PR Studies

My PR books of the year

Here's a very personal pick of the top five newly-published books on public relations in 2011.

1. Measure What Matters by Katie Delahaye Paine (Wiley)

Two books were published by Wiley earlier this year on the important topic of measurement and evaluation. Philip Sheldrake's is in many ways the more ambitious (it also makes it onto my list), but Katie Paine's is a book for the intelligent practitioner and deserves to be widely known and used. For its appeal to the general reader, it takes first place on my list.

The author tells us: 'the notion that a PR person is someone who has to deal only with the press is just .. antiquated. A good PR person is focused on his or her relationships - be they local media, national bloggers, employees, or community organizers.' So how do you measure they quality of these key relationships? This book offers practical insights into measuring events and into measuring key relationships with influencers, employees, local communities etc.

2. Public Relations: A Managerial Perspective by Danny Moss and Barbara DeSanto (Sage).

I'd been looking forward to this book ever since last year's round-up, but in the event it only arrived late in the year and with a 2012 publication date.

It's worth the wait: this is the heir to Grunig and Hunt's widely-cited Managing Public Relations in that it addresses the same issues and concerns: Is public relations a distinctive activity? How does it contribute to organisational effectiveness? I expect to return frequently to the chapters written by Danny Moss in particular.

The collection is rather repetitive, however, as each author has been instructed to refer to the editors' 'C-MACIE model'. It also has a glaring omission: no chapter on measurement and evaluation (Professor Tom Watson should have been asked to contribute this). Since measurement and evaluation is one of my themes this year, this explains why Moss and DeSanto miss out on first place in my list.

3. The Public Relations Handbook (Fourth Edition) by Alison Theaker (Routledge)

Over a ten year period, Alison Theaker has produced four editions of this useful standard text and this new edition is a substantial reworking of what went before. It's now almost 500 pages, and contains new chapters by Philip Young, Liam FitzPatrick, Mark Phillimore, Heather Yaxley and Simon Wakeman among others. Johanna Fawkes has reworked her useful chapters on 'What is public relations?' and 'Public relations and communications' and they are now essential reading for any student of the subject.

I applaud the author and the publishers for having resisted the pressure to present this as a glossy, colourful text. They let the words and ideas do the communicating instead. Others will disagree with me, and I was sorry not to have found space here for one such colourful textbook: Averill Gordon's wide-ranging Public Relations, published by Oxford University Press.

4. PR Today: The Authoritative Guide to Public Relations by Trevor Morris and Simon Goldsworthy, Palgrave Macmillan.

If what has gone before seems a bit too earnest for you, then this could be the one book you should read. Though the authors teach public relations at university, this is an anti-academic text: 'The Unauthorised Guide to Public Relations' might be a better subtitle.

The themes will be familar to those who know the same authors' previous work, PR: A Persuasive Industry? which was among my favourites in 2008. This book extends beyond anlaysis of the industry into a section on PR planning and strategy and another section on PR practice.

One example will give a flavour of the authors' approach. They introduce their chapter on PR Ethics with: 'Some textbooks treat PR as though it is a branch of moral philosophy. Such an approach leaves most PR practitioners bemused and is of little practical use.' You will have to look elsewhere for Kant (and will probably find much more cant too).

5. The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age by Phlip Sheldrake (Wiley).

Though written by a practitioner, this is the most ambitious and challenging book of the year. Its analysis of the problems facing public relations is brilliant (the author is an engineer, a manager and a marketer, giving him a broad perspective). His reframing of public relations as the activity that manages influence is intriguing. He hopes to see people appointed to the post of Chief Influence Officer: 'Ideally, the Chief Influence Officer will have a varied background covering marketing, PR, customer service, HR, product development and operations.'

What is less successful is his attempt to turn the balanced scorecard concept into the Influence Scorecard. At this point, the book feels like a first draft, and already it's been superceded by further work by AMEC. Sheldrake's book is the most interesting of 2011 - but Katie Paine's is in my opinion the more useful, hence their relative positions on my list. 

Are we mavericks? (to the tune by The Killers)

In an intriguing aside as he presented findings from the PR2020 research, Dr Jon White described PR practitioners as 'marginal, and often mavericks'.

By marginal, he did not mean marginalised. He meant operating at the margins - a reflection of the 'boundary-spanning' role with one foot in and one foot outside the organisation described by James Grunig.

But mavericks? The popular image of PR practitioners is as smooth company men or women with finely honed networking skills. Students will find the concept that PR people can be mavericks hard to recognise.

