Education

Chapter 1 – The Public Relations profession: an introduction

1.1. Differences between Public Relations and advertising

1.2. Differences between Public Relations and journalism

1.3. What exactly do Public Relations professionals do?

1.4. Definition of Public Relations

1.5. Who can use Public Relations?

Chapter 1 Summary

Chapter 1 References

Synopsis

PR professionals are sometimes mistaken for journalists or advertising professionals, but each one engages in specific activities which makes them different.

Journalists and PR professionals have more in common. However, there must be a strictly professional relationship between the two and for ethical and credibility reasons, a marked separation between what each one does, so that they represent themselves positively in the current climate of public mistrust with regard to media.

PR professionals have many specific ways of helping organizations communicate sucessfully with all of their audiences.

One of the challenges of PR is to find a globally accepted definition so that the profession be understood completely in all sectors, identified as an executive-level post within organizations and recognized in communications as the proper way to directly reach diverse audiences.

Given the flexibility of PR, organizations of all shapes and sizes can get the most out of PR. However, it’s always advisable to use professionals to reach goals with greater efficacy.

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Thought I’d jump into the fray here. We’re going to create marcom memes. A meme is something repeated from one mind to another, or from one site (blog) to another. Think longtail. Think WOM - word of mouth.

Let’s discuss new tools that we might incorporate into an online campaign for a client. Creating interest in a topic, or site, may be accomplished using a number of tactics. What I’d like for us to discuss here is the use of digg-style sites and applications. 3spots has assembled a list of “over 300 Digg like applications! (exactly 349 now) without counting the +200 Social Bookmarks! (del.icio.us, RawSugar, Netvouz…)” types of sites.

If you are not familiar with digg, here is their description of what the site accomplishes.

Digg is all about user powered content. Every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community. Share, discover, bookmark, and promote the news that’s important to you!

An older such community is Slashdot. It was founded in 1997 and has become quite legendary. These sites - digg, slashdot, et.al - can literally make a site popular in a click of the mouse - or mice, as in thousands (or millions) of them. To have your site “dugg” or “slashdotted” can bring you wild exposure online. There are numerous true tales of stories being published on these sites and driving so much traffic to the site - the servers crash. People whose sites have been slashdotted or dugg, in this manner, are proud of it. They brag about it.

So, we are talking about a community organized around a topic of interest where discussions ensue and the stories are peer reviewed by the community’s members. Is this really that much different from you writing about someone and linking to them in your blogs or Facebook account? No, it is just done differently.

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