PR is more than a media release

It’s been 17 years since I opened my first textbook on PR Best Practice. It was the year I turned 18, at a time when Nokia Snake was our only source of entertainment on the go and MSN chat helped us connect to millions around the world. We headed to Kodak to print our negatives and mapped our car journeys using the UBD Refidex; and you could forget getting customer enquiries if you missed your listing in the Yellow Pages that year!

My subjects focused on writing and distributing media releases, drafting newsletters, undertaking stakeholder communications and managing corporate events. PR at that time, was designed to accommodate large corporates that had the budget for an in-house or agency PR team to ensure the company retained an undamaged brand particularly with the media – the likes of Coca Cola, Commonwealth Bank, McDonald’s and Herron (who became a live case study for me as I watched their tampering crisis unfold in the media!). It was these companies, or the agencies that represented them, that I was encouraged to pursue in order to make a career in PR.

Fast forward to 2017, and PR practitioners are tweeting journalists, scripting and filming client videos, using Canva and WordSwag to create visually appealing and engaging Instagram posts, and ensuring digital content is SEO friendly. How times have changed!

Businesses are increasingly recognising their customer base is diverse and the channels used to communicate with them are numerous. Outsourcing to agencies, whether for projects or as an extension of their internal teams, is progressively being treated as an investment rather than an expense. This is allowing brands to go about their daily operations and business goals, while ensuring their audiences are suitably managed.

The term PR has also evolved over the years, with a stronger focus on an all-encompassing communication acumen. Business leaders are approaching us for social media management just as much as media relations, and for web copy just as much as corporate event management.

Another area I’ve seen a shift in over the years is in who uses PR to grow and sustain their business. Yes, I’ve managed communication activity for McDonald’s, Baskin-Robbins and Sunny Queen Australia, but I have also helped launch an entrepreneurial mining workwear brand and a start-up technology company as well as boosting the profile of a number of Not-For-Profits. It’s this variety that keeps us PR professionals coming back for more every day!

It’s an exciting time for businesses to incorporate PR into their business plan! With a host of avenues and opportunities to connect with customers, staff, media, suppliers and government, businesses small and large can adopt PR strategies to grow their profile, audience, engagement and ultimately, sales. PR professionals take great pride in producing measurable results for clients, and we see ourselves as an extension of a company’s team, working towards the same commercial goal.

Those two letters, PR, inadvertently makes the industry sound so simple, but I can assure you, in my 17 years since I picked up my first industry text book, it has advanced into a complex web of traditional media, social media, brand development, lobbying, stakeholder engagement, event management, crisis and issues management and so much more.