Jon White described how the PR practitoner often operates alone, giving advice to senior executives that is often contrary to other professional advice they receive. Let's say your company is being prosecuted for polluting the environment. The PR advice may well be to plead guilty, accept one day's bad headlines and work hard to improve environmental protection. But a lawyer's advice would probably be to contest the charge in the courts because a 'win is a win'. (Any PR student should be able to see that you can win in court but lose in the court of public opinion.)

In this context, the advice from PR is out of the ordinary, and it takes a maverick to stick out their neck and defend this position.

(I wear the badge with pride. My first consultancy boss Mike Copland described me as a 'maverick' almost twenty years ago. It wasn't meant as a compliment, but I still take it as one.)

 

#commschat: the role of learning

I'm leading a #commschat Twitter discussion later on the theme of learning. What can academics learn from practitioners? What can practitioners learn from academics? How do we all keep up, let alone try to keep ahead?

Let's start by addressing two stereotypes.

Professor Ivor Y Tower

Professor Tower is intellectually impressive (a towering force?) and proud to be known on the international sociology circuit. Though he has made his name as a public relations scholar, he's disdainful of the practice because it's too compromised by money and by imbalanced power relationships. So he prefers to create perfect models of how public relations should be practised.

Though easy to mock, there is an argument in favour of pure academic research. If nothing else, academics should be free to 'think the unthinkable'. In this regard, they are similar to monks. Though their thoughts are impractical, it's better for us all that some people are dedicated to an otherworldly pursuit of perfection.

Alan Bluff-Practitioner

Alan has traded off his deputy editorship of the local newspaper and still has a good list of local clients for whom he provides media relations and crisis management services. He's recently become a fan of social media, but is proud to say that he's never had a day's training let alone pursued a qualification in public relations. Why would he need to when it's all just common sense? He has similar views of the CIPR and other professional bodies. And as for PR degrees, don't get him started. He left school at 16, began as a runner on the local newspaper and worked his way up from there.

Alan is a characteristic figure. He's not unintellectual, but rather anti-intellectual: one of life's perpetual outsiders. The challenge he faces is to update his twentieth-century business model, which he's trying to do by becoming a social media advocate. He certainly represents the past, but does he have a future?

Hopefully our discussion will go beyond stereotypes and reveal that curiosity and a desire to learn are a requirement of all successful PR practitioners.

My thoughts on references and recommendations

I'm often asked to write references - and now so many are on LinkedIn, recommendations too.

I'm willing to help, but if you're thinking of asking then here's how you can help yourself first. Here's what I need if I'm to write an informed and positive reference or recommendation:

• I need a clear recollection of you, and something memorable to write about. (This sounds like my memory problem, but there are several things you can do to help me.)
• I would hope to have had some connection with you since we worked together, or since I taught you. (I'm not asking for Christmas cards - some connection on social media should be sufficient. I love career updates and even maintain a blog to record your achievements.)

Smart students already view their lecturers as potential mentors, not just as teachers. But most don't yet realise that although we may only have limited power (of awarding grades), we may have surprising influence in terms of workplace recommendations and connections.

On the day we learn about record levels of youth unemployment, I would like more students and graduates to appreciate this mentor role and get over the pupil-teacher relationship.

Back to earth. Back to reality.

There's a feeling of 'back to school' this week. But that's not the reason for the jolt.

The reality check is the decision to fold the Media Guardian supplement (and Education and Society supplements too) into the main paper. Clearly, this is a commercially-driven decision taken because of the migration of job advertisements from print to online (and elsewhere). Decades ago, before the world of the web, each Monday's Media Guardian had page after page of job ads and was the place to find a whole range of graduate opportunities. Times change, and so does technology.

The second jolt relates to this first one. Here's a very lucid perspective on the issue of unpaid internships from an MSc Marketing student. The phrase that leaps out at me is this uncontentious-looking one: 'I’m 23 and aspire to a career in advertising'. Only connect. The Guardian loses its well-established Media supplement  because of the migration of classified ads online. Then ask some questions about the future of display ads and print media.

Yes, but surely broadcast ads have bounced back in the past year. Perhaps; but what's the wider picture? The future of advertising isn't in advertising. It's in creating ideas, delivering compelling communications, fostering communities and managing digital campaigns (as this student is already aware). In other words, the future of advertising looks very like public relations...

