By Linda Forrest
Ah, the end of the year. A time when PR practitioners far and wide dust off their crystal balls and prognosticate about what lies ahead in our industry for the year ahead.
My Twitterstream is positively jam-packed with predictions for public relations in 2012. The aim of this post is to provide a quick round up of the top trends PR practitioners see emerging and what they feel the impetus is for said trends. I trust you’ll forgive me that the brunt of the prose comes from elsewhere; my mind is filled to the brim with if not dancing sugarplums, at least my distressingly long “still-to-do” list.
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By Linda Forrest
In my post on the subject of the PRSA initiative to create a new definition for PR, I likened the task to that of herding cats – ultimately futile.
But others closer to home have engaged in this exercise in the past, ending up with what they consider to be a successful outcome. Back in 2007, driven by the Canadian national PR association, the Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS), a committee of PR experts endeavoured to develop a new north-of-the-49th-parallel definition. This was a collaborative research project that resulted in the adoption of their proposed definition by the CPRS:
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By Linda Forrest
The PR industry has been aflutter with activity in response to the recent efforts of the Public Relations Society of America to crowd source a new definition for PR.
Rather than leave it open ended, PRSA has gone with a fill-in-the-blank (in this case, parentheses) approach:
Public relations (does what) with/for (whom) to (with/for) for (what purpose).
If you wish to weigh in, submissions will be accepted at the above link until the end of the week, with a new definition targeted for publication before the end of the year.
It has indeed been quite some time since the term has been defined, nearly 20 years, during which time the means by which public relations is conducted has evolved markedly from dead trees to digital zeros and ones, shifting from a one-way conversation to a multi-stakeholder conversation.
From the PRSA website:
The PRSA 1982 National Assembly formally adopted a definition of public relations, which remains widely accepted and used today:
“Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.”
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from April, 2010. We welcome your feedback.
By Linda Forrest
I had a long and interesting chat with the publisher of a specialized trade publication this morning, the results of which turned my thoughts to the importance of getting a return on investment in PR. I mean this in two ways: first, getting the most value for your dollars spent with a PR practitioner or agency and second, getting the most eyeballs on your coverage.
With regards to the first, this was the particular scenario that I was discussing with the aforementioned publisher. Having pitched a series of contributed articles by email, I was calling to follow up and discuss the level of interest in my proposition. The publisher, a 30-plus-year veteran of the Canadian publishing world, talked about shrinking editorial space and how he’s unable to commit to publishing an article, however appropriate for his readership. With shrinking ad budgets, increasing competition from exclusively online publications and other factors, it’s not feasible for him to accept and commit, based on an abstract, to publishing something that would take up precious room on his pages. Rather, he’s suggested that we develop an article purely on spec, and that once submitted, he’ll review it and if he’s got the room and inclination, he’ll publish it.
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By Linda Forrest
In my last post, I wrote about how PR practitioners annoy journalists. It’s ironic that many of the issues come down to a failure to implement the fundamentals of successful communication. So, in an effort to clear up exactly what it is that reporters want from PR people, this post aims to list the traits of a good PR practitioner, with a healthy dose of anecdotes from PR agency executives and reporters sounding off on what they think are essential attributes. While some posts I came across while researching this post were downright effusive about how wonderful PR people are, others contained language that might be deemed unfit for work.
The reporter’s view
I’ll start off by referring back to the very informative blog post by Matt Hartley, the editor of the Financial Post’s Tech Desk, wherein he demonstrated a learned understanding of the symbiotic nature of the relationship between reporters and PR professionals:
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