Are you living in a PR box?
Friday, August 20th, 2010
Many, many years ago, long before I got into PR, I recall reading a David Bowie interview. Then a rising star of the glam rock era, Bowie said something like “Once you label anything, it’s dead”.
Periodically, the PR community on Twitter gets all twisted up trying to define PR. Where does public relations end and advertising begin? Is social media something that belongs under the heading of PR? What is the difference between media relations and PR?
Text books and university classes all try to get to grips with these kinds of slippery questions.
I’ve never counted how many non-practitioners have talked to me about PR over the past 20 years but it’s a lot, and I think very few would define PR the same way that we do.
The truth is that, in the PR business, it doesn’t matter what you call what you do. What matters is understanding the client’s needs and meeting them, and (it sounds a bit arrogant) educating them to the wider benefits of PR beyond what may understandably be narrow or uninformed definitions. The way the PR industry has embraced social media shows PR people don’t just think out of the box, they jump out of it. So let’s not worry about labelling, defining and compartmentalising what PR is or limiting ourselves to what we can or cannot do as PR people.
In PR and in business, once you accept a label and get stuck in a box, as Bowie said, you’re dead.
