Have public relations professionals lost sight of their public? If so when, and why did they let this happen. There has always been concern surrounding the ethical practices of PR, and how to control this. People have always been suspicious of us Public Relation Practitioners, never really bestowing their full and utmost trust in us. And as the old saying goes, people will only ridicule what they don’t know, and the question remains what in the world, is public relations?
Lets look at the definition of the words that make up our profession.
Public: –noun -1 the people constituting a community,state, or nation. 2 a particular group of people with a common interest, aim, etc.:
Relations - 1.an existing connection; a significant association between or among things: the relation between cause and effect 2.relations,a .the various connections between peoples, countries, etc.: foreign relations. b. the various connections in which persons are brought together: business and social relations.
Onelookdictionary.com
Of course when defining public relations as a practice there have been a multitude of definitions offered, Harlow (cited in Wilcox and Cameron 2009) defined PR as the distinctive management of communications of acceptance, cooperation and understanding between an organisation and its public. Cameron (Wilcox and Cameron 2009) defines PR as strategic management of competition and conflict for the benefit of ones organisations and when necessary, for the benefit of the organisations stakeholder and publics.
The Public Relations Institute of Australia defines public relations as “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 key to effective communication in all sectors of business, government, academic and not-for-profit”(PRIA, 2010).
Like a teenager suffering from an identity crises, , public relations, in its inability to develop a unified definition of it’s practice, left itself open for the critics to define it (Hutton, 1999). As a result of this, Public Relations is widely known by the general public as spin, spin control and spin doctoring or as my uncle likes to call me a qualified BS artist.
It is therefore, no wonder that Public Relations lost the focus of public, and settled for putting the message out there as enough. But today counting media mentions just doesn’t cut it. Newspaper readership is down to dramatic lows, as the public move towards the Internet. And as Ashleigh stated the Internet does change everything and practitioners need to realise that unless they want to remain “spin” doctors then we really need to find our public again. As publics change so to, should public relations practices in order to maintain the relationship between organisation in public, or practitioners will be continuously breaking ties with key stakeholders.
Bianca Agius
Hutton, J (1999) The Definition, Dimensions and Domain of Public Relations.The Public Relations Review, 25(2), 199 – 214. DOI :10.1016/S0363-8111(99)80162-3
Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA) (2010). About PR. Accessed 10/4/10 from
http://www.pria.com.au/aboutus/cid/2/parent/0/t/aboutus/l/layout/l/layout
Wilcox, D and Cameron, T. (2009) Public Relations Strategies and Tactics. 9th Ed. Pearson. USA.
No comments:
Post a Comment