As both professionals and an industry, we revel in our own mysteriousness. That’s why there’s so much confusion around how PR is defined.
Time and again I’m asked by friends, family or people I meet: “just what is it that you do again?” People not associated with a marketing profession have a hard time grasping what public relations is and isn’t. For that matter, many of us up to our necks in PR aren’t any wiser.
Advertising has it easy. People understand what an ad is and can connect the logical dots between images, copy writing and media buying. That’s because it’s sensory — as consumers we experience it everyday on TV, billboards, online and the radio. But we can say the same thing about PR . . . it’s all around us, all the time. With the exception of investigative journalism I seriously doubt that any story read, seen or heard today didn’t have someone behind the scenes pulling the strings. It’s just not overt. And yet take a sampling of people across a given PR agency and they’ll be hard pressed to give you a succinct or consistent definition of what we do.
For those of us who focus on B2B and vertical programs, PR activities seem pretty straightforward: media and analysts relations, contributed articles, speaking opportunities, quarterly newsletters, media training . . . but it’s not cut and dried.
For many clients PR stands for “Press Release” and that’s an incredibly shallow and ineffective way to look at things. But it’s a perception that has always been there. A perception that sets strategy, dictates expectation, and minimizes value into the form of a document and a deliverable. Our mediascape is changing and traditional methodologies with it. Will the majority of us be able to adapt to a world where slapping a strap line, quote and boiler plate together isn’t enough? If we want to survive through the next decade, we don’t have much of a choice.
An evolution in PR, caused by the globalization of information and how it’s consumed, is stretching our borders beyond our normal purview of media relations into other areas of the marketing mix. Lead generation, sales support, BLOGS, Wikis, market intelligence, SEO, YouTube and customer reference management have fallen squarely into our ill-defined bailiwick. This should be old news by now. Pundits across the Blogosphere and industry have been talking about this for awhile — articles on New Marketing and New PR come out everyday. It’s a fact: things are changing. For some it means the creation of niche specialists; mini, separate agencies each affecting the influencer pie in a unique way. For others it translates into growing the agency to encompass different things and increasing budgets with a new range of services.
Instead of trying to expand or fragment the definition of PR, we should begin redefining what it is that we do.
I for one don’t feel that as an industry we relate to the public. But we are doing some pretty radical things. We’re shaping influence across audiences and multiple mediums. We're opening new channels that target the individual as well as the mass market. We're creating groundswells of excitement through viral programs that never get published in a newspaper or magazine. We’re driving top and bottom line results behind specifically defined business objectives. We’re using sophisticated tools to reach further, track and measure effectiveness, and we’re building technology to make sure that our clients and their products and services are paid attention to and considered.
PR has an opportunity to rebrand itself. We should use that opportunity to further demonstrate our worth not only through new services and capabilities but to establish the fundamental necessity of what we bring to the table. Maybe we even do away with the letters 'P' and 'R' all together.
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