Whilst I strongly believe that marketing plays a central role in business and that PR can and must support the brand, I also believe that PR and marketing must remain two distinct responsibility centers: PR must not answer to marketing, period. They must work closely together – marketing centered on the brand, PR centered on the relationships. Or, put another way, marketing centered on the consumer and PR centered on the citizen.

It’s hideous to countenance the possibility that corporate social responsibility has been a passing fashion for public relations, for its diminishing profile in business communication has struck me as both mystifying and disappointing. A new study underlining the impact that CSR has on perceptions of the reliability of a company’s products will hopefully contribute to getting the discipline back on PR’s agenda.

In responding to industry calls for more emphasis on practical skills rather than academic education which I discussed in a previous post, the public relations industry and professional bodies need to be careful that there is not an over-emphasis on practical vocational skills and too little emphasis on producing graduates who know how to think ‘outside the square’, how to question, how to challenge current practices and envision the future, and how to participate in the wider debates and discussions of society.

There is a clear choice in how the team that runs the reputational dimension a crisis is comprised: communication and reputation management can be run either as a stand-alone process or integrated into a team that addresses the crisis’s logistics/operations side making it, therefore, a more holistic approach.

There is widespread if not universal agreement that education and training are important to advancing a field and helping it gain legitimacy and recognition as a profession. But what is not agreed, and often controversial, is the balance between theory and practical skills. Public relations is no different, with theory often being thought of as esoteric, remote from practice and, even, dangerous.

There’s a never-ending debate about who’s the leader – PR or marketing – when it comes to getting an organisation on the map. Ford Kanzler argues that marketing is the ‘brains’ of the outfit’. That it provides the direction for all communication. PR is the helpmeet providing the support. If there was no marketing, there would be no organisation. Ford takes this further in saying an organisation’s “essential reason for being is marketing.”

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.”

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.

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.