Public Relations: The Basics

Ron Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135089740
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Öffentlichkeitsarbeit

Public Relations: The Basics is a highly readable introduction to one of the most exciting and fast-paced media industries. Both the practice and profession of public relations are explored and the focus is on those issues which will be most relevant to those new to the field:

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• The four key phases of public relations campaigns: research, strategy, tactics and evaluation.

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• History and evolution of public relations.

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• Basic concepts of the profession: ethics, professionalism and theoretical underpinnings.

Contemporary international case studies are woven throughout the text ensuring that the book is relevant to a global audience. It also features a glossary and an appendix on first steps towards a career in public relations making this the book the ideal starting point for anyone new to the study of public relations.

Part I Understanding Public Relations

1 A First Look at Public Relations

DOI: 10.4324/9780203798904-1

This chapter introduces you to the profession of public relations: What it is. What it isn’t. It outlines the practical benefits that public relations offers organizations and society at large It also introduces the ethical base of the art and science of public relations.

Understanding public relations is something like the story from ancient India about the blind men and the elephant. The parable tells of six blind men, each feeling a different part of an elephant. One touched the side and thought it was a wall. Another touched the tusk and thought it was a spear. The man touching the trunk thought he had a snake. And so on: The knee a tree trunk, the tail a rope, the ear a fan.

The story points out the pitfall of looking only at parts and not perceiving the whole. Public relations is like that. Public relations is publicity and research, special events and speeches. It is strategy and evaluation, community partnering and fundraising. But none of these, individually, reveals the totality of what public relations is about.

Some people see corporations hiding safety information from workers or covering up inept decisions by managers. They see politicians deceptively attacking opponents with money from unnamed backers. By focusing only on such negatives, the critics fail to see the benefits that public relations provides to society.

So what is public relations about? That’s the focus of this book.

Public relations is one of the humanities. It is an aspect of culture with ethical norms and a social perspective as an element capable of uplifting society and making sense of human experience. As such, it is associated with language and philosophy.

Public relations also is associated with the arts, particularly through the important role that design and visual communication plays in the discipline.

Finally, public relations is a science, specifically an applied social science with theoretical models based in research, driven by data, and focused on solving a practical problem.

Together, these concepts of public relations set the stage for looking at a discipline that helps us understand society and human behavior.

What Public Relations is not

Many misunderstandings surround public relations. Some are understandable, the result of confusion or outdated information, or perhaps only partial information (the elephant analogy). Other misunderstandings seem more deliberate, the result of willfully looking only at the dark side and believing that the worst example is the norm.

Delusions and misconceptions? Or untruths and lies? We’ll use a term with more neutral nuance and call these erroneous statements fallacies. These simply are false, no blame implied. It may seem unusual to begin a book with a list of criticisms, but by airing these fallacies we can actually glimpse a bit of the positive side of public relations.

Fallacy: PR equates to lying, hype and exaggeration.

Reality: Truth is a foundation of public relations. “That’s just PR” overlooks the standard of verifiable performance and sees only the illusion of smoke and mirrors. If public relations was so negative, it couldn’t last. After all, you can put perfume on a skunk, but it’s still a skunk. Public relations is about accuracy, honesty and information in context.

Fallacy: PR is just a form of propaganda.

Reality: Propaganda lives in a world of half-truths, innuendo, misrepresentation and hidden bias. Public relations focuses on the polar opposites. Once the two terms (“propaganda” and “public relations”) were used interchangeably, so it’s not hard to understand that some people have not updated themselves on the nuances of the terms or the fact that no reputable public relations professional engages in anything like propaganda.

Fallacy: PR is secretive and insidious.

Reality: Stonewalling means trying to hide information or delay its release. Public relations seeks to work with journalists and others to tell an accurate and timely story about their organizations. But much of the work of public relations is behind the scenes: researching, advising, counseling, strategizing, planning. So it is generally off the radar for most journalists and other observers. However, secretive means uncommunicative, and public relations is anything but. Open, honest and timely communication is at the heart of public relations.

Fallacy: PR tries to keep the public ignorant about what’s really happening.

Reality: Public relations flourishes only in a democracy, wherein many voices participate in debate on public issues. It enables people or organizations with different viewpoints to advocate and argue toward consensus—or, if that isn’t forthcoming, at least toward a fair policy in which the majority accommodates the concerns of the minority.

Fallacy: PR tries to control unsuspecting people.

Reality: Public relations definitely does not try to control anyone. It couldn’t even if it tried, because mind control doesn’t work, at least not in the public arena. Public relations does, however, seek to influence. It does this by building relationships to add value to organizations by increasing willingness of publics to support rather than oppose those organizations. And that’s more than a semantic difference between control and influence.

Fallacy: PR is only about spin, making bad guys look good.

Reality: The term “spin” is wrong on so many levels. It suggests a hired gun who tries to make bad things look good, or at least less bad. Rather, public relations allows organizations, advocates and individuals to openly share information, criticize policies, suggest alternatives, and otherwise engage in dialogue. Public relations serves the public interest by providing a voice for all in the court of public opinion. It advances society just as does its legal parallel, in which even people charged with a crime and presumed by some observers to be guilty deserve a vigorous defense by ethical attorneys. The court of public opinion isn’t always fair. Both sides may not have equal representation, and there’s no wise judge, no impartial jury to deliberate. Still, public relations gives every party an opportunity to present its case to perhaps the only jury that really matters—the public.

