Public relations

Public relations are a set of strategic communication actions coordinated and sustained over time, whose main objective is to strengthen ties with different audiences, listening to them, informing them and persuading them to achieve consensus, fidelity and support in present and future actions.

Public relations is called a set of techniques whose objective is to establish a link between the interested parties or target market. Its objectives are carried out using a chain of strategic communication actions. According to the intended result, the public relations technician seeks to sell, influence, promote, change the image or publicize the interests of his client. For this he uses methods, theories and techniques of advertising, marketing , design, politics, psychology, sociology and journalism. It is estimated that currently 80% of the content in the media comes from the actions of a public relations officer.

Edward Bernays is considered the founder and first theoretician of the discipline. Many of his postulates and procedures have a precedent in the research on psychoanalysis undertaken by his mother's brother, Sigmund Freud.

Definitions

Public relations is a characteristic managerial function that helps establish and maintain mutual lines of communication, understanding, acceptance, and cooperation between an organization and its publics; involves problem or issue management, helps managers stay informed and responsive to public opinion; defines and emphasizes the responsibility of directors to serve the public interest; helps managers stay ahead of changes and use them effectively by viewing them as a warning system to anticipate trends and uses research, preparation and ethical communication as its main tools. Public relations is the management function that establishes and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the publics on which its success or failure depends.

The RRs pp. They are also defined as the "professional act whose purpose is to communicate through personal efforts or with the help of the media to people, companies, public bodies and institutions with their audiences, trying to make them have a positive image of them". Whoever exercises it is called a public relations officer, public relations officer or public relations officer.

Public relations are a set of strategic communication actions coordinated and sustained over time, whose main objective is to strengthen ties with different audiences, listening to them, informing them and persuading them to achieve consensus, fidelity and support in present and future actions.

Functions

All relationship activity thought of Strategic Communication based on Research, Planning, Communication and Evaluation (IPCE) and within its purposes is the management of corporate identity, through the performance of the following functions:

• Management of internal communications: it is of the utmost importance to know the human resources of the institution and that they in turn know the institutional policies, since what is unknown cannot be communicated.
• Management of external communications: every institution must make itself known and its shareholder. This is achieved by linking with other institutions, both industrial and financial, government and media.
• Humanistic functions: it is fundamental that the information transmitted is always true, since the public's trust is the one that allows institutional growth.
• Analysis and understanding of public opinion: Edward Bernays, considered the father of public relations, stated that it is necessary to persuade (not manipulate) public opinion to order the chaos in which it is immersed. It is essential to understand public opinion so that it can then act on it.
• Joint work with other disciplines and areas: the work of all public relations must have a solid humanistic basis with training in psychology, sociology and human relations. We work with people and therefore we need to understand them.

The exchange with other areas within communication such as advertising or marketing is also important. Although the latter have purely commercial purposes, there must be coherence between the messages issued by one and the other in order to collaborate to achieve institutional purposes.

The tools that public relations use to fulfill their objectives and functions are many and diverse:

• The organization of events.
• Pressure groups.
• Social responsibility plans.

• Media relations.
  • Journals: allows the organization to access the general public.
  • Magazines: allows access to more and better segmented audiences.
  • Radio: allows you to instantly transmit information 24 hours a day.
  • Television: gives the institution great visibility.
  • Internet: you can work on the institutional website or with the online version of various media

Public relations works with various intangibles:

• Identity: it is the being of the organization, that which characterizes and differentiates it from the rest. Public relations work on this identity, basically managing two other intangibles: organizational culture and philosophy.
• Philosophy: poses the overall objective of the organization and the way to it. It establishes a mission (the benefit that the organization provides to its public), values (for which the organization is governed) and vision (where it wants to arrive, which must be a difficult goal to achieve but not utopian).
• Culture: it is given by the procedure or mode of action of the organization as a whole. It has to do with the values that are encouraged and how to guide the organization's performance.
• Image: it is that representation that the organization wishes to build on the stakeholders with which the organization relates or builds communicative links.
• Reputation: is that mental representation that the public is making about an organization through the experiences (direct or indirect) that they have had with it and the way the organization communicates with the interested parties.

The process of destroying reputation based on discrediting the counterpart (a company, organization, politician, etc.) is called negative public relations or BPR (abbreviations from English black public relations). To carry out these types of campaigns, access to reserved sensitive information can be crucial.

