“I am not a Gold Coin to be Appealing to Everyone”
The post-soviet reality’s grimaces labeled the public relations industry with an unattractive associative flow for good: lies, manipulations, healthy and unhealthy cynicism, opportunism, etc. The output is a socially disapproved profession whose representatives are either afraid of or despised. Some people would prefer all PR-pros to vanish in no time thus making this world kinder and clearer. Such demonization is a kind of family curse that my colleagues and I are trying to break to the best of our ability (of course, when we are free from serving the yellow devil) though we are fine about the situation and are treating it with the Olympian calm. All of us dislike the police, the intelligence agency, the tax office to a greater or a lesser extent, some of us even dislike doctors and teachers; yet the dislike does not threaten the existence of these activities in our society.
At the same time, it is much more unpleasant to put up with the inadequate treatment of PR and PR-experts by those who we are bound by the common business process in line of our duty. There are three main groups of the kind at least:
· employers and customers having various job hypostases – that is tasksetters
· employees of companies that PR work is done for – that is information holders
· representatives of mass media of all types – editors and journalists
Each of them has their own idea of an ideal “spinner” (I hate the term that has taken root thanks to somebody; that is why I can’t but put it in quotes). This is what the most insane representatives of these groups approximately think:
Tasksetters, “He must read my mind over a distance and be able to transform it into a coherent text and photos that my wife and my driver like. He does not need a budget, he can negotiate a free publication of an article about our new flavourings for buns in the next issue of the Financial Times. He must not distract other employees’ attention from their work because they take care of the business, they do real work. He must make all mass media respect us, make journalists write about us what we want them to write and when we want them to write it, make them send everything for our approval and forget about snickering at our company in social networks. Also he must guess insightfully, like Vanga, by how many per cent the volume of our sales and profit will grow even before a PR campaign starts.”
Information holders, “He mustn’t stand in my way when I am playing computer games, polishing my nails and having a fag. I don’t want to write any comments. I don’t want to talk either. I might put my foot in it and the boss will punish me. That is why let him write everything instead of me and I will then squeeze his blood and brains dry. To maintain order; for him to understand that he is not my boss.”
Mass media representatives, “He must honestly tell me EVERYTHING RIGHT NOW. If he says that he should send a comment for an information holder’s approval, he lies or wants to conceal something. If he says that he has no right to comment on the situation and has to look into it first, he lies blatantly and clearly wants to prejudice public interests.”
I would like to furnish one general answer to all of this. Ladies and gentlemen, a PR expert is not a gold coin to be appealing to everyone.
The essence of his work is not to please little gods of his company or to satisfy information hunger of the media by sharing facts, figures and budgets with a bountiful hand. The essence of his work is to help the company he works in/for to achieve the set economic or political aims. Despite the degree of its social responsibility and the ethical constituent of the corporate culture.
Inside his company, a PR expert is a detective inspector, a major case investigator and an official-at-large. For the outer world he is a barrister who defends his client from the standpoint of innocent until proven guilty, even if the media’s attitude is that of a prosecutor. This is the only correct stand.
That is why don’t reproach our people for being importunate (as a company’s employees often do), wasteful (as tasksetters do), greedy, unable to work on the fly and to write high quality texts. A real “spinner” is guided by interests of his company first of all. And these interests can collide and they do objectively collide with the interests of the mentioned above groups.
Don’t try to shape us in your manner. PR function has an original style and very many tailors.
I would like to offer two quotations that suit our today’s topic perfectly. The French woman’s motto, “I can’t be liked by absolutely everybody because everybody does not have a perfect taste”. The seconds is a story by the academia about the famous physicist Kapitza’s reaction to being co-opted an academician unanimously, “Am I such a worthless nullity that I do not have a single enemy?” A PR expert does not have to conform to his contact audiences’ stereotypic and distorted idea of his work. He just has to be efficient and effective – both from his employer’s/client’s point of view and from his own viewpoint too. And from his family’s perspective, if he has a family, of course. He has no other tasks.
http://forbes.net.ua/woman/1355576-ya-ne-chervonec-chtoby-vsem-nravitsya