Richard Edelman makes the right call in response to internal suggestions that Edelman redefine itself as a communications agency rather than a public relations firm.
I’ve made the case many times, but I’ll do so again. Communication as an important part of public relations, but viewing PR people as mere communicators narrows our focus and significantly reduces the value we can add to clients.
Consider a scenario: your company has been responsible for spewing toxic sludge into a pristine stretch of river, destroying wildlife and polluting the water supply. Your CEO comes to you for advice.
I know what the public relations advice in this scenario should be: stop spewing toxic sludge. What’s the communications advice? Lie? Craft a compelling narrative to convince people that toxic sludge is good for them?
The fact is that there’s no “communications” solution to this problem. It’s a problem that requires a change in behavior. Managing the relationship between an organization and its publics—public relations—requires good behavior and good communication, and if we define ourselves exclusively by the latter we are doing a disservice to ourselves, our profession and our clients.
Hi Paul,
I understand where you’re coming from but I have to disagree about the term ‘communications’ narrowing the remit of the PR professional. If anything it widens it. Unfortunately we live in a world where PR has become synonymous with press relations and it will take a committed enough on the profession as a whole to change this.
In my opinion, the ability to communicate is exactly what defines a good PR person from a bad one (or from any other profession for that matter).
Using your analogy, a CEO wouldn’t be asking for the advice of a PR unless he/she wanted to get some communications advice. By that rationale, he/she would get the same answer from the every single department. The PR’s role here to clearly and truly explain to its stakeholders what went wrong and what is being done to rectify it.
In years gone by, resorting to lying or spinning might be have been the case but in the age where everyone is in effect a publisher an organisation can’t get away with that anymore. It’s just about communicating the facts in a timely and honest fashion.
If you are in the business of building a relationship with the public (ie, public relations), you simply can’t do it through words alone — you have to align your behavior with those words. The failure you point to (\lying or spinning\) is precisely a result of the idea that communication alone could get you out of a problem or dispel a challenge. And in an age of radical transparency, it’s more important than ever for organizations to understand that to connect with their stakeholders they need to change the ways they act.
I also feel I have to push back on the suggestion that \the ability to communicate is exactly what defines a good PR person from a bad one.\
Most PR people are pretty good communicators. The reason most organizations don’t have good public relations is not because their PR people don’t know how to communicate. It’s because communication is either all they know or all they are allowed to do.
Truly great public relations people are defined more by their ability to analyze and understand public sentiment; to recognize and adapt to chaning public expectations; to glean insights and develop strategies based on that understanding and that recognition: and by the courage to tell their clients or CEOs that they need to change the way their organizations behave — at the values and culture and strategy level — if they want to develop good relationships.
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Paul
Interesting debate on the terms PR v. communications….to me the question isn’t about the terminology, but our role in the decision mkaing and strategy setting. You don’t need to be a great PR person or communications person to tell that client to stop spewing sludge (vs. lie, spin, deny, etc). The place where we earn our keep is when we answer the question about what to do once you’ve stopped spewing sludge to regain the trust of your stakeholders…and how to communicate about it in a way that is relevant and restorative. Do the right things first. Then say the right things, the right way, at the right time, to the right stakeholders.
Communications? PR? Issues Management? Or all of the above?
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