by Tim Beyers

Created on: August 27, 2008

According to the WordNet dictionary, public relations is promotion. Spin designed to produce favorable news coverage and, consequently, public goodwill. Wrong.

But don't take my word for it. The late Edward Bernays - author of the books "Crystallizing Public Opinion," "Propaganda," and "The Engineering of Consent" - had an entirely different definition. "A public relations person, who calls themselves [sic] that, is an applied social scientist who advises a client or employer on the social attitudes and actions to take to win the support of the publics upon whom his, or her, or its viability depends," Bernays said in a 1990 interview with Stuart Ewen, author of "PR! A Social History of Spin."

I had the excellent fortune of meeting Bernays as a graduate student studying PR at Syracuse. He was 100 at the time. And yet the answer he gave Ewen is essentially the same answer he gave to my friend and I on a late fall afternoon at his Cambridge home.

Over the next 12 years of my career as a PR consultant, I sought to be as Bernays had envisioned: a counselor with an informed view of what my clients faced so that I, in turn, could be a better advocate.

Advocacy is the soul of PR as much as social science is its heart. Here are three principles of advocacy for the modern practice of PR:

1. STORYTELLING. If the business of public relations is to influence publics, as Bernays says, then the modern PR professional must be a master storyteller and a collector of first-person testimonials in support of his client's products and positions. These are the hooks that grab prospects exposed to sales and press promotions.

2. RESEARCH. It's not enough for PR pros to know who their publics are. They must also know what they do, what they consume, what they like, what they loathe, and, most important, what influences them. This is where research comes in. Surveys are the most common tool for this type of study though content analyses of relevant press coverage can also yield results. For example, a feature story on how older homeowners are preparing for retirement might interest the PR counsel whose client is in the wealth management business.

3. TRUTH. Advocacy fails when advocates are caught lying, and they usually are. The good news? Puffery almost never works anyway. Stories have a way of ringing true, even in PR. That's why the press release that features quantifiable customer success always attracts more interest than the one that features a sexy new but unreleased product.

Speeches, press releases, media interviews, surveys; these tools of PR are all useful in their own ways. But it's the timeless principles of PR - storytelling, research, and truth - that cultivate the sort of effective advocacy that Bernays envisioned in a career that spanned more than 70 years and which could never be captured in a one-line dictionary definition.

Sources:

WordNet definition for public relations:
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s= public%20relations

Excerpt from PR! A Social History Of Spin:
http://home.bway.net/drstu/chapter.html

Biograph y of Edward Bernays:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

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