To achieve your objective, for example, you can generate a rumor that discredits the objective, which can be false, true or with half-truths. In these types of campaigns, it is common for the target to file defamation lawsuits. For this reason, it is common for the media to echo with headlines such as "According to some information...", "It is suspected that...", "According to some estimates..." or «According to some of the witnesses...».

Another way is to act directly with tests, always covering the largest amount of media at first in order to establish a single message to the community.

It is also common to try to find unconscious associations in the public. For example, putting information about a certain person next to information about disasters or crimes, or creating films where the antagonist has a certain profile (for example, a communist), or using phrases that associate the target to be discredited with negative concepts. For example «Informaticians and criminals...».

These actions are common in political campaigns.

Public relations as a science

Public relations is not a science in itself, with an autonomous character. Many authors point out that it is an interdisciplinary subject that needs many other disciplines to find effective solutions to the problems that arise. These authors defend the position that public relations belongs to the set of social sciences as an interdisciplinary subject through communication sciences. Disciplines such as general, differential, social and consumer psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, etc., are essential to manage the generation or maintenance of effective relationships between organizations and their strategic audiences.

And as an interdisciplinary subject within the framework of the social sciences, public relations practitioners (professionals and academics) plan, manage and evaluate programs and campaigns with a rigorous methodology typical of the area in which they are developed, generate research and theories that feed his body of knowledge.

Other practitioners of public relations understand, however, that it is also a science, since it is still a growing body of fallible knowledge acquired in the light of experimentation, which can be transmitted. As such, it has a number of attributes:

• Wideness: Public relations can be applied to various situations of daily life.
• Opening: they are willing to generate modifications when necessary.
• Empirism: they are based on experimentation.
• Method: they have their own method commonly called IPCE: research, planning, communication and evaluation.
• Utility: they help institutional purposes and management of IDENTITY.
• Description and prediction of institutional reality.

History of public relations

• 1600-1800: period marked by the struggles for independence. Public relations served both for the purposes of the settlers, who sought to foster their independence through various means (including the press, the theatre, pamphlets), and Britain, which tried to control the colonies.
• 1800-1865: this period is characterized by the growing importance of public opinion. Various topics were discussed: slavery, feminine suffrage, secularism, etc., and the incipient mass press was the vehicle of all those ideas.
• 1865-1900: this time was marked by an economic depression that terribly affected the image of the industrialists. There was no awareness of the importance of the public ' s favour and indiscriminate use of the “false news” drafted by the press officers.
• 1900-1919: the figure of Ivy Lee appears as a practical father of public relations. Lee contributed greatly to the growth of the profession, as he initiated an open door policy to inform the public. He humanized the profession and realized the importance of making public information compatible with the private sector. In 1917, Wilson as president-elect of the United States of America created the Public Information Committee (also called the Creel Committee), aimed at enabling American citizens to support the entry of the country into the First World War, which was a clear use of public relations for political purposes. It is worth noting that Wilson had arrived at the White House under a political program based on non-military intervention, which put things quite difficult to the Creel Commission (also known as the Committee of the 12 wise).
• 1919-1929: in this period stands out the figure of Edward Bernays as the theoretical father of the profession. He wrote several books delimiting the functions and scope of it and dedicated many efforts to make public relations of public relations, that is, to improve the image of the profession. Bernays' work highlighted the importance it attached to the need to listen to the public and work according to their needs.
• 1929-1941: Public relations are of great importance, since after the Great Depression it is extremely necessary to vindicate companies and explain their contribution to the economic system.
• 2001: Natalia Martini creates the RRPPnet Public Relations Portal

In Europe, discipline is not developed with the same intensity as in the United States due to the pressure of the totalitarian governments of the 20th century.

Professional Organizations

• In 1948 Great Britain created the Institute of Public Relations.
• In the 1950s, associations emerged in Greece, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and Spain, among other countries.
• The International Association of Public Relations (IPRA) was founded in 1955.
• In the 1960s the associations were grouped into an organization, the European Confederation of Public Relations (CERP).
• In 1960 the FIARP (Inter-American Federation of Public Relations) was created, recognized by the OAS. It later becomes CONFIARP.
• In 1963, in Colombia what is now called CECORP Centro Colombiano de relaciones públicas y Comunicación Organisationcional.

Public relations as a business management factor

• Public relations constitute one of the organizational activities of our times.
• Public relations interpret the environment of a company, are the antenna, radar, and the awareness of it for decision-making related to the integration of the company to the community.
• Public relations help companies anticipate and face the organizational crisis.

