Geoff’s Gobbledegook

G’day all, PR and Communications practitioners seem to spend an inordinate amount of time debating what they should be called and what others should call them. Maybe after a century of calling PR Public Relations, we should be a little more innovative, flexible and accurate.

When the team at RMIT University were asked to redesign the undergraduate PR degree, one of the first tasks was to define the term for the degree (our first task was to define the values of the degree, but that’s another story).

The definition we came up with was “creating, maintaining and improving relationships between an organisation and the people they deal with”.

Did you notice that there were no mentions of publics, or stakeholders, or other organisations? After much discussion, we realised an essential truth, which is that all of these concepts are made up of people.

For us, it was essential for a number of reasons that we moved beyond the notion of publics and emphasised the importance of people. Mass communication only means that the same communication goes to lots of people at the same time and in the same way. But that communication isn’t complete until an individual chooses to make it so by listening to it, absorbing it and acting upon it. The end result is the important aspect of our work, and that end result is a relationship in some form with people, whatever their role is and whatever the dealings between them and the organisation.

We thought about including the term reputation in the definition. However we eventually decided for the purposes of an undergraduate degree, that we could leave it out. Why? Relationships are formed by people having shared values, trust and communications. The concepts of shared values and trust are the basis of reputation, communications the tool used to allow people to identify those attributes. Again, the end result was relationships.

On the other hand, we wanted to make it clear that we weren’t about to teach a group of family counsellors. So we elected to teach that this was a professional undertaking for organisations, even though one could argue that promotion of personal brands falls within the realms of PR and Communications.

Over the last couple of decades, our profession has been developing very quickly, and as part of that, we have recognised the prime importance of people and relationships in what we can achieve. This movement has been accelerated through work on leadership, organisational structures, the role of storytelling, social media, management philosophies, measurement and other fields.

The evidence is everywhere. Here are just a few examples:
Seth Godin - Seth’s Blog
Geoff Kelly - Kelly Strategic Influence
Steve Denning - Radical Management
David Park - Reputation Renegades
Michael Margolis - Get Storied
Anita Roddick - Business as Unusual

The work of these people and many others (I’d love you to leave more examples in your comments) all demonstrate clearly that the path to business success is through people, and communicators can guide organisations along this path.

So instead of debating whether we are Public Relations practitioners or Business Communicators or spin doctors or flacks or whatever, maybe we should be redefining our whole profession. Shortly before his death, Edward Bernays argued passionately that we should keep using the term Public Relations rather than Communicators because our job was about relationships with publics, not about the communications which are the tools of our trade. But we no longer seem to be working with “publics” as we have used terms such as audiences, market segments, stakeholders et al. But bottom line is that it all comes back to people.

So what do you think about abandoning all of the terms used about and by us, and starting from scratch? Perhaps People Relations could be the way to go, or maybe Professional Relationships to highlight the value and ethical nature of what we do. At least that way we can keep all the names and logos that use PR in them!

Cheers, geoff