Hopefully smart graduates are alert to this. Hopefully their lecturers and textbook authors are too. But I very much doubt that university marketing and management teams are when they offer courses that appear to promise glittering careers in glamorous twentieth-century industries that evoke a Mad Men world.

Bump. Back to reality.

The future of public relations education

Guess which university is currently recruiting for a part-time public relations lecturer? Newcastle University (here's the ad).

This is worth noting because for past two decades undergraduate PR degree courses have only been offered in the UK by the 'new' universities (ie former polytechnics). Public relations was seen as too commercial and unsufficiently academic for the more traditional universities.

Now every HE institution is confronted by a more competitive landscape in which money follows students - and public relations ticks several boxes, notably for graduate employability. There's now a Centre for Corporate Reputation at Oxford University; I understand Leeds University has hired our former colleague Lee Edwards from Manchester Business School to boost its public relations and communications team; and Newcastle University is now offering public relations (within a media and cultural studies context).

This move towards academic respectability is good news for public relations as a discipline; it's good news for the professional bodies such as the CIPR; it's good news for students who have greater choice. It may be bad news however for some of the 'new' universities who may not be prepared for this more bracing competitive landscape.

To draw on an analogy, there are 92 professional football clubs across the four English divisions (Premier League, Championship etc). Despite promotion and relegation, the top teams remain remarkably stable from season to season. So it is with universities (though there are currently more than 92 of them).

Just as some football clubs go into administration (though remarkably few given the poor finances of most of them), some universities may not survive in the new landscape.

You don't have to buy a ticket to a professional club to watch football. Similarly, you don't have to go to university to study public relations. There have always been qualifications and training courses aimed at practitioners (and would-be practitioners).

Yet university remains valuable for those who can benefit from the rounded experience on offer and the useful half-way house between the structure of school and the challenges of the workplace. Public relations combines the intellectual rigour of a university degree with practical applicability and very high rates of employability.

I wasn't faced with tuition fees and was encouraged to 'follow my interests'. While this remains good advice, it also makes sense to consider the future before committing to student debt. In this context, I'm confident in what we're offering and am pleased that more universities are coming to share this view.

 

My review of my year

We encourage students to become 'reflective learners' - but in general undergraduates are poor at reflection. Some assume they're perfect and all assume that they're perfectible works-in-progress.

I know differently. I've never been perfect and with age my character flaws have grown ever more apparent. But my strengths are equally clear and as adults we become proficient at masking the one with the other.

So here's my reflection on my (academic) year, starting with what's gone well. For context, I returned to a full-time role in September after an inexplicable year of trying something different.

Positive

• My teaching hightlight was leading a large, lively and experimental postgraduate module (Public Relations and New Media). Not all welcomed the wilfully unstructured delivery - but it forced everyone to think and there was some very strong student work from a very diverse group.
• I have spent my adult life trying to turn a love of history into paid work in public relations. This year I turned a PR-for-PR project into a paper at a History of Public Relations conference.
• We're in a recession and graduates are sometimes derided for lacking workplace skills. Yet I'm still aware of more employers seeking good graduates than good graduates lacking suitable work. Nothing pleases me more than connecting the one with the other.
• My own research is limited (see below), but I'm delighted that a postgraduate who I supervised has had a paper accepted at the Euprera Congress 2011 (which we have both been involved in promoting).
• I've become something of a professional qualifications expert, and helped with delivery of the CIPR Diploma in another country (in addition to location-based and online delivery).
• I've edited online magazine Behind the Spin for over four years. We have a viable and valuable student magazine (with cash in the bank) - and I should now start looking to pass this on to a suitable home.
• I blog infrequently at PR Studies - yet it's still what I'm best known for. Perhaps this is a weakness (see below)?

Negative

• What have I written? I'm not a traditional academic focused on 'research outputs', but I should be capable of some original thought or interesting publication. So where is it? Are the blogs and tweets merely a displacement activity?
• I was fortunate to have gained a very good education in the humanities, during which quesions were always more interesting than answers. Yet I'm more often teaching people who expect a didactic and definitive approach to knowledge. (Knowing my weakness, I get an opportunity to work on it: I'm leading a new module for first year undergraduates - Principles of Public Relations, a chance to teach theory rather than practice.)
• I'm impatient with process and paperwork. I regret this where students are involved, but still feel there's a point to be made at an institutional level. I could be wrong...

There may be trouble ahead

We have a problem. There's a perfect storm approaching for students and universities. Oversupply of graduates is meeting a shrinking jobs market just when the cost of higher education is about to jump.