Through certain messages an image is created, which we want the company to have, the failure or success of our company depends on it. Projecting a good company image is neither more nor less than the market having knowledge, an opinion and a positive assessment of our organization and therefore, of the products and services offered.

Advertising is an excellent tool to help convey that image, but probably, and just as important as advertising, is the implementation of a communication plan that transmits that image to the different markets and also does so in a a credible way.

Public relations play an essential role in the communication strategy that is aimed at employees and constitutes a fundamental tool for the relationship between the organization and the public. Internal communication has different points of view such as economic, human resources, management, organizational; which need to be worked on fundamentally so that they participate in the formalization of decision-making. Through public relations, the company seeks a position in the field of image, always pursuing maximum social acceptance. The most important functions to be developed by public relations are:

1. Support and strengthen the work of sales and advertising departments.
2. Prepare and supervise the specific actions of promotion and advertising of the products or services it represents.
3. To maintain a climate permanently favourable to the products or services it represents, through constant contact with customers, suppliers, social agents, among others.
4. Establish a good working climate and get in employees the spirit and image that the company intends abroad.
5. Get that no problem alters or damages the image of the company in the social field.

It is necessary to use techniques included in public relations facing the outside, and inside the company, which is why the employees of a company are the best asset of a company and nobody like them to be the first link for work in terms of communication and reflection of a powerful and suitable company image. Corporate identity also plays a very important role within public relations and has the task of giving the image that companies are going to give to their interlocutors, in short, that they are perceived by the recipients.

The image will be a quality that the company will possess. There are two elements that will generate the identity of the company:

• a. The corporate cultural system: which is the personality formed by ideas, signs, objectives and principles. Which have made the company distinct from the competition. It is complemented at the domestic level by the personal policy that covers the salary, motivation and design of decision-making systems.
• b. Visual or physical manifestation: it is the visible of the company, symbol, logo, corporate colors, stationery, installations, uniforms among others.

Visual identity and behavior patterns form the image of a company.

Corporate image

The image is not managed directly, since it is owned by the public, but public relations professionals manage it indirectly, working on identity.

In order to carry out this management, it is first necessary to audit the image, that is, to know what image the public has of the organization. This is achieved by studying the visibility of the organization (how well known or unknown it is) and also through the use of surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.

Then it is necessary to plan to establish, taking into account the current image, what is the image to be obtained and the way to carry it out.

The main benefits of a well-defined image are:

• Identification of the organization
• The differentiation
• Referenceality
• Preference: This is usually the main objective in managing the image, which the public chooses from this organization.

Public Relations and its Management Function

It is important to understand that the functions performed by the Public Relations Officer are very important, therefore, they must assume a management function. As James Grunig (2000: 50) points out, he is the communication director of the company, organization or foundation in which he works. His work must be planned together with the company's executives, as is thought in an annual marketing plan, work must be done on a Public Relations project to maintain a favorable relationship with the public.

The work of the Public Relations Officer goes through planning and that implies a process of Research, statements of Objectives, design of Strategy and Evaluation.

Current trends

Currently, the paradigm of integrated advertising communications, which places public relations as another marketing tool, is being left aside. In fact, scientific research in public relations is increasingly focused on relationship management itself.

Public relations is being viewed holistically, that is, it is linked to institutional communication and is positioned as a management function. There is a tendency to place all the organization's communications in the hands of the communication director in order to achieve a more coherent and integrated communication policy that pursues the same goals as the institution.

The way in which institutions address and communicate with their audiences has also changed. Public relations today uses communication tools that were unthinkable years ago. The proliferation of social networks and corporate blogs indicate that dialogue is gaining a new space; The cyberspace. In a framework of sustained competitiveness, today's organizations need to be always available to their audiences, the participation of more and more voices encourages public relations professionals to appeal to creativity and computer expertise to develop current and relevant strategies.

Currently, the paradigm of integrated marketing communications, which places Public Relations as another marketing tool, is being set aside. It is happening to have a holistic vision of Public Relations; that is, they are linked to institutional communication and are placed as a management function. Within these current trends, some paradigms appear: 1. The challenge of the public relations officer is to help build the identity, culture and reputation of the organization, as a path that will facilitate the construction of links with stakeholders, which in turn should have a positive impact on the achievement of the corporate strategies. 2. The relationist is a strategist, and this implies having the ability to plan, execute and measure the impact of the strategies and tactics that are executed. (By Mgter. Antonio Ezequiel Di Génova, in his Public and Institutional Relations Manual, Editorial Ugerman. 2016 Edition)