Public relations at its very core is about words – sometimes written, sometimes spoken, sometimes with images, but always about words. And it is driven by strategy – essentially comprised of the who, what, when, where, why, how of communication and engagement – which is sometimes made to sound more complex than it actually is. A little secret – public relations strategy is over-rated.

Employer branding is something of a chic sub-section of contemporary branding, yet marketing has yet to get its head around how to leverage PR to achieve a best-possible outcome. Actually, marketing has yet to figure out how to leverage marketing to best effect! But it’s an exciting and incredibly worthwhile dimension of business communication and one where dialogue/conversation/change based on feedback really does have an opportunity to occur.

The value of employer branding is becoming clearer each day as the battle for workplace talent gets increasingly fierce. Australia, for instance, is going through a severe skill shortage crisis in key areas. Yet many organisations are lagging in their thinking and application of employer branding, including how public relations can be incorporated into this quite specific, and generally marketing-aligned, business communication activity.

Public relations is critically important to branding; perhaps even its most important element. This is because PR is the primary architect and facilitator of stakeholder engagement, its brief being to be concerned about both the organisation and its stakeholders – their knowledge, opinions and behaviour. And a brand is built, these social media-powered days especially, as a partnership between multiple entities.

The CEO is (or should be) the most prized communications asset at a company’s disposal. He or she drives corporate strategy and gives voice to performance and progress. The CEO establishes the building blocks of corporate culture and is often the public face of the company. They exemplify all that is good, bad, promising or disheartening about an organisation, so whether or not they are the spokesperson for an organisation in crisis is a question of fundamental importance for corporate communicators.

As the technical heart and soul of public relations communication is writing, what better PR topic to discuss than qualities that characterise great writing? I wonder, though, which of the qualities of great writing per se we can transfer to the context of professional PR, which is a business discipline after all?

Whilst there is plenty to like about the seeming only ‘official’ Standard for public relations in the world, it amazes me that such a small portion of it is actually related to putting together an actual communication strategy. Another big miss is that there seems close to nothing in it about changing either organisations’ or their stakeholders’ behaviour – surely the ultimate achievement of an effective stakeholder engagement process?

Power is an underlying theme of all public relations, yet it’s a topic rarely raised in its professional practice. In contemporary society organisations – especially corporates – hold more power than governments. Organisations hold the information, they hold the budget and they have the influence. What a hefty responsibility lies on their shoulders, then, to use all this power responsibly and not purely for their own benefit.

The emergence of social media, an entirely new tactical discipline, has presented an enormous challenge to the teaching and strategic and tactical practice of PR. It’s new, it has a wealth of platforms, it demands a lot of content produced in an online-friendly mode, its rate of change is eye-popping.

Public relations teeters on the precipice of hyperbole, but it is no spin to purport that the profession is at a critical juncture in its development. And it is with some irony that it is a communication tactic, not a strategic approach or a grand conceptual issue, that is the prime reason for this. You are familiar with it – the loved and sometimes loathed ‘social media’.