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?

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.

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’.