A Public Relations Podcast: Smoke Signal Episode 5 – Creating a tribe of change makers

Smoke Signal, A Public Relations Podcast

Why after 120 years don’t we have a universally accepted definition of public relations? According to UK pracademic (practitioner and academic) Andy Green it is because we have been asking the wrong question.

Andy is spearheading what has been called, The Dublin Conversation. As described in my earlier blog There’s something going on in the world of comms, this includes proposed definitions of PR, comms, advertising and brand and is a starting point for 100 conversations in 100 days.

After seven years of struggling to arrive at a definition for public relations that was fit for purpose, Andy finally realised that previous thinking was blinkered in trying to define PR in isolation rather than as part of a bigger universe.

In this podcast, Andy discusses a new theoretic PR canvas, based on the work by Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman who identified that five things govern all social interaction – being known, liked, trusted, front of mind and being talked about.

According to Andy, and as detailed in the Dublin Conversation, these conditions form the foundation stone of any communication campaign as you are invariably looking to do these five things.

On that canvas – which we are all operating whether you are in public relations, advertising, digital marketing or any ‘comms’ role – there are then four channels of interaction: paid, earned, social, owned (PESO).

In this world of ‘comms’, advertising and PR work in polarity of each other with advertising being born out of the need to be known and PR out of the need to be trusted. In other words, advertising leads with paid (PESO) and PR has earned at its core (ESOP).

At the heart of PR is earned trust and PR five prime activities:

1. Managing the activity of earning, growing and measuring trust
2. Champion of corporate listening to its wider environment
3. Advice and counsel on brand character
4. Building social capital
5. Managing narrative, storytelling, media relations, and content marketing or inbound PR

The reality of existing PR practice is that we tend to focus on the last point, so by broadening this out further creates a whole new extended platform of future PR practice

The good news, this validates existing global definitions of public relations but also gives us as practitioners greater clarity and focus on what we can/should deliver in practice and always with earned trust as the cornerstone of what we do.