Strategic planning is at the heart of all public relations. Launching a PR campaign without a strategic plan is like embarking on a trip without a map or GPS. In today’s business environment, with limited resources and ramped up accountability, it’s not enough to head off in a general, vague direction. A GPS-like a strategic plan requires you to input your destination. It keeps you on track.

The ability to think and act strategically is the key that enables professionals to advance from tactical PR practitioners to sought-after strategic planners. Today, effective communicators not only need to know what to do and why, they also need to know how to evaluate the effectiveness of the chosen approach.

It’s such an exciting time for public relations. The landscape of the profession is rapidly changing and new methods and tactics are emerging. It is shedding its past approach from disseminating information to a focus on promoting engagement, identifying influencers and developing brand advocates. But the basic principles for excellence in effective PR still apply: strategy, creativity, integrity and follow through.

Continue reading " Strategic Public Relations Planning — Positioning for Success "

The guy who hired me to do PR for AT&T was a former newspaper editor. Like his peers at most companies, he only hired ex-journalists. I had a degree in broadcasting and, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was kind of an experiment foisted on him by people higher up the food chain. For the next couple of decades, nearly all the new hires had some broadcasting background. Not because I had been such a roaring success, but because everyone was convinced that most people were getting their news from television.

Then the Internet changed everything. The new hires might not know how to spell, much less how to write, but they knew HTML and Java. Eventually, I was doing whatever hiring we could afford and I came to the conclusion that writing skills were the cost of entry and a leading indicator of basic intelligence. Beyond that, what technical skills people had was less important than their character. That’s even truer today.

Higher immigration rates are changing the demography of developed countries and globalization is spurring the growth of new middle classes in emerging markets. While PR used to be all about publicity and advocacy, its highest role today is helping companies make business decisions in a sound context. In philosophical terms, PR today is less about rhetoric and politics than about ethics. Less about explaining and winning permission for proposed actions than helping choose and shape the actions themselves, based on a clear understanding of the people they affect.

Now, to many people, “ethical public relations” sounds like an oxymoron along the lines of “jumbo shrimp.” But if the experiences of some of our leading institutions — secular and religious — have taught us anything in the last few years, it’s that large organizations can easily lose any meaningful connection with the ethical principles they espouse. Companies are just as vulnerable.

Continue reading " The Missing PR Skill "

Coming to Conference is about extending one’s excellence in practice. We hear sea stories from our colleagues about what worked, what didn’t and we get a chance to learn about the latest trends in public relations.

But some of those little gems of lessons we learned happened a long, long time ago on a college campus in a land far, far away. Some of the most important lessons of practice we learned came from our PR professors.

In honor of Besty Plank, the first female PRSA president and a champion of education efforts, we asked attendees the recount the best lesson they learned from their PR professors.

Continue reading " What Was the Best Lesson You Learned from Your Professor? "