What PR Companies Are Doing Wrong

Five years ago it looked as though PR was falling to its knees, ready for an upstart social media industry to administer the coup de grâce.

Right now the American PR industry is in the midst of a redefinition. And it's making a big mistake. Here's Part 1 and 2 of why.

Part 1. The New PR

The rise of social communications, in theory, left little room for spin or message control, two staples of PR. The industry was exposed, only sometimes unfairly, as a mechanism for controlling broadcast-era corporate messages.

Ad agencies too were caught off guard by social.

But PR companies and ad agencies responded by hiring digital specialists and/or integrating small social media start-ups. A kind of hybrid social PR began to grow.

It was PR with a Facebook account chasing advertising agencies who do social creative.

And lately it became something else again. PR companies began getting involved in the intricate internal challenge of making companies more social.

Here, a completely new role is emerging, one that is open-ended and still in need of definition. If, like at Dell 3,000 staffers can talk online on your behalf, where does that leave the PR profession? That's a fascinating problem to have.

It puts PR in creativity mode, trying to define an agency role in a hyper-connected world where some form of intimacy between customers and company is beginning to scale. And one where the nature of employee communications and empowerment is also radically changing.

Fast Company's list of the 50 most innovative companies includes Red Bull Media, a true example of a transformational approach to corporate communications.

Now we step back to the future.

Part 2. The Old Confused PR

In January 2012 the PR Society of America (PRSA) asked for suggestions for a new definition of PR, and as of yesterday the profession began voting on them.

The candidates in my view are dire and damaging:

#1. Public relations is the management function of researching, engaging, communicating, and collaborating with publics  to build mutually beneficial relationships.

#2. Public relations is a strategic communication process that develops and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics.

#3. Public relations is the strategic process of engagement between organizations and publics to achieve mutual understanding and realize goals.

The PRSA is going to announce the results on 27th Feb, after a two week voting period to round off the crowdsourcing.

Does the PRSA really believe it can voice the role of PR as part of a two-way pact between customer and supplier? I doubt it can work.

Many PR companies still assume that they are there to support the corporate broadcasting effort. They see  a slightly wider range of media channels into which they can pump information for their clients.

I know this from experience and as someone who values PR folks who make contact with stories.

The Core of My Disbelief

At its core PR practice has barely changed in the era of social. At its core!

It is still the job of a PR person to find a writer who will interview a client or write about the client or product, and to control that process as much as possible by, for example, sitting in on interviews, seeking out writers who will be favourable, offering exclusives, and attempting to frame the story for the writer. End of story.

Some PR companies have gone as far as creating leverage for themselves in social channels but even so they seek the legitimation that comes with mainstream publishing. That simply has not changed.

Also from experience I cannot believe for one minute that PR firms believe that they are creating mutually beneficial relationships between organizations and their publics. Sounds good, but that's not what PR is about or what it does.

What is the mutually beneficial relationship that my mobile phone's company is maintaining between me and them, for example? I am skimmed for hundreds of dollars if I go roaming around Europe and make use of my phone, a perfectly natural use for a phone when traveling.

Or what relationship are they maintaining between me and Microsoft whose software seems to need updating on a monthly basis, but why? I have no idea. I have little idea what Microsoft does to my laptop once a month and I see no effort to create mutually beneficial understanding of it.

Nor do I believe that PR agencies aim to extend this mutuality to realizing strategic goals - not my goals anyway, and I am part of this mutuality. My goals in most of my interactions with companies is to help them change their values.

A Better Definition

If this is what PR companies are trying to do then please wrap it into this modern definition.

How about: PR is about trying to help companies adapt to new realities?

If it is helping companies to adapt to social business, let's have that. The role of PR is to interact with clients to forge a new understanding of their role?

If that is what PR is now about, and you can easily argue it is, then let's have it written down.

Don't tell me it's about "mutually beneficial" relationships, because that sounds like spin. Andy why leave out the things PR companies are doing right?

I think these three definitions will mire PR deep in its historical role of trying hard to broadcast the good news that its clients want to push and mitigate the bad that inevitably escapes.

I am puzzled why seven years into the social media revolution and as business wrestles with a different value system, this part of the PR industry fails to get the message.

Follow me on Twitter @haydn1701

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