A Little PR for PR: A Few Things We Should All Know About Public Relations
A recent Forbes Council article I chanced upon stated that the Public Relations industry hasn’t done good PR for PR. Yes, the pungency of the comment hits hard but anyone with the slightest interest or knowledge in PR will have a hard time denying the statement. In fact, the easiest way to confirm this assertion is to ask some PR people what they do and wait for the feedback. You would discover that only a few people can articulate, in precise terms, the unique service the profession provides. A significant number of them will take circuitous paths that lead to no clear destinations of understanding. As far back as the 1970s, Rex Harlow identified more than 400 variations of PR definitions - that's almost half a century ago . Since then, more definitions have been introduced, interrogated and, in some instances, rejected. This impression of incongruities divides scholarly opinions. Watson and Noble (2014) submit that while ‘some commentators see the surfeit of definitions as a ...