The Seventh Week.

Chapter 7: How do Public Relations fit in to the organization?

In this chapter, I learnt that it is important to practice the public relations method of being socially responsible all the time. For example, while you save electricity at home, you do not seem to do so at work. How do you foster this good habit at work, how do you solve this problem?

“The model theory for the practice of PR is all who attempt to solve problems, make recommendations and predict the future, need theories, models, and as a starting point, concepts.” (Skyttner, 2001)

I found that one of the methods practitioners used is by a constant monitoring one foot in the organization, and one outside – media, audience, publics. It is through this method that providing information to the environment about the media comes back and brings information about the environment back to the organizational decision makers. For example, if we were to release a new idea of product from an IT store, we could come back with information about whether people were responding well to the product, and that would lead to decisions on whether the market was ready for this new product.

I learnt that an excellent PR program must operate at organization, department, and program levels. The PR program must know to cater to all the different culture and needs at the different departments.

I remember Ms Tanya talking to us about the organizations today and how they want their PR practitioners to be jack-of-all-trades. That is why the Communication department and the Marketing department are often associated with one another. But I found a different view to that statement.

“For the most part, public relations academics believe that the public relations dept should be separate from the marketing function.” (Grunig, 1992)

“It should coordinate all forms of communication to maximize organizational goals. Nowadays, the public relations marketing mix is becoming more common but the specific contributions of public relations must still be recognized and supported.” (van Riel, 2007)

This goes to show that while organizations believe that a PR practitioner should be capable of a lot of tasks and responsibilities, the role of the PR professional must still be recognized and appreciated.