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.

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 [...]