Is a PR Degree Necessary?

The last class of the semester posed the question of the importance of having PR degree to work in the industry or if it is all about connections and personal qualities.
This particular class made me think a lot, because as we are all students studying a masters degree on PR we should all think that a degree is necessary to work in this industry, but because of my personal experiences and through asking different people working in the industry I came up with the conclusion that a degree is not the most important thing, and what really makes a difference in this industry is how you manage to understand and treat different kinds of people. Is all about people liking you, if they don’t like you for any reason they won’t hire you.

There are several aspects which I think are very important: first of all personal qualities, if you don’t have any personal qualities to offer a certain company they will not care if you have ten masters on PR. Secondly the languages, as it is very important in this industry to speak at least two or three languages: thirdly, your degree, and the last but not the less important is your appearance. This is what I personally think, and what different practitioners have told me off the record.

So to conclude this statement, I must say that it doesn’t matter how much you study or how good your grades are, because if you don’t get to know the right people, you will probably find it very difficult to have a good job.

Social Media Can Bring about Change

Today we had a very interesting class; we had a guest speaker who brought up very interesting points to think about. The class was about social media and how changes occur, and at the beginning he asked all of us how we thought changes happen. My personal opinion is that changes happen very slowly, and in order for something to change it has to be socially accepted so that people can change their attitudes or perceptions about a certain aspect.

The guest speaker explained his view about how changes can happen, and he talked about several real cases in which a change had happened. He argued that changing an attitude is not very important in order for a change to happen, he said it was the least important, therefore my question is; If public relations practitioners are working towards changing attitudes, can they contribute for a change to happen in society? According to the guest speaker, changing an attitude is the last thing he would do to make something change, but what I have learned throughout these two semesters is that public relations has the power to change peoples perceptions, minds and opinions. You can find evidence that support my argument in my first post, where I wrote about PR during war and I gave the example of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. From my point of view everything is about PR, and as well as making an idea or a product to be sold, we can change people’s way of thinking, and after changing peoples opinion about something, changes slowly start to occur.

It Is true that social media nowadays is a very important tool for PR practitioners, and it may help to change people’s attitudes towards something. Facebook is a very powerful tool which has also helped politicians to win elections, like the Obama example, but not only that, but it is helping companies to sell their products through different social media platforms, such as youtube. Here you can watch a video from youtube on Obama’s campaign. This video was watched by thousands of people and this helped him win the elections. So conclusion to this class is that, yes PR can change attitudes using different tools such as social media, and here you have the example.

Crisis Management

Crisis management is a very big issue for every public relations practitioner, because when there is crises management there is a need of good PR work.
What we did in class was recreate a hypothetic crisis management situation, and tried to act as if it was real. We, as a whole, where divided into groups and the outcome of how all the different parts on a crisis situation where acting and how everything worked out was really interesting.

Word reputation is essential in public relations and, to sustain a positive reputation, it’s important that the public relations practitioner is aware of every situation before it happens.

“Identity programs also have great deal to do with sustaining reputation. Coherent self-presentation and consistent projection of reinforcing images help to build and maintain favourable appraisal by constituents”. (Charles J. Fombrun. Reputation. P.201)

As I mentioned the week before, the identity of an organisation or of a brand is very important in order to help with their positive reputation. The problem comes up when the identity is not coherent with their attitudes or actions and then the crisis crashes into the organisation’s face before they can even see it coming.

As the book that I’m reading currently is about reputation, I am going to quote some of Charles J. Fombrun’s words, “Reputation tends to only count after the fact, when a crisis has already hit. Then they want you for a damage control.” (p.192).

Identity and Country Branding

Our last class was about International Public relations and we also discussed country branding. After a couple of days thinking on this issue I came up reading a book written by Mark Rowden entitled “Identity”. I found it very interesting when the book came to analyse how important identity is in order to build up a positive reputation for a certain brand. In this case, the brand would be a country, and I’ve been thinking about my own country “Spain”, and I came up with the idea that without exposing our identity to the rest of the world, which is created through the cultural aspects we, as a country, would not be noticed by the rest of the world.

“Culture is always a form of pretence. It pretends to be itself, at times may even parody itself. Your culture is also the full gamunt of association you allow yourself to reside within – not necessarily what you say but how you say it – not necessarily what you wear but how you wear it” (Mark Rowden. Identity. P.133)

This quote illustrates what I mentioned in the above paragraph, and adds to the idea of how you transmit your identity.

