What's In a Name?

Now that we’re all back from the holidays and I’ve updated my friends and relatives at various parties on my current happenings, I noticed something a little funny. A number of people don’t understand what I mean when I say I work in public relations. What’s worse is I have a difficult time fully explaining what I do without launching into a drawn-out explanation.

I tell them “we’re the middle man between a company and the media,” and while this is very easy for people to understand – it’s not completely true. That definition only covers media relations but public relations is so much more than that! In fact, our target audience isn't necessarily the media, sometimes it could be a client’s employees or a client’s customers (hence B2B). So, I did a little digging in order to find a better explanation.

This is what I found:

Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) currently defines PR in its official statement as, “helping our complex, pluralistic society to reach decisions and function more effectively by contributing to mutual understanding among groups and institutions. It serves to bring private and public policies into harmony.”

While that is a lovely definition, it doesn't explain what we do as PR professionals and apparently I’m not the only one who’s looking for clarification. Check out this recent PRSA blog post to read more about its efforts to better define and modernize the current definition of PR.

I also scoped out the ever-reliable Wikipedia, which actually makes a little more sense than PRSA’s definition (in my opinion). Its definition is, “public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc.” Aside from the excessive use of etc., that one seems to be a little more clear, however it still doesn't explain how we do it.

I’m curious how all you PR students and professionals define public relations. What do you tell friends and family when they ask about PR?