By Craig Pearce 

Craig Pearce

The culture of public relations is not only based on a gratifying and inspirational aesthetic, but PR also contributes positively to society. To meet the challenge and leverage the opportunity that contemporary society is providing PR with, PR practitioners need to continually evolve and educate themselves, take a leadership position, collaborate excellently, know their way around social media and, very importantly, be a nice person! 

Helping society
One of the most important strategic elements of public relations is identifying organisational stakeholder needs and wants. The PR pro then informs the organisation of stakeholder positions and helps the organisation evolve the way it operates so it is more closely aligned with stakeholders. 

Of course, it works the other way around, too. But what isn’t so widely discussed through public relations forums is the influence that public relations can have on an organisation. 

Leadership
Inherent within strategic public relations is challenging the status quo. That might be a status quo as characterised by an organisation or its stakeholders. 

We are seeking change. 

Change requires those who are instigating it and representing it to stand up in a considerably large way. That takes fortitude, it takes vision and it takes leadership. 

Innovation and education
Public relations, just like business and society which it serves, is changing all the time. 

More importantly than that, however, is that a constant flow of new, business relevant ideas are needed to help create POD and thought leadership for organisations. Additionally, society and business are not getting any simpler, so the intellect of public relations as a putative whole needs to continually keep one step ahead to deliver results. 

Inherent within this is the need to continually learn and improve. Education is at the heart of this. Without it, you may not be fully dead in the water from a career perspective but, believe me, you ain’t going anywhere fast. 

Nice people!
PR is a people profession. 

We are under the ‘people spotlight’ all the time. 

It is expected of us to be emotionally functional (as opposed to dysfunctional) human beings. Add to this equation that the most effective and persuasive form of public relations is face-to-face communication. It is extremely hard to do this well without caring about other people and being able to empathise with them. 

Public relations, is, at the end of the day, a civilised profession in which to work. And one of its roles is, inherently, to enhance the civility of all those it counsels and works with. 

Upshot? Excellent PR by excellent PR people helps create a more civilised society. 

Collaboration and teams
This works two ways:
• On a strategic level, public relations encourages various parties (e.g. an organisation and its stakeholders) to collaborate to devise a win-win outcome for these parties. This will generally mean negotiation and it will probably mean compromise
• On a more day-to-day level, we are all operating in some sort of team environment where we collaborate with colleagues, associates or clients. Even sole practitioners collaborate with clients and, arguably, stakeholders such as journalists. 

For me, this is an enjoyable way to work as it helps me learn, it invariably challenges my perspectives and, ultimately, it leads to a better quality communication/relationship management outcome than would otherwise have been the case. 

Social media 

Public Relations 2011: Issues Insights Ideas

More than any other single tactic, social media has the potential to help achieve the holy grail of two-way symmetrical communication. 

This mode of comms provides a deeply satisfying model for me to apply and/or aspire to applying: professionally, personally, socially. 

Social media, as has been well documented, is about:
• conversations
• giving a ‘voice’ to, in many cases, those who did not have a voice before its advent
• clarifying, and helping form, communities of interest, location and power
• organisations and their stakeholders learning from each other
• sharing ‘ownership’ of organisations/brands
• creating/enhancing relationships
• providing a bedrock from which change in organisations and their stakeholders can occur and is actually expected to occur.   

It is helping create a new society, or at the very least the paradigm for a new society. One where my dreams of greater social equity, greater organisational transparency and sincerity…and greater professional (and personal) fulfilment for all of us will occur.
 
This post is an edited version of an article appearing in a free strategic report, Public relations 2011: issues, insights and ideas, that discusses topics such as why PR agencies lead and in-house practitioners follow, why working in PR is a waste of space if you want to organisations to change for the betterment of society, why more theory – not less – will benefit the industry and the fallacy of transparency being necessary for best practice PR. The report can be downloaded for free upon email subscribing to Craig’s blog, Public relations and managing reputation.