PUBLIC RELATIONS – WHY DO SO FEW UNDERSTAND IT?
Why is it that so few people, including professionals, and business owners understand media relations and the essence of how the media works? Conceptually, it’s really not that hard, but every day I’m amazed by the basic questions I receive from smart business people. Just today, someone with a very successful business asked me how much we pay news anchors to place clients on the air. (Any PR or Marketing 101 class we tell you in this country, one can’t pay news anchors to book guests. At least not in the PR business.)
Public relations, particularily media relations, is a fairly easy to understand business: find a story angle, pitch it to the media and open the paper (or turn on the TV) and there’s your story. Yet one of the reasons PR budgets are so low in comparison to advertising budgets is that so few understand PR. If they did, you’d see many more businesses spending much more on all aspects of public relations in general.
Ronn Torossian
5WPR
January 26th, 2009 at 3:34 pm
I think the reason so few people don’t understand PR is because many in the industry have been forced to use “buzz words” in order to make themselves come across as mystic carriers of knowledge to the folks who might hire them.
After all, someone who is straightforward obviously doesn’t know as much as someone who hides behind jargon.
It’s interesting you have this as a topic because I am changing that paradigm via a new YouTube series, PR Puppet Theatre, where I teach puppets about PR.
It is my belief that using humor and an “out of the box” approach will go a long way towards helping people solve your problem. It is my hope that a smart savvy PR exec will see the value of employing a person such as myself who comes up with innovative, entertaining solutions to problems like the one you’re proposing.
I seem to be on to something: CNBC calls the site “must-see entertainment/ education for any PR flack.”