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Tuesday, March 11, 2008
PR is a two-way activity
While I think Josh Bernoff has hit the nail on the head in terms of a corporation’s participation in social media, I had to sigh when I read this line: “PR and advertising are mostly one-way, broadcast type communications, and these folks continue to try to adapt those one-way modes of thinking in the two-way, read-write world of social computing.”
That’s true of advertising but decidedly not of public relations. I’ve made this point in several venues but I don’t think I’ve ever addressed it head-on here. Now’s my chance.
Most people, when they think of public relations, equate it with media relations. Media relations is, in fact, just a small subset of PR. True, a lot of it goes on, and it is clearly the most visible PR activity to most outsiders, but behind the scenes and away from public view, PR practitioners engage in a great many other dimensions of PR, the ones addressed in textbooks and reviewed carefully in “Excellence in Communication and Public Relations Management,” the PR literature review from James Grunig and his colleagues, commissioned years ago by the IABC Research Foundation.
Let’s consider just two characteristics of excellent public relations practitioners, according to the Excellence study:
- Negotiation skills—Good PR people engage in negotiation with publics all the time, clearly a two-way communication skill.
- Boundary spanning—If you’re going to communicate with (not to) a constituent, you need to understand things from their point of view. Boundary spanning requires a communicator to get out of his comfort zone and truly perceive things from the other side. If you do it well, your bosses may wonder whose side you’re on because you can speak the other side’s language so incredibly well.
Public affairs, including government relations, is a subset of public relations—most PR agencies have government affairs practices. The counselors in these practices engage routinely in both negotiation and boundary spanning. Investor relations is another practice in many PR agencies that requires two-way communication. A lot of PR practitioners get involved in investor and labor-related communications, which also require direct engagement.
In fact, if you read the PR textbooks, you’ll find that media relations usually occupies only one chapter. The rest deal with topics like research and direct engagement with critical publics. Even the most basic of PR departments focus much of their effort on seeking input from constituents and responding to the issues and concerns they raise. Again, that’s a two-way activity.
Yes, media relations can be one-way, but most PR is two-way, which situates the PR function perfectly to guide an organization’s social media efforts. Unless, of course, media relations is the only thing the PR function in your organization has ever done.
