It’s CEOs and executive directors and corporate counsel.
Regardless, I see PR as fitting quite nicely with the tools of social media – building conversations and creating community! That’s what we were supposed to be doing all along.
And yes, my students get plenty of lectures about writing online, blogger relations and social media (thank you for giving me a reason to give them a big “I told you so!”)
Thanks for stopping by, Brent! Great food for thought. Now I’ll get back to teaching and you get back to the piano bar. 🙂
I think your post hits the nail on the head. I’ve recently become involved with my university’s PRSSA chapter. In fact, I just ran for secretary of our group for the upcoming semester (and won). I think that involvement with the PRSSA is going to be extremely beneficial for me and everyone else involved. As I told my group mates why I wanted to be their secretary I tried to tell them that this group has great potential to impact our lives. Public relations is a very vast field that has so many facets it is hard to read one definition and know you want to be involved.
In order to figure out if PR is right for you or to even explain the field to outsiders it is important to gain experience. I told my PR Group that we all need experience outside of the classroom to understand what this industry is about. By taking internships, joining clubs, and researching the field you can get such a better understanding of what public relations really means. For our group specifically, I want to have plenty of speakers come in to talk to us and I want some of us to go to Detroit for a PRSSA conference. So needless to say I am very happy to read your post.
For me personally, I knew before I started school that this industry was for me, but I still needed to find my place in the communication world. I’ve already completed one internship that was in-house, I am secretary of the PRSSA, and I am going to England over the summer to intern at PR Talk (an agency in London). All of this is going to help guide me through the infinite field of PR. As a student I appreciate all the help my professors give me in class, but some of the best advice I’ve been given has been to gain real world experience. I think it is great that you are a professional and professor providing your students with such perfect advice.
T, sounds like you’re definitely on the right track. Congrats on your PRSSA board position and on the internship in London. What a great opportunity!
Your points are well made. Thanks for coming by!