Communicators Who Call Themselves PR People; PR People Who Call Themselves Communicators

Thinking a little more about my post on the difference between measuring communication and measuring public relations (and yes, I know I spend too much time worrying about trifling semantics) I am struck by the fact that in our industry the people who are most likely to be practicing public relations are also most likely to call themselves corporate communicators, while those who practice mere communications eagerly embrace the term public relations.

Part of this stems from what appears to be genuine confusion about the terms: I have, in the past, received press releases from firms claiming that they are broadening their services beyond public relations to include marketing communications. It has always seemed obvious to me that marketing communications (typically, communicating with consumers) is a sub-set of public relations (building relationships between an audience and all its publics or stakeholders.

Whence the confusion?

The origin of the problem is that it has always been possible for anyone to hang out a shingle claiming to be offering public relations. Over the years, many of those who were in fact publicists, whose service offering began and ended with media relations, decided that public relations sounded better. So they started to claim to be public relations people, thus beginning the devaluation of the term public relations.

In response, many serious practitioners of genuine public relations--particularly within corporate America-- decided they needed a different term to describe what they did. So they cast about for an alternative term, and a majority of them settled on corporate communications. (The last time I looked at the membership roster of the Arthur W. Page Society, for example, I don't think there was a single senior in-house professional with the words "public relations" in his or her title. Someone will doubtless correct me if I am wrong.)

In addition to the desire to distance themselves from the publicists-pretending-to-be-PR-people, however, I wonder if there was not in fact some pressure inside corporations for the function to actually become corporate communications rather than public relations. Which is to say, I wonder whether most companies are not, in fact, far more comfortable communicating (by which I, and they, really mean disseminating their message) than they are relating?

That may have been the case 20 years ago, when the change in nomenclature took place. But it cannot be the case in the new social media age: communicating (at least the half of it that communications departments typically engage in: talking) is not a particularly useful skill. Relating is. Maybe it's time to reclaim the words "public relations" and, more importantly, the philosophical principles that underpin those words.