A new study on social media, and its use by public professionals in particular, found, “that organisations need, but most currently lack, a social media strategy – an overall framework of objectives, performance indicators and management processes to achieve these, including training, governance, monitoring and measurement.”

Strategy is more than the glue that holds tactics together; it provides direction and rationale for everything that we do in public relations. Without it, we meander aimlessly through a darkened business forest and can be successfully challenged and undermined at every step by one simple question: why?

Public relations was ignored by Qantas when it recently grounded its entire global fleet, because best practice PR would have seen it: evolve the way it did business by listening to and responding positively to its stakeholders; change the culture of the organisation so it behaved as a partner with its stakeholders; and inform stakeholders of key issues more speedily and effectively than they did.

Marketing should be the brains of the outfit, including a deep concern for customer relationships. Marketing, in an ideal scenario, should provide clear direction for any communications function, including PR.

The PR industry globally is undergoing one of its biggest changes since social media boomed across the web – it’s called content strategy and it’s rocketing through the traditional corridors of marketing and PR.

A mistake that public relations professionals and/or organisations (and PR researchers/academics?) make too often is ignoring employees when it comes to the application of two-way symmetrical communication. Manifestations of practical outcomes where public relations should be achieving outcomes for employees include them having more control over their work activity, varying tasks, their work being respected and work expectations being clear.

In an ‘information obesity’ world, what can public relations practitioners do or say to cut through the online corporate corpulence and still add ‘meat’ with nutritional value? Two answers are that we need to ‘re-calorie-brate’ our focus and activities and add internal journalist and search engine optimization (SEO) expert calisthenics into the working skill set.

Whilst the media is notoriously unreliable and is often more prone to spin, bias and subscribing to a pre-ordained agenda than public relations professionals, an Orica Chief Executive quote in a recent Australian Financial Review story, if true, revealed an approach that will do nothing for Orica’s stakeholder management or reputation-building efforts. It’s a quote that belittled local communities and the ‘man in the street’ (prioritising ‘big’ or ‘important’ stakeholders in its thinking).

All public relations has positioning inherent within it, but positioning itself is often thought of as being marketing-specific. Three main manifestations of how PR impacts on positioning, however, are narratives, language and, perhaps especially, the fluid negotiations that take place between an organisation and its stakeholders to create meaning: a ‘contested space’.

Marketing communication has the potential to be, at least partially, an application of effective issues management. This is essentially because marketing communication is a proactive, ‘friendly’ mode of communication and may not necessarily raise suspicious hackles from stakeholders.