I mentioned last week that I was surprised that so many public relations people were enthusiastic about participating in the annual ad industry awards event at Cannes. For one thing, the event is opening itself up to PR people (not coincidentally) at a time when advertising is losing its central role in the marketing mix; for another, it is unlikely, because of its focus on marketing, ever to represent the breadth of what public relations people can bring to the corporate realm.

It would disingenuous, however, to ignore the one very obvious benefit of attending the event: the ability to mix and mingle with marketing thought leaders who represent--and help choose PR firms for--some of the most significant global brands. (Of course that benefit does not extend to the awards competition; Cannes does not allow clients to serve on the awards jury.)

But if PR people want a global forum at which they can mingle with clients, perhaps it's time to consider whether it might not be better to create their own than to piggyback on an existing event, the focus of which is far from conducive to the particular strengths of this industry. The time--with social media creating a larger and more central role for the PR discipline--could hardly be more propitious.

With its focus on advertising--and on creativity, as defined by advertising people, it is unlikely that Cannes will ever focus on the topics that are of most pressing concern to public relations people (and ought to be equally high on the agenda of marketing folks). Among them, off the top of my head:
• The growing convergence of brand marketing and corporate reputation;
• The need to harness employees as brand ambassadors;
• The need to protect brands from and during crisis;
• The use of social media to build consumer relationships rather than as another communication channel;
• The need to develop new metrics that emphasize engagement and advocacy over reach and frequency;

In other words, it's not difficult to imagine an agenda that addresses the most significant issues facing the PR and marketing communities, and would attract the most important corporate communications professionals as well as brand marketers.

The question is whether the PR industry has the confidence--at this time of unprecedented opportunity--to create such an event, or whether it will continue to ride the coat-tails of an ever-weaker ad industry.

The large agencies--they are the ones with the money and the motivation to make something like this happen, partnering with groups like the Arthur W. Page Society and the European Association of Communications Directors--need to ask themselves two questions: "If not us, who? If not now, when?"

The Independent has an intriguing story that takes Edelman's recent hiring of two high-profile U.K. journalists--the BBC's Richard Sambrook as director of content and this week the FT's venerable Stefan Stern as director of strategy--to look at the changing role of PR, and to ask whether we are seeing "the emergence of a new hybrid of 'journalicist' media workers, who combine editorial and public relations skills to tell a client's stories in credible 'publicitage.' Or is it just PR playing at advertising?"

Quite aside from the coining of two ugly new words I trust will never become part of common usage, I'm not sure that's the right question. At the very least I would have phrased it differently.

The changes in PR's role are coming about because of the convergence of several trends: fragmentation of the media and growing consumer sophistication, which together render advertising less effective (and less cost-effective); increased transparency, driven by intense NGO scrutiny of business as well as by new information channels; the decline of mainstream media credibility and the rise of social media (which I would argue are separate--though not unrelated--trends); and the heightened expectations of consumers, both in terms of corporate behavior and engagement.

All of these trends impact on the primary role of public relations, which involves building, nurturing and leveraging the relationships between institutions and their publics.

The reason that PR has traditionally had such a close, symbiotic relationship with the media is not that public relations and publicity are synonymous but because the media delivered two things that public relations needed: the ability to reach a large audience and the credibility to offer a "third-party endorsement" that would render stories more powerful and believable.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media has been losing its monopoly on both audience and credibility, while new digital and social media channels have offered PR people the ability to reach audiences directly, while also creating new "opinion leaders"--bloggers and other social media influentials--who can offer the valuable third-party endorsement that used to be the exclusive province of journalists.

This certainly isn't a matter of "PR playing at advertising." There is clearly an opportunity--as Sambrook says in the article--for PR people to create the kind compelling content that reaches consumers directly, but that content will have to earn the attention of important stakeholders (rather than buying it, as advertising has done) and to do so will need to be informative as well as entertaining and--most critically--about engaging consumers rather than simply delivering a message.

It is this ability--the ability to engage, to spark conversation, to initiate a dialogue between client and consumer and ultimately to build relationships--that will define public relations going forward, and differentiate it from both journalism and advertising.

Two pieces in the January/February issue of Harvard Business Review focus on the importance of customers, and both--I think--make the same mistake.

The first, by Roger Martin of the University of Toronto, makes the case that companies have been focused on shareholder value for the past three decades, to the detriment of their shareholders--an argument with which I have a good deal of sympathy.

Martin draws on some historic data showing that shareholder returns actually went down during the "shareholder value era" (which he defines as stretching from 1977 to 2008) to make the case that "to create shareholder value, you should instead aim to maximize customer satisfaction."

