The two things that Lakeland public relations care about are these: communication and reputation. An effective communicator with a passion to handle crises and manage reputations should check out a career in the highly competitive field of public relations.
A career in PR is all about managing reputation and using communication strategies to change the perception of the general public about your clients, whether they are businesses or individuals. In some cases, a PR agency is tasked to manage both the reputation of the business and its owners. A PR agency must have in its power the will to influence opinion and behavior.
But PR is often misconstrued for advertising and marketing. While there are principles that they share, PR is largely depending on the “reputation” and the credibility of the third-party endorsements they will use. While advertisers use money to pay for airtimes and newspaper ads, PR must “persuade” and “convince” journalists to write about their clients in a good light.
Remember that saying that “bad PR is still good PR”? That is actually true. While most PR agencies are tasked to persuade third-party platforms such as the media, business organizations, and even charitable institutions to speak about their clients in a positive way, not many use this tactic to get what they want.
Simply put, a PR agency could also cause commotion and bring attention to their clients by “floating” a scandal or a mystery about them. Everyone knows that the general public loves a good scandal to talk about. While these scandals should not directly impact the reputation of the clients, they should at least, bring attention to the clients and how they will handle the situation.
But bringing down and building reputations is not just what PR is about. There is a lot more work here that we know or give PR agencies credit for. Market research is one thing. There needs to be a considerate amount of market research results that PR agencies have access to because these results would affect the communication strategies they will create for their clients.
It is important to know the demographics of the target audience, their lifestyles, their purchasing power, their ages, their interests and their hobbies. All of this information would directly impact the strategies that would work for them.
The creation of a strategy is more than just wanting to build the reputation of the client. It should be about knowing how to target the audience and how to influence their opinions about the clients and persuade them to side with you.
