Strategic Communication

Public relations at work

Jane Johnson, Leanne Glenny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000282368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Relations publiques

Communication and relationships sit at the centre of our hyper-connected lives, and their effective management is a strategic necessity for all organisations today. As the communication and public relations industries continue to grow globally, they offer a dynamic career for those with the right skills and knowledge.

Jane Johnston and Leanne Glenny show how strategic communication and public relations plug into the social, economic and political world, creating crucial links between organisations and people. They explain how communication professionals build partnerships, motivate and engage stakeholders, manage content, media and planning, develop reputations, and troubleshoot crisis communication.

Strategic Communication is a complete introduction to the fundamentals of communication and public relations for the next decade. It presents innovative and creative approaches to deliver 100 tools and tactics, over 30 theories and models, and three levels of strategy that underpin successful communication. The authors include examples from around the world, from private sector, public sector and not for profit organisations.

Part 1
Foundations and the working environment

Chapter 1

Introducing strategic communication and public relations

This book introduces you to the professional world of strategic communication and public relations (PR). It is an exciting and dynamic world because communication and relationships sit at the centre of our hyper-connected lives. The book explains how strategic communication and PR plug into the social, economic and political world, illustrating the importance of effective communication between organisations, institutions, groups and individuals across a wide range of activities and fields. From building partnerships to gaining a following, sharing information to motivating activity or persuading a change of mind, strategic communication and public relations are pivotal to how corporations, governments and not-for-profits connect with the people who matter to them and achieve their aims and objectives.

If you’ve chosen to study or practise in the field of strategic communication and PR, you’ve made a good decision. You have chosen an industry that is growing and expanding—and one that’s in demand. The communication and PR industry is surging ahead so quickly that it’s moving faster than the economies of some countries (Morris & Goldsworthy 2008). Australian Government predictions are positive for public relations professionals and managers. These job outlook figures show that growth is stable overall and strong for managers. Importantly, they also show high employment certainty (or low unemployment) for the future (Australian Government Job Outlook 2019a; 2019b). The full predictions—which cover a range of variables, from pay scales to gender share—are illustrated in Figure 1.1. In their examination of public relations, Morris and Goldsworthy (2008) ask the question: Why does public relations exert such a fascination for people? This is a question on which we hope to shed light throughout this book.

This chapter will introduce you to the breadth of strategic communication and PR, including how it fits in to organisations and society more broadly. It will examine the changing nature of the discipline, the people who carry out public relations and strategic communication roles, its widespread adoption across many industries, and growth in the field within the tertiary sector and as a profession. First, however, we’ll provide some simple explanations that will help you navigate this book. We’ll explain some of the commonly used terms and provide some definitions.

Figure 1.1 Infographic from Australian Government Job Outlook, Department of Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business. Source: joboutlook.gov.au

Definitions and language at work

Before we proceed with exploring strategic communication and PR more generally, we begin by explaining our terminologies and some of the key words and expressions in the book and the field. We have developed some navigational short-forms as tools to help you through the book; these are also intended to guide further exploration by the reader (and might help with research).

	Sticky notes are used to identify an important theory that is explained in Chapter 10
	Fact check is used to get you investigating—you become the fact checker!
	Quick tips are used to provide you with extra readings or online places to check out.

Next, we explain some of the words and phrases in the book that are widely used in the profession. The language in this book is kept pretty simple, but we need to make sure we’re all ‘on the same page’ in clarifying everyday words—like society, public, communication, audience, stakeholder and strategy. Simple words? Yes, but, believe it or not, their meanings are often confused or disputed. Journalist and military strategy expert Richard Halloran (2007) says if five government people were put in a room and asked to come up with a definition for ‘strategic communication’, eight different answers would be given! And these, he argues, would be ‘mostly bureaucratic gibberish’ (2007, p. 5). For definitions to be useful they need to be clear and to the point. In Table 1.1 we present simple definitions for key words in this field—there are many to choose from. Our selections are sometimes abridged but all are close to the original or our own work.

Table 1.1 Key words in strategic communication and PR

Word	Definition
Strategy	The determination of the basic long-term goals of an enterprise, and the adoption of courses of actions and the allocation of resources necessary to carry out these goals (Chandler, in Nickols 2015).
Communication	A reciprocal process of exchanging signals to inform, persuade or instruct, based on shared meanings and conditioned by the communicator’s relationship and the social context (Cutlip & Center 2009).
Public	A group of people linked through a shared interest in an issue, whose motivation to act varies depending on their awareness of the issue, the level of concern held and the constraints that limit action.
Stakeholder	Any group or individual that can affect or be affected by the realisation of an organisation’s purpose (Freeman 1984).
Audience	A number (large or small) of people who are united by their participation in media use (adapted from Hartley 2002).
Society	A group of people whose members interact, live in a definable area and share a range of cultural norms, practices, values and matters of kinship (Little 2016).
Community	A group of people who interact with one another, within a bounded geographic territory [or in an online virtual space], whose members often share common values, beliefs, or behaviours (Neal 2014).
Organisational Relationships	The effective management of mutually beneficial exchanges in which organisations and publics strive for the same shared goals (Lock 2019).

But language is a rather plastic thing. Words change meaning over time, in different cultures and across different disciplines. Reasons for the emergence of the term ‘strategic communication’ over ‘public relations’ include that some people think ‘public relations’ does not sufficiently sum up what is done in this industry; or it is too US-specific; or it doesn’t translate clearly across cultures (Zerfass, Verhoeven, Tench, Moreno, & Verčič 2018). One study of 43 European countries found preference for other terms: ‘corporate communication’ in business, ‘strategic communication’ in non-profits and government, followed by ‘communication management’ and, lastly, ‘public relations’ (Zerfass, Verhoeven, Tench, Moreno, & Verčič, 2011).

In 2012, the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) incorporated strategic communication into its definition of public relations following a national study of what people thought was the best way to sum it up. Its current definition is:

Public relations is a strategic communication process that builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics. (PRSA 2012)

In the Australian and New Zealand professional associations the definition has continued to be tweaked over time, but only New Zealand has incorporated communication into its definition. The Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) defines public relations as

the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

And the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand’s (PRINZ) definition is:

Public relations practice is the deliberate, planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain mutual understanding and excellent communications between an organisation and its publics.

A popular definition of strategic communication, meantime, has most recently been revised to:

Strategic communication encompasses all communication that is substantial for the survival and sustained success of an entity. Specifically, strategic communication is the purposeful use of communication by an organization or other entity to engage in conversations of strategic significance to its goals. (Zerfass et al. 2018, p. 493)

Words change over time and with cultures

Think of the language that has evolved with the internet and social media: words such as share, like, block, friend, unfriend, Google, hashtag, tag, IGers, app, filter, follower, moment and Instameet have emerged or been altered in everyday meaning. Then there are the acronyms and abbreviations that are used—like LOL in English, which translates to XAXA in Russian, JAJAJA in Spanish, kkkkk in Korean, www in Japanese, 哈哈 or 呵呵 in Mandarin, 55 555 in Thai and hahaha, hehehe, or hihihi used in many languages (Garber 2012). And, of course, emoticons and emojis are also part of this new language

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Industries across the communication environment—from public relations, to advertising, to political and science communication—can now share the broader name of strategic communication (Zerfass et al. 2018). This is in part due to the breakdown of what were called ‘silos’ of activity where, for example, one industry did one thing and then passed it to the next. This is illustrated in the advertising–PR overlap, the traditional field of integrated marketing communication (IMC) and the so-called convergence of communication industries. Paid advertising was once the sole domain of the advertising industry. Now, public relations practitioners sometimes need to negotiate with o...