As a PR practitioner-turned academic, I am often asked how I keep my students interested in the material. The one sure-fire recipe is to bring a theory to life by giving a real-life personal example: Been there, done that, have the scars (or the trophies) to prove it, so let me tell you about the time that I did it….

Try substituting public relations for science fiction in this comment from ground breaking sci-fi author Samuel Delany: “Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be – a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they, and all of us – have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”

There are great benefits for organisations in building up deposits in the stakeholder ‘relationship bank account’, with one of the most important being to mitigate how a crisis impacts on reputation and brand. It’s a straightforward equation: simply proactively communicate and – this being the really interesting aspect – ensure the organisation (operationally and culturally) listens, learns, interacts and evolves.

Those that advocate the view that PR and advertising will be subsumed into a hybrid communication discipline and those who believe the discipline should mint itself a ‘new’ name, like ‘communication professionals’, are in grave danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What about the most basic tenet of PR, that which constitutes it being a discipline that can help organisations change so they better meet society’s expectations?

The adage of what goes around comes around rings truer than ever when applied to business referrals and social media. If you give, you get, is the way I look at it. Biblical, in some ways. In social media terms, the parlance is reciprocity and its strategic manifestation is thought leadership provision resulting in meaningful [...]

When attending networking events as an organization’s PR representative, many of the same norms of behaviour apply as in the strategic steering of a viable and healthy social media presence. A goal should be to leave each event and encounter confident that an accurate and authentic profile was presented, organizationally and personally, with the intention [...]

Being dispassionate in public relations could be the biggest mistake we ever make. Whilst the mainstream perspective may be that it is best to stay hard-headed (and hard-hearted) when operating in the business environment, PR is different in that so much of it is constituted by the forming, cultivating and leveraging of relationships, many of them human rather than entity-centred.

The rise of social media has created untold new tools and channels for all public relations practitioners. But in the field of issue management it is having a dramatic impact not just on the day-to-day practice of the discipline, but is changing forever an organisation’s stakeholder relationships and the expectations of its stakeholders.

Age delivers experience, one of the strongest influences on competency and excellence that exists, with PR being no exception. Whether it involves any form of writing, managing a crisis, developing strategy, integrating public relations into broader business and marketing activity, managing teams and working with colleagues, or simply having developed a humility that comes from the realisation that everyone makes mistakes – it’s what you learn from them and how you deal with them that matters most – age=maturity=PR/business ROI.

Public relations is a multi-faceted business discipline. In this post in-house, agency, industry association and academic PR professionals, as well as a marketer and a market researcher, all highly reputable and respected, share their definitions of PR. Facets include: two-way and not necessarily intermediated communication; increasing brand awareness; helping organisations articulate compelling stories; engaging target audiences; creating, renewing and improving relationships; delivering positive publicity; encouraging social change and community mobilisation.