I believe that another important aspect of country branding is consistency. It is important that their messages, their images and their music, in other words, everything that includes cultural aspects must be consistent in order to create a successful brand, in this certain case of a country.

“Your identity needs critical mass. An audience needs to be able to clearly recognise your sameness, but not necessarily because this sameness is a consistency also shared by your competitors, for that is merely conformity with others”. (Mark Rowden. Identity. P.149)

After reading the book, I analysed my own country branding and realized its all about public relations and about what each country want the rest of the world to perceive about them.

If some of the followers of my blog are interested on the Identity side of public relations I recommend this book, as it has been very interesting as well as helpful to understand how brands are generated.

Corporate Social Responsability

Last class was about Corporate Responsibility, and how the public relations industry manages its CSR to work. Every business should be responsible for its own actions and should try and make our world better than it is by maintaining a self regulation. This means that sometimes businesses can make a lot of profit through different ways and some times they make decisions which have an impact on their activities, on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere.

Corporate social responsibility is related to ethics because it has to do with what is morally correct, and where is it respectful for the environment and for the society to invest, or in other words to make business. The idea of corporate responsibility is to think about public interest, and to make a community grow and develop.

We can’t forget that every business including the public relations industry is about making money, and some ways of making money can be legal but may not be moral. A real example of a brand which does not think on corporate responsibility is Nike. It is a very successful brand and it has a huge income every year, but we must not forget about where it has its manufacturing factories and how much these poor people are earning per day, while the top businessmen are making such a huge profit out of this.

Here I am showing you a video that really interested me, because it explains and also gives examples of companies and what do they do for corporate social responsibility. The question would be which businesses do better in terms of financial issue, the ones that think about corporate responsibility or the ones that don’t?, and after answering that question to yourselves its easier to understand why Nike has their manufacturing factories in undeveloped countries where they can pay really low salaries for a whole day of work.

Women in PR Industry

I’ve been thinking for the past days about last class, and how women cope with the fact that they are far behind men in terms of salary and they are mainly always in a lower position compared to men in the public relations industry. It is well known that the PR industry is full of working women but always run by men. I would like to analyse why is this is a sexist world, in which men have all the power.

I’ve recently read an article from PR Week written by Stephanie Siegle about maternity and paternity in the public relations industry.

“With such a high percentage of women working in PR, how does the industry fare on maternity and flexible working issues, and is there room for improvement in light of new legislation proposals?”

After reading the article, I’ve realized that maybe this is the reason why women hardly ever reach “the glass ceiling” on the PR industry. Obviously women have the inconvenience of being the gender that has to cope mostly in every industry with the fact that having babies is not always compatible with reaching the top position in their careers, but there should be a legislation that offered some kind of flexibility for women in these cases.

“However, GlaxoSmithKline vice-president of corporate internal comms Elaine MacFarlane points out that flexible working is not always the right option and that there are certain roles that lend themselves better to it than others”.

This issue has been so controversial that the IPR is trying to work out a way of improving maternity policies in order to keep women able to grow in their career without having to decide whether to have family or to keep their career.

My own worries about the issue of feminization of the public relations industry are, if it’s all about maternity being a problem for the industry or it’s as well a problem of men being scared of women doing better or at least achieving the same level of work than men do.

Here you have the link for the article on PR Week, it’s really interesting, and really related to this issue. I hope that you enjoy it.

http://www.prweek.com/uk/search/article/234329//

Ethics in Public Relations

The title of our last class was “Can PR ever be ethical?” this topic has been very interesting for me since I started my course in PR. As we learned in class ethics is all about dilemma, should we do this, or that? These dilemmas emerge when we have to make any decision that affects our own values or principal in life.

Ethics in general are codes to help us decide what is right from what is wrong, but at the same time ethics depend on people’s morals. Each country has their own culture, therefore, their moral must be different from other culture, this doesn’t mean that one is right and the other is wrong, it just means that we all as human beings act according to our morals and our own codes of ethics. As we learned in class “ethics is the study of morals”.

Working in the PR world makes us as practitioners, think about how should we act in certain circumstances that will happen during our careers. Therefore there are codes of ethics in the different countries, which help practitioners to make decisions. There is the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations), or another example could be PRSA (Public Relations Society of America).

After reading about this topic, it could be said that codes of conduct are guidelines for practitioners when there is an absence of laws on a certain field. The codes of conduct are generally more related to ethical moral than the law, because although the actions must be framed within the law, these actions might not be legitimate. This means that although the action is totally correct according to the law, it might be immoral according to ethics. “The advantage of such codes is found in the number of professionals who are part of designing and then implementing the standards. The disadvantage is that in achieving this breadth, specificity is often scarified.”(Seib and Fitzpatrick, 1995, p.13).

