A recent website question aimed at public relations professionals (and, presumably, their bosses) was “What’s the role of public relations when traditional media die?”
Obviously, the person posing such a question has little or no understanding of what public relations is or what tasks are implemented under the rubric of public relations. The tragedy is that such questions have been asked before.
Public relations is not of the same specie as the internet; it is not a media format that packages and delivers information in a form that appeals to a certain target audience. The internet is a vehicle, the hardware so to speak, that disseminates information. It’s in the same category as the printing press, movies, radio, broadcast television and cable television. Social media are the 21st Century counterparts of style pages, columns, how-to articles, radio talk shows and television specials.
As for public relations, I look at it as the applied social science which deals with influencing behavior and deploying information to motivate a defined audience to a specific course of action -- to support a certain point of view, choose one automobile over another, trust one bank over others and vote for one candidate rather than another.
In doing so, the public relations professional helps hone the messages that will be most persuasive to the audience and selects the media (usually a mix of media) that will deliver the messages most credibly and economically. It goes without question that this process take place within the context of uncompromised dedication to truth and transparency.
That in a few words is the essence of public relations. It should also be noted that public relations has many subsets. Publicity is likely the one most recognized by professionals and the public. Nowadays often referred to as “earned space” (print) and earned time (electronic), publicity also is sought on internet websites including social media. Other subsets are employee relations, investor relations, marketing support, litigation support, communications training, crisis management, etc., etc.
There are still a few of us around who remember the coming of television in the 1950s. Back then most public relations professionals were former newspaper or press association reporters. For the most part, we dealt with print media – radio seemed always to have a secondary role in the publicity mix. But we soon realized the potential of television to reach the audiences of interest to our employers and clients. It took a good ten years for most of us, both in-house and agency publicists, to feel comfortable working with television producers. And ever since television has been an important delivery vehicle for public relations practitioners.
Just as television, for the better part of a decade, was a work in progress so is the internet. It would be as foolish to question its ubique power and reach as to ignore its potential pitfalls, not the least of which are its threat to privacy and, at times, its lack of credibility.
But make no mistake about the role of public relations professionals in this ongoing process of capitalizing on the best of the internet and minimizing any pitfalls. The domain of the internet as an information dissemination vehicle is ours to lose.
Put another way, there well may be people other than today’s public relations/communications specialists responsible in the future for what goes on the internet, but regardless of their identity and experience, what they do will still be a subset of the public relations function.
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Harold Burson
October 30, 2009