I think Martin is on to something, but I would make the case that companies should in fact be focused on the needs of all stakeholders: employees, customers, shareholders and--in today's hyper-transparent social media age--communities.

Martin touches on this possibility, but dismisses it in a sidebar that argues "there can be only one goal," or more specifically that companies "can maximize only one variable." That may be true, but it doesn't prove that customer satisfaction is the one variable that companies should be maximizing. More important, it doesn't prove that maximizing a single variable is the best approach to creating a successful, sustainable business.

Indeed, in arguing for a shift from focusing exclusively on shareholders to focusing exclusively on customers, it seems to me that Martin is simply creating a new variation on the same mistake. (Consider: Martin makes the case that focusing on customers will create a better return for investors; I could make a similar case that focusing on employees will create a better experience for customers.)

Managing the conflicting demands of multiple stakeholders is, it seems to me, what makes management challenging and interesting. Any attempt to reduce that task to a single dimensional is an over-simplification.

In the second article, Roland Rust, Christine Moorman and Guarav Halla (University of Maryland, Duke University and consulting firm Knowledge Kinetics respectively) make the case that companies need to reorganize their marketing to put "cultivating relationships ahead of building brands."

Again, I think the authors are half right. The idea that there needs to be (and for many companies, already is) a focus on relationships is relatively uncontroversial. But I'm not sure why the emphasis is exclusively on customer relationships. To my mind, companies need to reorient themselves around managing their relationships with all of their key stakeholders.

There is a function in most companies dedicated to that idea. Now what's that called again....

Public relations ranks among the 50 best careers of 2010, according to U.S. News & World Report, which should be good news for all of those wishing good riddance to 2009.

U.S. News expects the public relations industry to rebound strongly this year, and so do I. Every major trend--the rise of social media, declining public confidence in major institutions, increased transparency--suggests that building stronger relationships between organizations and their stakeholders will be vital to any success those organizations (be they corporations, governments, or non-profits) enjoy in the coming decade.

If you want more reason to believe that the immediate future is bright, two articles in the mainstream media--one on either side of the Atlantic--suggests that public relations is gaining a little respect from those on the other side of the media divide.

Paul Argenti has an impressive piece in the FT--drawing on the ideas presented in his new book--on the new communications challenges facing companies in the 21st century. "In addition to rethinking the definition of communication, the best companies are rethinking its structure," he says. "There is a greater need for integration, collaboration and partnership among corporate leadership, human capital, finance, sales and legal teams."

It makes an interesting companion piece to this article in Forbes by the Reputation Institute's Roger Johndrow, which examines the role of the "chief reputation officer" asking who should fill that increasingly vital role. (It should be obvious. It's a tribute to the PR industry's ability to undersell itself that it isn't.)

But likely growth is not the biggest reason I'd put PR at the top of the list of the best careers.

Public relations, done right (and it will have to be done right in the high-pressure, high-stakes decade ahead of us) aligns the behavior of organizations with the expectations of the society in which they operate. It's hard to think of any function more vital to solving the problems we currently face.

This is a decade for public relations people to finally demonstrate the value to the organizations that employ them and the world in which they live.

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.

Entergy Corporation's vice president of communications Arthur Wiese, writing at the Arthur Page Society's Page Turner blog, makes a strong argument for the integration of public relations and government relations.

Discussions with his peers led him to conclude that in most corporations the functions "not only operated separately in most companies, they rarely even conferred with each other." That was in contrast to his experience at the American Petroleum Institute, where "I was in charge of not just communications in the narrow sense but opinion research, coalition-building, grassroots organizing, community relations and advertising – all the building blocks of a well-integrated public affairs program except lobbying itself. All these functions should be seen as complementary tools for achieving a common goal... to mold public views and public action to further the interests of the company, its shareholders and its employees."

Wiese makes a strong argument, and the only quibble I have is that it doesn't go far enough.

Public relations is about building, maintaining and leveraging relationships between an organization and its publics, or stakeholders. Government is an important stakeholder for most companies, and so yes, government relations is a part of public relations. But so is investor relations. So is customer relations. So is employee relations.

Unfortunately, the public relations function has become Balkanized in most organizations, the result--in many cases--of weak senior public relations pros losing out in turf wars with stronger counterparts in other departments. And so in many corporations, investor relations reports to the CFO; employee communications reports to the head of HR; customer relations is part of marketing; government relations is part of the legal department; and PR is reduced to whatever is left: sometimes little more than media relations.

But in today's complex world, these functions can't operate at full efficiency if they are kept at arms' length from one another. The stakeholder groups overlap and interact--employees can be very powerful advocates in the government affairs arena, for example--and simply cannot be managed in isolation.

It's hard to imagine a public relations department contributing fully to the success of an organization as long as these functions remain separate.