Day 14- half way there almost!!

Today we welcome our second guest blogger. Fiona Poustie runs Missing Sock PR. I will leave her to tell you more.

PR Does Not Stand For Press Release

Q: What does the wife of a public relations expert do when she has insomnia?
A: She rolls over and says, ‘Tell me again, darling, just what it is you do for a living.’

You are exposed to the efforts of public relations practitioners every day, in various media – from TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, Facebook, Twitter…. I could go on but I’ve been invited to be a guest blogger for day 14 and not for 14 days.

It’s a growing profession but there are many myths and misconceptions about PR that are just wrong.

Here are just a couple I come across regularly.

You work in PR. That stands for press release, right? Implying all you do is issue stories to the press. Wrong! Part of the job is issuing information to the media, and building cooperative relationships, but that is only part of it.

Public relations is just propaganda. Wrong! Propaganda is about manipulating people, getting people to think or act in a way that is based on emotion, not intellect, to do something that is not in their best interest. Public relations, on the other hand, is a management tool used to create goodwill between an organisation and its public (both internal and external). Various communication instruments are adopted to further this interest. Media relations, stakeholder relations, employee engagement and crisis management to name a few, are part of public relations.

Public relations people drink copious amounts of coffee. Ah…ok, you’ve got me there.

So just what is public relations?

Socrates wrote 2,500 years ago:

“The way to gain a good reputation is to endeavour to be what you desire to appear”.
In other words, it’s about what you do as well as what you say.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations appear to agree, giving its definition of Public Relations as:

Public relations is about reputation - the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.
Public relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.

And on that note, I’m off. I have a reputation to uphold and the kettle’s just boiled.

Fiona can be contacted at www.missingsockpr.co.uk