What's a young person to make of this? They should shop carefully and decide whether and when higher education is the right decision for them. Education is priceless and the opportunity university brings is valuable. But it's not about the degree certificate alone; it's about the journey. Where should you begin your journey (which city, which university)? What should you study?

Students will have to become more businesslike, starting with 'brand me'. Most are already holding down one or more paid jobs while studying, and should gain credit for their work outside the classroom where it adds to their independence and employability.

What's a university to do? We have to prove our value in a crowded and competitive market. Value starts with staff and buildings but extends to alumni and other networks. What have former graduates gone on to do? What do they say about the course? What do employers think of our graduates?

There's more to education than money and more to degrees than careers. But we can't ignore the cost-benefit analysis that young people and their parents will be conducting.

I anticipate a shift from 'full-time' education of 18 to 21 year olds towards different patterns of adult education, workplace learning and continuous professional development. None of this is new, but there will be renewed impetus from 2012. University buildings will need to be occupied for more than half a day for half the week and half the year.

I also anticipate a shift in emphasis from producing employable graduates to developing entrepreneurial young people. This is exciting - but very problematic for business schools. Would an entrepreneurial young person be better advised to invest £50,000 in their business or in their education (an approximate cost of tuition fees plus living expenses over a degree course)? It depends...

A suitable candidate for company graduate schemes is likely to be a conventional team player. The successful  entrepreneur is likely to be a stubborn, thick-skinned individualist. Which personality type suits the classroom better?

Then there's a cultural problem. Mass higher education has worked hard to reduce failure and so operates in a fail-safe culture. Innovation requires lots of experimentation - including much failure. Since failure is the necessary flip side of success, we will need to learn to embrace it. Risk will need to be taught as a good thing, not as a problem as now.

Trouble ahead? If I think as an entrepreneur, I see plenty of opportunity in education. In the meantime, we're celebrating another batch of graduates next week.

Photo by digitalkatie on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Why PR is going backwards

It was during the final session of the second annual International History of Public Relations Conference (#ihprc2011) when event organiser Professor Tom Watson said something explosive.

While cantering through his 'evolution of evaluation' talk, Watson said that public relations had begun as a holistic activity in the early twentieth century, but during the second half of the century had become a narrower publicity function driven by the rise of the consumer society. 

Watson did not have time to elaborate - nor did he need to given the audience he was addressing. But I'd like to offer my own interprepration in the hope that this will reach a few more people beyond those who attended.

I call this explosive because it reverses the widely-cited and therefore presumably broadly-accepted depiction of PR as having emerged from one-way publicity before developing into professional two-way communications.

Watson suggests we're in danger of going the other way. Other speakers at the conference showed that 'the more things change, the more they stay the same' and keynote speaker Ray Hiebert (starts after 13 mins) comprehensively demolished the certainties of the Grunigian world view (note that he had hired James Grunig to the University of Maryland) when he dismissed the idea of a 'general theory of public relations'.

The tension between PR-as-craft (exemplified by Ivy Lee) and PR-as-strategic-management (Edward Bernays) has been there from the early twentieth century.

Public relations examples can be found further back in history (one paper contrasted More's Utopia with Machiavelli's The Prince - which was, as I suggested, to compare a saint with the devil incarnate), though Gunther Bentele rejects as unhistorical the use of the term public relations to describe these early examples. He suggests they are rather examples of public communication.

History illuminates our understanding of the present, and international perspectives refresh our narrow world view. (The more positive perspective on PR going backwards is that we're revisiting and reinterpreting our roots.) I hope to be back for more next time round (and am already planning some archive research) - and look foward to meeting more people at the next conference. There's so much to be researched and written about:

• Corporate and institutional histories 
• Non-corporate uses of PR
• Country cases (and multi-country comparisons)
• Thematic perspectives (how about public relations and religion?)

Graduateness without a degree (21 by 21)

I spoke to a class of sixth formers about university this week. They, remember, will be the first group having to fund fees of up to £9,000 a year if they choose to go to university.

I told them that except for a few specific professions (like medicine), a degree is still not an absolute essential - but gaining 'graduateness' will be vital for their future success. (I told them I wanted them to go to university, but even more than this I wanted them to want to go.)

The challenge now is to articulate what I mean by graduateness. To kick this off, here's a list for discussion of '21 things to achieve by age 21' - suitable for graduates and non-graduates alike. What would you add or change?

21 by 21

21 things to have achieved by age 21