PR Studies

#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.

F off and get real

Here's a paradox. Just when some social media early adopters are starting to leave Facebook, the mainstream majority (approaching 500 million of them) seem to be more hooked on the world's favourite social network than ever.

I've discovered a problem with Facebook dependency amongst first year students. They were tasked with creating, publicising and evaluating a charity event - with varied results. Facebook groups were universally created - and were relied on to disastrous effect.

One group were confident of their event's success because scores of people had indicated their commitment on Facebook. Did they show up on the day? Did they heck. The team resorted to old-fashioned word of mouth to salvage their scheme. While Facebook's success is based on its recreation of the real world of friendship online, the process doesn't work so well in the other direction.

It's easy to get people to click but where's the commitment in this? Where's the engagement? Barring a few posters, the old-fashioned means of publicising an event were missing: personal invitations, stunts, media publicity, even celebrity endorsement.

It appears the real world is an increasingly confusing place for Generation F students. 

WAG the dog

Did you catch the interview on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live this morning with former footballer's girlfriend, Nicola Smith (available to listen again here)? Curiously, the role seemed to run in the family as she mentioned her even more celebrated sister Mandy, who notoriously dated Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones when still a very young teenager.

Nicola Smith spoke openly about the emptiness of a life that appears to have so much, and of her current work as corporate fundraiser for the Five Stars Scanner appeal. She described this as public relations work, and it's a version of public relations that appeals to many first year students.

It's public relations as personal networking; public relations as party and event organising; public relations that uses celebrity connections.

Last week in the lecture theatre I tried to distinguish two things that are often confused: the use of PR in support of major events, and the use of events to support PR campaigns. PR is not the same thing as event management (several universities follow Leeds Metropolitan in teaching both as entirely separate disciplines, in this case delivered in different faculties), though there is some overlap in the skills needed. I view event management as a left-side-of-brain activity involving painstaking attention to detail and public relations as a right-sided activity that involves creative 'ideas management'.

As student Megan Parks writes, the PR event organiser will find she's Not Quite JLo.

The connection between awareness raising and fundraising is a question for another lecture.