Blog
10th April 2009 - What is real PR?
By Mumtaz Ahmad
Public Relations is an essential and important part of Corporate Strategy today to communicate with highly competitive and fast consumer society. An organisation or company which is unable to communicate with the outside world i.e. its clients, audience and partners have rare chances to compete with its competitors.
Public Relations helps an organisation by communicating, analysing, interpreting and anticipating public opinion, issues and attitudes that might impact for good or ill, the operations and plans of the organisation.
Internally Public Relations support its organisation in decision making, finalising action plans and fulfilling social responsibilities.
The public, private and voluntary sectors have achieved objectives by using public relations as a strategic tool in their management and communication. By the passage of time public relations has developed from “press agentry/publicity model” to “two way symmetric model”. At present the emergence of “social media” public relations and use of digital tools besides customary media is growing in popularity to get the message across.
Public Relations is usually misunderstood and is considered an activity of the promotion of the client’s objectives. Public Relations is a strategic marketing discipline, whereas promotion or publicity is a rather more straightforward activity that more readily accepts compromise.
I believe that Public relations professionals do more than draft press releases and build relationships with (key) media representatives. They are also familiar with the attitudes and concerns of consumers, employees, public interest groups, and the community in order to establish and maintain cooperative working relationships.
PR is a marketing activity but a business discipline in its self and should not be under valued in creating value for your organisation.