The PR Industry is in Need of Some PR

It’s been a while since I’ve written about PR; I have somehow mainly focused on social media lately and so today I am going to talk about how the PR industry itself needs PR. This is indeed nothing new. Since its very emergence PR has always been associated with spin and persuasion, which has affected the reputation of the practice and the acknowledgment of its importance as a management discipline that should sit at the C-level.

Unfortunately, it seems that not much progress has been made to improve PR’s reputation. A recent survey by TopLine Communications just confirms that the PR industry could certainly do with a little PR itself.

As it turns out, the majority of people doesn’t really know or understand what PR is – 48% of the respondents in the survey believe it is advertising or marketing. Talking about reputation, 14% describe PR as spin or propaganda. Another 14% say it’s communications and equally as many believe it’s people management. 8% define PR as reputation management, 4% as sales and 3% as journalism.

Further sign that the public doesn’t know what PR is is that the majority of people associate the activities of PR agencies with marketing or parties, cocktails and celebrities. And 25% of the respondents apparently even mentioned activities that certainly do not belong to PR such as ”putting advertisements in newspapers/magazines,” “telling journalists what to write” and “paying for stories to be put in newspapers.” Furthermore, people have barely mentioned social media and digital as something that PRs do.

As the researchers note, it seems that many do not understand PR’s overall objectives and how these are achieved. This has to do with the fact that normally PR people have always been behind the scenes and are less visible for the general public. My friend Robert Jessop put it really well:

"PR is like IT security. Hardly anyone notices it when everything is going well, but when something goes horribly wrong it has to respond and is suddenly noticed. Something going horribly wrong is usually the fault of someone outside the PR/IT department."

So, the PR industry should make use of its own capabilities to finally take care of these uncertainties and lack of clarity about what PR actually is. But then again how could it when PR organisations, bodies and associations still can’t decide on a clear and equally recognised definition that all PR professionals around the world should use when asked what they do?