Public Relations is forever
By Harold Burson (Hon. ’88)
The founder and chairman of global communications firm Burson-Marsteller, on the past, present and future of the field he has influenced for 57 years.
My greatest frustration as a lifelong public relations professional is that so many of my fellow professionals cannot define public relations in its totality.
Otherwise, I would not read blogs and articles in the trade press titled “Will the Internet Replace Public Relations?” or “Social Networks Are Replacing Public Relations” or “Will Advertising Make Public Relations Obsolete?”
What nonsense!
The fact is that public relations has been practiced from the time humans began interacting with one another, from the time one person first wanted to persuade another to change an opinion or to take a specific course of action. The Ten Commandments were not written on parchment; they were carved onto tablets of stone. The Romans didn’t build wide boulevards to avoid traffic jams; that’s where their legions marched to demonstrate the grandeur and power of the Roman empire to the rest of the world. Martin Luther didn’t paste his 95 theses on the cathedral bulletin board; he nailed them to the cathedral door. The purpose of the Boston Tea Party was hardly to protest the small tax on tea; it was to dramatize the broader concept “no taxation without representation.” Using the word “massacre” (as in the Boston Massacre) to describe the slaying of five colonists (in fact, the colonial firebrand Samuel Adams referred to it as the “horrible Boston massacre”) hardly depicted the event literally. Rather, these were manifestations of a sense of public relations: efforts to change attitudes and/or behavior.
Public relations as a discipline (I prefer defining it as an “applied social science”) was first offered as a professional service in 1900 when the Boston Publicity Bureau was established. An early client was Harvard University. But in American politics, the use of public relations strategies and tactics dated from Revolutionary times or even before. Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr all employed paid journalists who were embedded on the staffs of colonial newspapers to tout their points of view and maintain their public reputations. Most of the newspapers of that period supported one of the two political parties that took shape soon after the founding of the Republic and were an important source of their funding.
Public relations has been around a long time. There is nothing in human behavior that is likely to change or even modify its basic purpose or its universal usage, knowingly or not.
While there are at least as many definitions of public relations as there are textbooks and deep thinkers about the discipline, the one that most succinctly encapsulates its totality comes from the street slang: if you’re going to talk the talk, you gotta walk the walk.
An early simplified version was: public relations is doing good and getting credit for it.
A more academic definition goes like this: public relations is the applied social science employed to develop policies and behavioral patterns which, when communicated effectively, motivates individuals or groups to a desired course of action.
This definition recognizes two components that must be brought to bear. The first is behaving in such a manner that accords with the public interest; the second is communicating so persuasively that it will motivate the desired audience to take a specific action.
The public relations professional’s leverage is opinion, or attitudes. There are three — and only three — ways that leverage can impact how people think:
- One can seek to change an opinion or attitude. One can try to persuade a person with pro-life sympathies to believe in the pro-choice alternative. One can seek to persuade a vacationer to travel to Greece instead of to Bali, or to buy Tide detergent instead of Wisk.
- One can seek to reinforce a currently held opinion or attitude. One can hope to make a charter school supporter even more ardent in his or her support by increasing his or her participation or contribution or by demonstrating the greater worth of the institution.
- One can create an opinion or an attitude where none previously existed. One can present sufficient evidence to turn people who had no interest in the humane treatment of animals into supporters of animal rights.
In effect, the overall role of public relations is to motivate a person or a group to take a specific action. No new invention or methodology can ever change the basic human characteristic of communicating ideas with the basic purpose of influencing agreement or support or otherwise.
The Internet is a powerful tool in the communications arsenal, perhaps the most versatile ever. But it is one of many tools — communications transmission vehicles that began as long ago as when the alphabet was invented and the handwritten word was first used. The next major step forward in communications came millennia later with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. But for hundreds of years, the transmission of news was only as rapid as the fastest horse or wind-driven sailboat, only to be superseded by the steam-driven ship in the early part of the 19th century. With the industrial revolution and the age of invention came other tools that were to make the communication of words more efficient. The telegraph, an 1840 invention, facilitated the communication of words almost instantaneously across wide expanses of land and sea. The telephone, invented by a Boston University professor, Alexander Graham Bell, in the mid-1870s, gave voice to communications over long distances. A person in one city could speak with a person hundreds or even thousands of miles distant. Each of these inventions served the purpose of public relations. Newspapers no longer needed to wait for six weeks for news to cross the Atlantic Ocean. In a matter of minutes they received reports on events almost as they happened.
But it was not until the early part of the 20th century when new inventions began to impact mass audiences—when literally thousands or even millions of individuals could be exposed to the same message at the same time. First came the motion picture; it enabled audiences around the world to see firsthand how life was lived in other countries. Then came radio, a magical wireless device that delivered entertainment and news over the airwaves across distances long and short. And, in the mid-20th century, the miracle of all miracles, television. In their own living rooms, mass audiences could both see and hear entertainment and news programming originating thousands of miles away. (Seeing fallen soldiers fighting seven thousand miles distant on television made the Vietnam War the most unpopular war in American history and undoubtedly played a major role in bringing the war to an end.) Television reigned as the crown jewel of communications vehicles for the better part of half a century. It was the premier dispenser of entertainment, news and advertising.
Then, in the waning years of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, the Internet, certainly the most pervasive, universal and rapidly accepted in the long evolution of communication vehicles, came into being. But despite its enormous impact, there is little reason to believe that the Internet will totally replace television, magazines, newspapers, radio or direct mail. To be sure, all will be affected, some very adversely. Discovering how to utilize the Internet most effectively is still a work in progress; we don’t know what a powerful medium it really is, nor are we fully aware of its downside—risks regarding privacy and the safeguarding of personal information.
But make no mistake: The Internet is a great boon to the practice of public relations. No other medium has the capability to reach such large and widespread audiences so quickly and so economically. For one, it has made possible the near instantaneous establishment of global coalitions. And its effectiveness as a fundraising vehicle has been demonstrated over and over again. On the other hand, it can cause tremendous mischief because of its ease of access and total lack of discrimination in its acceptance of misinformation. Only with the passage of time and through experimentation can we master this wonder medium.
In assessing the future of public relations, one must take into account the demand side. At no time in my career has the need for public relations services been greater in almost every aspect of our daily lives. Public confidence in nearly all institutions, both public and private sector, is at an all-time low. Business, especially the financial services sector, has declined precipitously in public esteem. Other industries have been hard hit as well, as product recalls and environmental violations have increased. Negative coverage of business, especially by cable news media, has sharpened, while members of Congress and even the President have intensified their scrutiny of business governance and practices. And this at a time when politicians at all levels—from city councillors and state legislators to the Congress and the Presidency—are at historic lows in acceptance by the voters who put them in office.
Restoring one’s good name is, increasingly, an objective of enlightened management. To a greater degree than ever before, public relations has a seat at the management table as plans are created and programs are implemented to improve public attitudes. This is not only happening in the United States. It’s a global phenomenon—rendered so by the global reach of both television news and the Internet.
My concern in dealing with this problem is more along the lines of whether there are enough qualified public relations professionals to provide the advice and implement the necessary programs to bring about the good will our clients and employers are seeking. Call it what you will—communications, corporate affairs, public affairs—public relations will be the function that creates the equilibrium that is so necessary to social, political and economic stability.
