What is PR?

Dear Dave,

You asked me what public relations is; this is going to be my best shot at describing what public relations is and does. One definition of public relations came from buildingbrands.com, “Public Relations practice is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its publics.” http://www.buildingbrands.com/definitions/07_public_relations.php

A practitioner of public relations is someone that can open and maintain clear lines of communication between an entity and the various groups of people that the company or organization serves. This happens on many different levels. Brandbuilder.com went on to emphasis the importance to many customers the ability to know the company behind the product. Public relations is more than just ‘launch parties’ for new products.

Public relations helps an organization and its public's adapt mutually to each other is the definition that the Public Relations Society of America in the organization's web site. Public relations plays a key role in maintaining the trust people have in the organizations they associate themselves with, whether it be a business or a not for profit organization. This is accomplished by clear and open communication between the two parties. It is the role of the public relations practitioner to be fluent and proficient in the many different ways that an entity can communicate with several different groups of people.

In order for a public relations officer to clearly and efficiently communicate a message, they must first know who needs to hear the message and what that message should be. For this reason, one of the biggest roles of a public relations officer is research. Before any message is communicated to a public, by any means, it must first be decided what that message is. In order to know what to communicate, it first has to be established what identifies the public that the organization need to connect with. Public relations practitioners must be familiar with several different ways of identifying a public including marketing, demographics; or identifying characteristics of people such as income, age, and gender.

Once that it has been decided who should receive the message, there are several different ways one group of people can communicate with another. The fastest growing way to communicate a message is the internet. The internet is unique because it much easier to reach a more specific group than say newspaper, and more members of that group. Public relations now utilizes not only web sites but all forms of social media, such a Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, as well as blogs.

One of the strongest tools of public relations is the press release. A press release gives reporters and other members of the press the information needed to relay the message from an organization to the public. For example if Apple released a new line of computers, they could send a press release that would be seen by many members of the press. They in turn could feature an article in the technology or business section of thier newspaper, include an article in their magazine, or a spot on their radio talk show. by sending one release, Apple had their message communicated to several specific groups of people from a few paragraphs being made available to the press.

I hope that help answer some of your questions. If you have any more questions you can always ask me but there is great information on the internet, for example, the PRSA web site, http://www.prsa.org.

-Mike