An Acquaintance to PR

It is a fact that many people are not aware of what exactly Public Relations are. Most of them tend to confuse the advertisers with PR professionals. At that point it is significant to separate those fields. A key word to do this is “the persuasion”. PR professionals usually rely on unpaid methods to persuade the audiences through trusted sources, whereas advertisers on earned methods through paid sources. In other words, Public Relations use language to persuade media whereas advertisement uses mostly visual ads and consequently PR is less expensive than advertisement.

Another word linked with PR is “reputation”. The main role of PR people is to form an organization’s or a company’s reputation in the best way possible. They are responsible to inform the public about their clients through campaigns, events, press releases and responses in case of a crisis. Overall, PR people communicate their clients to the public by using traditional and new media.

But it is not only this, because PR people are content creators. They either create stories when there is an opportunity for their clients, meaning a new product or service or they follow stories when they must response to something such as bad rumors. Furthermore, when it has to do with media there are a lot of people, who believe that social media have replaced traditional media but the truth is that both of them are complementary. They must go hand in hand, but it is important to clarify that each social media platform needs different management to catch the attention of public eye. For instance, a post on Facebook should not be the same as a post on Twitter, because those two platforms serve different purposes and most of the times target different audiences.

Public Relations have multiple functions to support all types of businesses. They act as “mediators” between organizations and publics so that to ensure beneficial relationships.

Marina Kritikou