Personal Relations - A new way for PR - part 3

The Personal Relations approach is also ethical. It doesn’t seek to dress up, instead it seeks to strip down to the emotional and human truths – warts and all. Personal Relations upholds the integrity and dignity of every human being, it is collaborative and affirmative – there is no need to knock someone down when you can lift your own head up to be counted!

The key to Personal Relations is the authenticity of the sharing, and not mistaking humanity for personality. Organisations and leaders who strategise the use of Twitter or other social media miss the whole point, the whole essence of what it means to really share. President Obama didn’t dress himself up to be perfect or say that the task would be easy should he be elected President. After all, life’s not easy. New PR is about going back to basics, where being vulnerable, being imperfect, being able to suffer, is perceived to be what it really is: a strength and not a weakness.

Obama’s “Yes we can” slogan and presidential campaign point to another important characteristic of new PR – it focuses on solutions and not problems. As President Bill Clinton recently said: “We are now in the age of how.” In this age, we know problems exist: the task of our age is how to tackle them. In the UK, the political messaging is still stuck in the old PR rut: “No he can’t.” The world of technology and communication is moving inexorably in the “Yes we can” direction – open-source, shareware, freeware, online collaboration. (It is ironic that many leading news media are stubbornly swimming against the tide of this movement by charging for online content, but that’s another article!). New PR is about collaborative, hope-filled solutions. In this sense, new PR is not that new: it’s identifying patterns in changing tides of communication, and changing with them.

Those who fail to change will struggle to stay afloat.

Newspaper circulations are plummeting in many countries. In the USA alone, the average daily newspaper circulation plunged 10.6 per cent in the April-September 2009 period from the same six-month period the year before, according to figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. This trend is mirrored in other (though not all) countries around the world. Yes, the fragmentation of the media, the exponential growth of the internet and the global recession have not helped the mainstream media’s fortunes, but there is only so long external factors can be blamed. Fewer people are buying certain newspapers because fewer people are demanding them. Sooner or later, we all need to look at ourselves. Media and PR professionals could point to external factors all they like, but it’s tantamount to pointing at a tidal wave as it crashes down on top of you.

Continued on Monday...