WHAT IS PUBLIC RELATIONS

Of all professions, Public Relations (PR) is by far the most misunderstood, misrepresented and abused in Kenya as most organizations and leaders expect PR people to work their magic each time a crisis arises, and miraculously make it go away. What they forget is that PR works more like a vaccine against a disease and not medicine for it.

For a long time, a number of people have been made to believe that bad stories can simply be ‘killed’ so that they do not get to see the light of day. In most cases proponents of this view are of the opinion that all one needs to do is either pay-off a reporter or threaten him or her altogether and the story would go away.

Very few people can explain what people in public relations really do. I constantly have to explain that we don’t buy advertisements, we don’t order journalists to write stories for our clients, we don’t produce cute radio jingles, and we don’t hand out free samples at the mall.

Yes, we try to promote our clients, our products or ourselves. But unlike advertisers, we persuade our external or internal audiences via unpaid or earned methods. Whether it’s the traditional media, social media or speaking engagements, we communicate with our audiences through trusted, not paid, sources.

PR is the Persuasion Business. You are trying to convince an audience, inside your building or town, and outside your usual sphere of influence, to promote your idea, purchase your product, support your position, or recognize your accomplishments.

PR people are storytellers. They create narratives to advance their agenda. PR can be used to protect, enhance or build reputations through the media, social media, or self-produced communications. A good PR practitioner will analyze the organization, find the positive messages and translate those messages into positive stories. When the news is bad, they can formulate the best response and mitigate the damage.

Firstly, and perhaps the biggest mistakes corporates and brands make is responding to an alleged scandal in a broadcast fashion as opposed to targeting the origin of the report. They believe that like the magic bullet, a press release to all media will instantly kill the story and repair the tainted image. For example if a disgruntled client posts his complaints on twitter accusing a CEO of alleged bribery, it is suicidal to call a press conference to refute the claims.

In so doing the organization will not only be seen as defensive and therefore insincere, but also in the process will be attracting undue attention from the other media, which otherwise would not have been the case had it been resolved online with the specific original complainant.

It therefore follows that the best way to beat a crisis is by doing the right things all the time; setting up organizational structures and procedures and abiding to them; providing good, ethical leadership; and creating forums for employees to express themselves without victimization. Anything less will only earn you a permanent space in the media for all the

Finally, when a product is not working, no amount of PR, marketing or even paid advertising will help clean the brand's image. Such efforts give similar results to that of a child’s attempt to evade a bath by smearing oil all over his stomach to hide away the dirt. This trick has never worked!

For Public Relations to work, a brand must constantly work to bridge the gap between what it says in its marketing and advertising and what it actually does. The bigger the gap between the public perception and the reality, the more scandals and crises one invites.

If your business is selling automobile, make sure the showroom has cars ready to be bought and not beautiful girls; if you trade in culinary solutions, ensure that you constantly review your recipes to satisfy the dynamic foodie instead of churning out fliers and ADs promoting your outlet

PR is a full-time business and must be experienced and embraced by all employees across the organization, right from induction to exit and thereafter. Nothing is more authentic than a former employee saying: "I worked there for so many years and this is what they do"... Frankly speaking, PR is the result of a full cycle that is alive in all aspects of an individual or an organization’s operations and aims to create a mutual understanding between the brand and its public. Prevention is better than cure. This is cliché but true.

When PR is well managed, a crisis becomes easier to handle when (and not if) it arises because it eventually will. As Benjamin Frankly once said; “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”