It’s not rocket science

I’ve taught countless courses and classes for a quarter of a century: not just for undergraduate and postgraduate students, but for practitioners on training courses and those seeking professional qualifications.

Here are just some of the things I’ve got wrong. You may be able to learn from my mistakes.

Public relations: the profession that dare not speak its name

You’d think this would be an uncontentious subject. Students have signed up for a public relations degree; practitioners have signed up for a Chartered Institute of Public Relations qualification so you’d assume there would be an agreed agenda and a common understanding.

But as soon as you mention public relations you are sure to alienate some in the room.

Most obviously there are those working in the public sector and government comms who prefer to describe themselves as communicators and who resent any association with public relations which they view as tarnished by spin and manipulation. Communication, in contrast, sounds neutral. Similarly, there are those working in internal communication, analyst relations or public affairs who see theirs as distinct disciplines and who do not welcome being treated as if they face the same problems.

Then there are undergraduates who start out viewing public relations purely as a promotional discipline, and who struggle to see why it isn’t being called advertising – which is visible and so much easier to understand and discuss. They think their lecturers are being deliberately obtuse by focusing on something intangible and ill-defined.

Two decades ago, I thought my students were being naive by viewing public relations as advertising – but now acknowledge how hard it is to make a clearcut distinction between public relations and advertising in the digital age. My students were ahead of their lecturer on this point.

What defence can I mount for continuing to teach a subject called public relations? It’s still in the name of the main professional bodies (such as the Chartered Institute of Public Relations); it’s the subject of almost a century of academic and practitioner literature; it’s a reminder that though communication is important, there’s more to relationships than words. There is, for example, reliability, trustworthiness and many other things we have to show rather than say.

So public relations it remains for me, though this argument will not go away. Others will continue to champion public communication, strategic communication, organisational communication, marketing communication and variations on this theme. Yet more will continue to view reputation management as their guiding light.

The academic way is not always the right way

Academics love nuance and resist oversimplification. This can leave students bewildered.

Let me give you an example. How would you differentiate the concepts of brand and reputation to a class of undergraduates? I’ve read densely argued academic monographs that explore the subtleties of these terms but get no closer to providing helpful guidance.

Now, too late for me to put it into practice, I’ve realised there’s a one word answer that makes the distinction immediately clear to anyone.

McDonald’s.

Everyone will immediately see that the McDonald’s brand is one of the most successful ever created. It’s instantly recognisable, global, and it works in multiple media forms (colour, logo, slogan, tune). As a brand it’s a perfect achievement.

But what about the reputation of McDonald’s? There will be fans of the brand who travel to dine in a McDonald’s restaurant and who see no contradiction between the brand and the reputation. But there will surely be many more who make some less positive connections – between ‘junk food’ and obesity (some may remember Morgan Spurlock’s film Supersize Me); with low wage so-called McJobs; going back further with corporate bullying and the McLibel trial; to problems associated with packaging waste.

Every student in a seminar will have some experience and perspective to contribute to this debate. If they were all committed vegan eco warriors (though I’ve never taught such a group) then their lecturer could easily advocate for McDonald’s in that it provides choice (are we really arguing to ban everything we don’t like?), it provides jobs and training and that McDonald’s restaurants are accessible and affordable for most people who may feel excluded from many other venues.

This is a model that can be extended to other hard-to-explain concepts. Let’s take trust and reputation. They’re not the same thing either, as I can show you in one word.

Amazon.

I trust Amazon to deliver. I have entrusted Amazon with my credit card details. I trust Amazon to resolve any problems with products or with fulfilment. I can’t fault Amazon for trustworthiness.

Yet what about reputation? Here, once again, it’s a much more mixed scorecard. I do feel guilty that our collective preference for online shopping has damaged bricks and mortar shops, has cost jobs and has degraded high streets. I do worry about the working conditions in Amazon warehouses and the pressures on delivery drivers.

Here’s the lesson, in summary. Your brand is something you control. Brand management makes sense.

Trust is something you can strive to gain and retain through your actions and behaviour.

But your reputation is more complex and is only partly under your control as is explained in the CIPR’s definition of public relations being about reputation, ‘the result of what you do, what you say, and what others say about you.’

We talk a lot about reputation management and stakeholder management, but we can’t control the thoughts of others (we’re not Big Brother). So reputation management is a misleading concept in that we shouldn’t promise to manage something that’s out of our control.

What’s preferable? I think it’s revealing that when the CIPR launched a print publication for members, it was not called Reputation. It was called Influence (it’s now an online publication with occasional souvenir editions such as for the institute’s 75th anniversary).

We can’t control how people think so there’s no guarantee we can achieve a perfect reputation – yet we can strive to influence how people feel and behave. This also chimes with the shift from media relations to influencer relations.

You shouldn’t only teach those in the room

Focusing on teaching is a category error equivalent to focusing only on inputs in your public relations planning. However good you are (or think you are) as a teacher, you can only teach those present in your class.

If teaching is an input, the grade a student achieves is the outcome. The impact is what they go on to do with their degree, across a lifetime.

Those present deserve to be inspired. The commitment and organisational skills that got them to your class on time are good indicators that they will succeed.

But what are you doing to help those not in your class to fulfil their potential? It’s those who aren’t attending who are in most need of the input of a skilled educator and motivator.

Please don’t suggest that recording all teaching sessions is the answer. While it may enable some to catch up and keep up, it also gives tacit permission for students to skip class (how many times have I heard ‘I’ll catch up with the recording later’?). Recorded sessions are less engaging than face to face classes, and by giving assumed permission to skip class the live sessions in turn become less valuable and less worth attending.

