Learning public relations

I have spent the past quarter of a century attempting to teach public relations. Sometimes I may even have succeeded.

But enough has been written and said about teaching. I want to talk instead about how and when we can best learn public relations.

One case study should illustrate this challenge.

How well do you think BP handled the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico (its correct name back then) in 2010?

Every student and practitioner will be able to list the communication mistakes made by BP. It serves to this day as a case study of how not to manage crisis communication.

Yet I learnt to take a different view thanks to one experienced commentator who reminded us that BP did not only have responsibilities to the people and  communities affected, and to the US government, but it also had legal and moral responsibilities for its shareholders and employees.

It paid out billions in compensation, but this commitment could not be infinite or there would be no business left to pay the bills, or to pay salaries, or dividends to shareholders. You may still have little sympathy for big oil fat cats – but then you’re not thinking about the pension funds of millions of ordinary people that depend on the stock market performance of a few bellwether companies such as BP.

The public relations lesson may have been that BP did not go far enough and fast enough in its contrition and in its compensation payments.

The stakeholder relations lesson is that a business needs to take a 360 degree view of its responsibilities, and not simply be blown off course by responding to the loudest voices at any one moment.

But how do you learn that?

You can observe how different businesses and organisations prioritise their various stakeholder responsibilities and relationships.

You can note that ‘bad’ companies or industries can make a ‘good’ contribution to society. Questions of ethics and the public good are rarely simple and binary.

You can recognise that short term knee-jerk reactions to pressure may not lead to the best outcomes in the long term.

You can spot the difference between the tactical challenge of communication and the more strategic role of trusted adviser.

You can learn these lessons from textbooks and from contrarians such as Steven Olivant.

Public relations advisers are often compared unfavourably with lawyers. The latter are considered clever for understanding and interpreting the law and knowing how the legal system works. In England and the US, where common law applies, they also have to be guided by precedent as much as by principle.

By contrast, public relations advisers can be viewed as charlatans only too ready to dispense advice – for a fee – based on no solid foundation and with no guaranteed results.

Yet giving reliable advice requires an acute reading of the environment (or rather multiple environments) as I’ll attempt to show.

Media and technology landscape

Public relations emerged during the mass media age, yet has moved beyond that model. Since the turn of the century media relations has worked not in isolation but alongside link building and other SEO tactics.

Now, as we enter the ‘age of intelligence’, we can see that the primacy of Google is threatened by AI summaries meaning that fewer users are clicking links. It’s also threatened by voice searches on smart devices and on social media searches – leading in turn to an increased risk of misinformation and disinformation.

If we can’t trust information and if we don’t trust organisations, institutions and governments either, then this makes for a challenging information environment.

In the short term we’re seeing a reversion to direct, unmediated forms of communication (you’ll have noticed the decline in social media use, the rise in use of private messaging apps, and the endless requests to subscribe to email newsletters).

It doesn’t mean we can and should ignore journalists (after all, journalists are influencers but influencers are not journalists), but it certainly means viewing the media as just one part of an information ecosystem involving human and non-human actors.

As we have seen in the UK in recent weeks, cybersecurity is a present danger and yet another public relations problem arising from the information landscape.

Political landscape

In the West, the political environment was exceptionally benign for several decades following the collapse of communism. Democracy appeared to have triumphed, and the electoral logic more often than not led to opposing parties seeking the middle ground.

That has changed. Populist governments are asserting their power to challenge business-as-usual in the areas of trade and tariffs and immigration – and to punish organisations for such innocent-looking transgressions as having policies on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) or allowing staff to work remotely.

This presents a set of pressing public relations problems. Do you bend to the prevailing wind, or do you stand up for your principles?

Cultural landscape

We have discussed the forces being applied to organisations. But how do they seek to get heard and even to change the debate?

It’s increasingly hard to cut through and to win attention from news-averse publics with short attention spans.

This is where the public relations practitioner needs to be tuned in to popular culture and the zeitgeist. 

Which celebrities and which influencers can you work with productively? Can you use creative stunts to contribute to public entertainment while avoiding mockery and cynicism (‘floating something down the Thames’)?

Nor are these questions only for consumer-facing brands with big budgets. No sector is more competitive than the not-for-profit space, with more than 170,000 registered charities in the UK vying to gain attention in order to promote their good cause, raise much-needed funds, lobby government and attract volunteers and supporters. With further restraints on public sector spending, their contribution will become even more important and the fundraising challenge even more pressing.

In the private sector, public relations will often be seen as an adjunct to marketing, but in the third sector public relations is on its own and is relied on to provide the biggest bang for no bucks.

Organisational landscape

The main lesson of the past few years is that we’ve shifted from an outside-in view of organisations to an inside-out view. Whereas it was once considered unusual to prioritise internal stakeholders over external ones, it’s now a mainstream view.

If your DEI strategy is an essential plank in this employees-first view, then you need to stand up for your principles. If it was only ever a flag-flying performative gesture, then why bother?

Senior executives across all sectors are grappling with the productivity problem. They know that their people should be the solution, but also that people are expensive and their output needs to be viewed in the light of productivity gains and cost savings that could be made from deploying AI.

Never forget people in public relations. They’re the answer to your problem, but they may also be the problem itself.

Learning landscape

So how and when do you learn all this?

• Apprenticeships are to be welcomed as a way to bring increased diversity into the public relations workforce. They’re a good debt-free alternative to university. But the focus of an apprenticeship is on technical skills, and it’s these technical skills that are most under threat from AI.
• A university degree is still a good choice for those who want to keep their options open. But it’s a very wasteful and expensive way to acquire vocational skills. Besides, the teaching students receive will be more focused on academic principles than applied problem solving.

Which brings us to various professional pathways for learning public relations.

• Training courses are a good way to gain or refresh skills and knowledge. For example, expert training in artificial intelligence is currently in demand as everyone adapts to the challenges and opportunities of new technology.
• Continuous professional development (CPD) is to be encouraged. But a points-based system used in an annual CPD return incentivises the ticking of boxes and collection of points over deep learning. Yet it’s a necessary precondition for CIPR Accredited and Chartered Practitioner status – with the latter reserved  for those showing the highest standards of professional and ethical practice.
• This leaves professional qualifications: once the vital missing step that helped the CIPR gain its Royal Charter, these are now in danger of being overlooked. Yet it’s professional qualifications that best enable practitioners to apply principles and theories to real case studies and to demonstrate deep learning by reflecting on their assignments.

Alan Anstead makes this distinction between training, CPD and professional qualifications with reference to the Global Capabilities Framework:

‘Qualifications provide the knowledge and understanding that underpin each capability. Training provides the skills to do something. A CPD programme keeps knowledge and skills up to date, and the Chartership assessment shows that practitioners have reached the highest standard. They are all important parts of the PR professionalism jigsaw. Replacing qualifications with a modular on-demand training programme would be a retrograde step.’

Teaching public relations is one thing. But learning public relations is a much greater challenge experienced by many more people.