Fallacy: PR works only for powerful groups with deep pockets: corporations, government, lobbyists and others who work against the best interests of average people.

Reality: Public relations enhances democratic values by providing for multiple voices in the marketplace of ideas. For every cereal manufacturer advertising sugary food to kids, dozens of nonprofit groups use public relations to educate parents on childhood nutrition, to expose the false claims of the marketers, and sometimes to advocate for effective public oversight on marketing practices. The same can be said about issues from nuclear energy to workplace safety, from animal rights to climate change.

Fallacy: PR is only publicity, and nobody reads newspapers anymore.

Reality: Remember the elephant parable from the beginning of this chapter. Publicity accounts for only a small slice of the public relations pie. Public relations is so much more. With the fragmentation of the mass media and the mushrooming of new and interactive media, organizations now can go directly to their publics without needing the assistance of journalists. “Mere PR” dismisses the profession as being inconsequential and unnecessary, neither of which is true. It also misses the point that—in addition to being skilled writers, editors, graphic designers and so on—public relations practitioners also are experts in strategy, management and other problem-solving aspects of organizational life.

Fallacy: Anybody can do PR.

Reality: It’s true that public relations doesn’t require a license as does dentistry, law and funeral service. So anybody can call himself or herself a PR person, and who’s to disagree? But public relations is a profession rooted in research, ethics, strategic planning and evaluation, as well as effective written, spoken and visual communication. It is based on a course of study. So it’s more appropriate to say that anybody who has acquired the skills and adopted the ethical standards can do the work of public relations.

Fallacy: PR is the guy with the shovel following the elephants in a circus parade.

Reality: Sometimes public relations is asked to clean up the mess caused by others, usually managers who made bad decisions with even worse consequences, often because they failed to consider public relations perspectives before they acted. But rather than being the band aid (to switch metaphors), public relations has become the wellness program and preventative medicine that helps avoids the problem in the first place.

Fallacy: PR has a dark history, such as campaigns to get women to smoke and books that guided the Nazi propaganda machine.

Reality: In the past, research sometimes looked at how the uneducated masses could be influenced and manipulated. That’s where research was in the early 20th century. But theory and research also have developed, as has the rest of society. It’s true that an early public relations campaign aimed for social acceptance of women smokers. That was when society discriminated overtly against women and when even doctors and nurses smoked, before we learned of the associated dangers. So it’s more accurate to point out that public relations, from its early foundations as a profession, has been used in many ways to uplift society and help people who have been oppressed and marginalized—and yes, to sell cigarettes and all the other consumer products that corporations provide.

(In case you haven’t observed a pattern yet, professionals do not generally use the abbreviation PR. The shorthand is associated with all the misperceptions about public relations. So in this book, we consistently use the full term.)

It’s easy to criticize any organization if you focus only on the excesses, exaggerations and aberrations rather than the best practices, high standards and good work. Schools? Look at all the dropouts, cost inefficiencies, bullying and poorly educated graduates. Military? Consider the rogue killers, suicide and rape. Churches, scouting programs and college athletics? All that sex abuse and underage drinking. Hospitals? Accidental patient deaths and nurses’ strikes. Manufacturing companies? Plenty of pollution and inferior products. And so it goes.

Focusing only on such negatives is an exercise in paranoia. It may be fun for folks who enjoy reading about conspiracy theories, but it’s not useful for understanding real-world relationships. On the other hand, it’s never helpful to deny the negatives, because we learn from them. Especially, we can learn how to overcome them, relegating bad practices to the dustbin of history.

What Public Relations is

If there’s confusion about public relations, it may be because the term is used in so many different ways, many of them just plain wrong. A company advertises for a PR representative, only to have the job turn out to be a sales rep or a telemarketing caller. A restaurant has a job in PR, but only for young women with great bodies willing to wear sexy outfits. A politician wants a PR person to do opposition research to distort another candidate’s record. That’s definitely not public relations.

To get a real look at anything, it’s always a good idea to go straight to the source. Here’s what public relations people say about their profession.

Three-quarters of a century ago, Harwood Childs (Princeton University professor and founder of Public Relations Quarterly) wrote in his book An Introduction to Public Opinion this classic and still insightful definition:

Public relations as such is not the presentation of a point of view, not the art of tempering mental attitudes, nor the development of cordial and profitable relations … . The basic problem of public relations, as I see it, is to reconcile or adjust in the public interest those aspects of our personal and corporate behavior which have a social significance.

Here are eight contemporary definitions by leading public relations organizations:

Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.

Public Relations Society of America

Public relations is defined as the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its public, such development being for the benefit of the practice of public relations in commerce, industry, central and local government, nationalised undertakings, professional, trade and voluntary organisations and all practitioners and others concerned in or with public relations.

International Public Relations Association

Public relations is the art and social science of analyzing trends, predicting their consequences, counseling organizations’ leaders, and implementing planning programmes of action which will serve both the organization and the public interest.

World Assembly of Public Relations Associations

Public relations is the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding between an organisation (or individual) and its (or their) publics. It’s the k...