This is the problem facing higher education post-pandemic. The experience of teaching online has broken the habit and students have been reluctant to return to the classroom.

Yet non-attending students still expect to be assessed. They still expect to pass (they’re paying fees, so they demand a service). University administrators would blame a lecturer for higher than expected fail rates (it reflects badly on their progression statistics and would not contribute to student satisfaction). The f-word cannot be mentioned (a former line manager of mine told me to use ‘deferred success’ instead; I think she did so with a straight face.)

So you may not be able to actively teach non-attending students, but you still have to provide them with an educational opportunity to learn and be assessed.

Being optimistic about technology

The arrival of the internet and social media was transformational for public relations practice. These were developments to be embraced and addressed in the classroom.

Yet ever since the introduction of electronic calculators in the 1970s, the knee jerk reaction of educators has been to ban new technology for fear that students would take shortcuts and avoid learning.

We don’t talk much about Wikipedia today: it’s become a fixture and is rarely commented on. But Wikipedia is the classic test case. You could view it (as I do) as the perfect case study of Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the WorldWideWeb: a collaborative, not-for-profit project seeking to extend knowledge and understanding. It shouldn’t work – but it does. It’s remarkable.

Or you could view Wikipedia as many in education did and still do – as something to be discouraged. Of course a student shouldn’t cite Wikipedia as a source (so the message became simplified to ‘Wikipedia is banned’), but of course they can check Wikipedia among other sites and sources and use it as a starting point for learning. Wikipedia is notably well sourced as the catch-phrase from its editors ‘citation needed’ shows.

Educators are going through the same process with artificial intelligence. Their fear is that students will use AI to write their essays and assignments, and so not learn much. Yet you shouldn’t be setting essay assignments in the age of AI. How about requiring students to use AI so they can learn to critique its outputs? How about they explore questions such as bias and learn how to write better prompts?

What is education for? Is it a system for grading essays, or is it a system for preparing students for an uncertain future?

Yet there are limits to my optimism over technology. Here’s one I got wrong. I saw social media as, on balance, a force for good – as illustrated by my view on Wikipedia (a primitive example of collaborative social media). What’s wrong with expanding knowledge and understanding?

What happened is that social media has taken the opposite turn and become a force for disagreement and polarisation. The rise and fall of X/Twitter sums it up.

And the move towards short-form, entertainment-first media such as TikTok has been damaging to attention spans. Reading has suffered as a result. Yet paradoxically, the emergence of streaming services such as Netflix is a reminder that people have a continued love of long-form storytelling.

Neither too hot nor too cold; it has to be just right

Call it the Goldilocks principle. But how will you judge if your comms is neither too little, nor too much, but just right?

Do you recognise the gap between speaking and hearing; between hearing and understanding; and between understanding and changing (teachers understand this well)? Will you be willing to bore or irritate a few to reach the many? Where do you pitch your messages?

I confess I’ve been taught a lesson recently by one of my graduates.

Ami Wyllie was seconded from the Liberal Democrat press office to the role of Creative Director for the Leader’s Tour in the 2024 General Election. You’ll be aware of the many stunts pulled by Sir Ed Davey, from falling off a paddleboard on Windermere onwards.

It looked rather old school to me: the politics of pseudo-events (or stunts to use plain English). Yet it wasn’t targeting me. It sought to carve out attention for a third party in a national two-horse race and the results were self-evident: a record 72 seats from a ruthless and consistent campaign.

It’s not rocket science: the paradox of public relations

Public relations is seemingly Schrödinger’s profession: one that’s simultaneously easy and difficult.

It’s easy in that everyone communicates, so everyone has some view on how it should be done. It’s considered easy because generations of journalists have taunted PR people that they’re doing something ‘fluffy’ and trivial. How hard can it be?

Professor Anne Gregory, interviewed for a PR Academy Insights #50over50 profile addressed the ‘it’s not rocket science’ claim head on.

‘How many times have you heard a public relations person say ‘it’s not rocket science’? How true, it isn’t; it’s much harder. There are manuals for building rockets. You can’t do this job just with a manual.’

On paper, public relations problems always look easy. So it’s tempting to deliver simplistic classes.

What should an organisation do when faced with a crisis? It should always apologise quickly, according to simplified textbook and classroom theory.

Yet experienced heads say you can’t communicate your way out of a crisis you’ve behaved yourself into. Talk is cheap.

And there will be lawyers cautioning that an apology could be taken as an expensive admission of guilt.

We fail to replicate in the classroom the workplace power dynamics. Public relations is an advisory rather than an executive function. We do not run the show, but we do advise those in power how to navigate uncertainty and complexity using our understanding of the media and key stakeholder groups. Newtonian physics taught us that every action has an opposite and equal reaction. In public realtions, our role is to anticipate the likely reaction to any actions we take (including inaction).

Is our function to protect the boss and make the organisation look good? Or is it to present the boss with hard truths?

Is your understanding of reputation management that you should do all within your power to avoid tomorrow’s bad headline and make your boss look strong; or should you have your eye on the organisation’s long-term legitimacy even at the expense of some bad headlines and the survival of your chief executive? Are you willing to stand by your advice – when legal and other professional advisers may be arguing against you – and face a ‘back me or sack me’ moment?

It’s not rocket science. But it is public relations. Textbooks are a guide; AI is a tool. But it takes more than that to do it well.

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