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.”

The glut of information that all of us in western (and many other) societies encounter is making this information on the way to being close to meaningless, with meaning for people have most resonance through behaviour and tangible outcomes, such as products and services. An outcome of this is that unless PR practitioners focus more on outcomes of communication, not communication processes themselves, then we are on the way to making ourselves redundant.

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.