This past Monday morning I had the opportunity to shape young minds and pump up my ego as I was interviewed by Victory Davi, producer and host of School Court TV , for a graduate PR project.
The details of this interview serve as the inspiration for today’s blog entry.
First, there was no video camera. Victory set up her laptop computer with its built-in video software that allowed her to film us together as we chatted. Victory had emailed me that she wanted to conduct the interview as part of her “capstone project as a graduate student of Kent State University’s online Master’s Public Relations program…considering that you teach PR at a local prestigious university, I thought you would be perfect to chat with/interview!”
Wow…things sure have changed.
As I noted in the interview, when I started out in PR back in the Pleistocene era, there was no internet (or at least none accessible to the general public), no pencil-thin laptops, no email (we faxed everything…I think you can find a fax machine in the Smithsonian). I was using a word processor and had to actually type in the HTML code if I wanted words or phrases to be underlined or in italic. No, I'm not kidding.
This meant there were no young people earning their graduate degrees "online." There was no "online." There were no computers that you could carry under your arm that could basically serve the function of video camera and TV station. There was no social media or search engines through which a student could find me and request an interview.
Bottomline? There are A LOT more ways to reach out and touch someone nowadays…and for those of you who remember that old phone commercial tagline, you know first hand what I’m talking about.
But no matter what “new-fangled” techno-thingees the boys (and girls) in Silicon Valley develop, some things are never going to change when it comes to public relations…which brings us to the actual interview with Ms. Davi.
Ms. Davi’s project, I learned, is focusing on theorist James Grunig’s view that PR practitioners must move away from being seen as “apologists or promoters,” and more toward “a symmetrical model…where communication, honesty and trust are mutual…(PR) practitioners must be willing to recreate their entire sense of being…Grunig holds that PR must reinstitutionalize, from being buffering agents to being bridging agents that facilitate effective communication.”
In other words, PR people need to be more about building relationships for the benefit of both the client and society as a whole.
Not a bad way to define PR…The management function by which relationships are formed for the mutual benefit of the client and target audiences.
In her email to me, Ms. Diva referenced “the revolution of social media, including company websites, e-newsletters, Youtube, and various social media websites, like Facebook, Blogspot, and Flicker.” These are all well and good, but as I noted in my interview with her, these things, and their more “old fashioned” equivalents (i.e. the press release, the pitch call, the news conference) are all just tools in the PR arsenal. They are tactics. The key to success in PR is to first think STRATEGICALLY.
Does the PR guy (or gal) have a seat at the Executive’s table? Is there a space for him/her in the C-Suite? So long as the CEO equates PR with Press Release, that PR person faces an uphill battle.
All the new technologies, the I-Pads and laptops and TV-stations-in-a-brief-case are irrelevant if the PR person is left in the cold.
It still comes down to relationships…the relationship between the PR person and the top executives of the company he/she represents…the relationship between PR practitioner and the individual reporters, producers, freelancers, bloggers, etc., that comprise the media which follow his/her company/industry…the relationships the PR person helps build between the client and like-minded organizations, companies, civic groups, politicians, business and opinion leaders, etc., that are for everyone’s mutual benefit.
Public relations. It’s about relationships. Go figure.
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