I’m very concerned about ethics in public relations, and how different practitioners act in the same circumstances. There are thousands of books about ethics related to PR, and after having done a lot of research on this issue I agree on the fact that PR practitioners can be ethical but always in a subjective way.

PR in Politics

Nowadays we can see that PR tools are being used more and more for political purposes. It’s becoming a trend that that PR practitioners make use of New Media tools to build up political campaigns and politicians positive as well as negative reputation.

In the last class, some class mates did a presentation on Obama’s campaign and it was a fabulous presentation where they analysed every single PR tool he used. Obama managed to get through all different kinds of public using a really good PR strategy, and what worries me about politics, is that sometimes a politician wins the elections just because of their creative and strategical PR campaigns and not because of their beliefs.

Obama’s and Mc Cain’s campaigns where totally different, and obviously Obama did much better selecting his PR people, but politics is not only about campaigning, politics should be much more than that. We, as a whole society, should fight and go for our beliefs, and what is happening is that people have a blind faith in media and on what the media says.

The media has the power to convince a country to support a really harmful politician. An example of this could be “Hitler”. In this case, he used propaganda to such extent that he managed people to support him. The outcomes of his campaign lead the whole country to a terrible situation.

I’m not trying to compare Obama’s campaign to what Hitler did, but what I’m trying to say is that we, as PR practitioners, have the power of persuasion and, depending on how we use this power, we can do either really great or harmful things for our society.

I want to share with you all a video from YouTube that shows exactly how PR campaigning can be distorted, and how PR people have to fight to get their message across and to persuade people. Sometimes they create good strategies like Obama’s PR people did, and sometimes their campaigns are not that successful like Mc Cain’s campaign.

Becoming Famous Using New Media

Last Wednesday’s class was about new media. I’ve been thinking about new media for such a long time because I had to do a presentation on that topic, so I had to do an in-depth research on it.
From what I’ve learned new media tools are essential for any business to use as a way of social networking and communicating with a vast amount of public who they cannot reach by means of traditional media.
PR practitioners are able to reach their target easily using Social Networking Sites and information is easily spread out.

I want to share with you all a video about a British girl who started posting videos of herself singing on “YouTube”, a very famous social media network, and she managed to get the attention of musical producers in New York, and they actually hired her. Currently, she is recording her first single, and what is really amazing is the way she managed to attract the attention of many people all over the world, and this is the way she got famous.

As you can observe, new media has the power of making an unknown person famous. This is an example of how someone used new media in a positive way, but there are many cases of people who are using new media tools to destroy many organisations or people’s reputation.

There is a controversial belief about this girl called Mia Rose, about her being helped by a PR person to build her image in order to become a popular singer and to build her career as a musician. It’s very possible that a PR practitioner is actually helping her, but either way, this is a very curious example that shows how powerful new media tools can be.

My personal belief about new media is that its so powerful that it can help and at the same time be really dangerous, because anyone around the world can have their own blog and say whatever they think about any organisation or person and can really harm their reputation.

The Powe of PR during War

The first class of this semester was about PR during war. I found it a very interesting topic because I learned how public relations practitioners use media tools to persuade a country of starting a war and how they can convince the public that national interest is under threat.
Every war obviously has two sides of the story, and any of the sides have the right to start the war, but isn’t it interesting how we, as PR practitioners, can change people’s minds?
The most important aspect is what the public perceives about the conflict, and how by using PR people can think that it’s good to start a war against any other country.
Currently, we have the example of the Israeli war against Palestine. As we can see in the news, the Israeli army has been dehumanised by the showing videos of the soldiers bombarding schools and hospitals, but what is the Palestinian army doing? Aren’t they doing the same? Aren’t they using schools and hospitals as a tactic against the Israelis? So at this point, who is behaving worse?
This is a good example of how much power public relations has during a war. The vision that the European countries have of the Israeli war is that they are not acting morally but attacking civilians, but isn’t that what the Palestinians want the rest of the world to see?
I recently interviewed an Israeli citizen and asked him about what he thinks about the conflict and, obviously, his view about the conflict is totally different from what we can see every day in the news.
To conclude, I have learned that the worlds perception during a war depends on what kind of PR each country is doing, so I can say that the media has too much power to condemn or condone the other.