At some point in our lives every person becomes a PR professional. Whether you want to admit it or not, that choice is up to you. According to dictionary.com, “public relations is the art, technique, or profession of promoting such goodwill.”
Public relations is essentially creating a brand, standing out and keeping a good reputation solid. That is what people do everyday to represent themselves. So, where did PR get off to having such a bad reputation?
This is the problem. Everyone is doing it and not the right people. I’m beginning to realize that people don’t really understand public relations, in fact, I was 21-years-old before I truly understood what the heck PR people did. Half the people at the University of South Florida, school of Mass Communication, have no idea what it is either. People are not well informed and they turn to the bias they see on television; PR practitioners running around acting anything less than professional.
In my eyes, public relations is one of the most important jobs in the world. Public relations should make life easier and better for anyone who does business with a PR professional. However, many times this doesn’t happen. PR professionals sometimes make things too complicated for clients and make business anything but easy.
My conclusion is that there are too many bad seeds in the PR world.
Thousands of people choose a career in public relations because they think it’s easy, or that there is good money involved. Their hearts don’t beat “P-R” the way mine does, and hundreds of other professionals out there. These “bad seeds” might have good intentions, and I’m certain they are wonderful people, but they need to step it up.
Public relations is more than writing press releases and media alerts. It is about building sincere relationships with people. It’s about keeping up with PR and becoming active in the community. It is about social media and two-way communication.
Believe it or not, I know very successful PR professionals who have not a clue what is going on in social media. Call me an overachiever, but shouldn’t every great PR professional have some connection to the social media outets?
I guess this is the problem; there are hundreds of problems in PR and not many people are willing to step up to fix them. Now a day, people have specialties in this field. I even have one myself. However, I don’t believe that just because you know how to work in crisis management, or any other specialty, that that should become your only focus. In this economy, we all need to step it up. Only the diverse people will last.
I know, some people might read this and think “Oh, she is young, she has no idea what the real world is like. Once she gets into PR she will understand.” This may be true. It is correct that I really have no idea what life is like outside the student world I’ve been living in for the last 23 years. However, what I do have is an outside perspective. I can see the reputation and I can see the different patters that are developing.
PR, like any profession, has the wrong people doing the wrong job. It now takes the devoted PR professionals twice as much effort (we should be doing that anyways) to show the world how public relations is GOOD. PR can make or break a company; it is quite valuable.
There are hundreds of blogs that will continuously write about why public relations is bad. As professionals, we need to show these doubtful people how important we really are, and how great we are at doing it. In Guy Kawaski’s blog post “The top 10 Reasons Why PR Doesn’t Work,” he listed these reasons why PR needs help:
- The client doesn’t understand the publicity process.
- The scope of work is not detailed and agreed upon by both parties.
- The client has not been properly trained on how to communicate with the media.
- The client and the PR person or PR firm are not a good match.
- The client has not gotten results quickly enough and ends the relations too soon.
- PR people don’t explain the kind of publicity placements a client will most likely receive.
- Clients don’t realize that what happens after you get the publicity coverage is sometimes more important than the actual placement.
- Clients refuse to be flexible on their story angles.
- Clients get upset when the media coverage is not 100 percent accurate or not the kind of coverage they wanted.
- Clients won’t change their schedules for the media.
Kawaski is telling us what we need to do to step up. Print out the list and work hard to fix any one of these that you don’t do, or don’t do well enough. PR should never be a 9 to 5 job, it is a lifetime commitment. We are representing people. So, lets do it right.
Tags: Mass Communications, Media, Public Relations