Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

We recently took to all of our channels to gauge how you view the practice of public relations. In our article What Is PR? A Look Back, To Look Forward, we asked you to fill in the blank: “PR is now ____. ” and share how public relations has changed since we originally released our popular PR Is infographic in 2012.

We received close to 100 responses from around the world and across the industry — corporate communicators, agencies, newcomers, industry veterans, and everyone in between weighed in. We even received a video.

When our senior creative manager Jamie Heckler compared your replies to 2012’s infographic, we observed the following trends....

Monday’s New York Times ran an article by Stuart Elliott on the rebranding of our competitor, Fleishman-Hillard (FH)....

...The world is moving in our direction. We are not selling to an audience; we are trying to build relationships across the community of stakeholders. The horizontal, peer-to-peer, conversation is supplanting the top-down, controlled messaging that is the essence of advertising. The consumer is now also an employee, a shareholder, a member of an NGO, a community activist and a passionate user of products willing to advise on design.

PR is more than a set of tactics or tools. It’s a mindset; the ideas that come from PR people are different than those that come from advertising people. Both are engaged in storytelling, but the PR idea stimulates discussion and has the potential to play out over years. A PR idea has to start with relevancy and newsworthiness....