Why PR?

I’ll tell you why. If you checked out my bio page, then you already know that I am a PR major. I chose public relations as my path and as a career. But since studying it in school, I became discouraged that maybe PR wasn’t really what I wanted to do. So I went out on my own to find exactly what I wanted to do in a field that could really be morphed and moved into any industry.

From there, I found digital PR and have been as happy as a clam since then. But since reading Seth Godin’s blog post “The difference between PR and publicity,” I put some more thought behind why I chose PR and why I stuck with it.

Think about it, when you are 18, you have to choose a school and soon after choose a major. And you don’t really get the full picture of what this major entails until the 3^rd or 4^th class. And all these lessons are being taught along side of the life lessons involving moving away from home, being independent, and all of that other coming of age stuff. I know, l know, life’s soo hard, blah blah blah.

Basically, PR from my basic pre-college understanding of it four years ago was building a story of someone or something, being able to mold something out of nothing, making something worthy of true attention all through communicating through various mediums and connecting to people that otherwise would be disconnected. That is what I thought it was. I thought it was both protecting and promoting reputations through communications.

Now, in retrospect, it’s obvious that digital PR was my end game, but at the time I just became frustrated. Class after class, we wrote fictional press releases and backgrounders in a systematic way.  Some stories were told, but those stories have been told.

Godin’s post differentiates between publicity and PR and sometimes that line is blurred without a second thought. In class, publicity was what I learned, in my internships and general interests, stories and PR is what I yearned and ultimately learned.

Twitter, especially in its stage as being mainstreamingly new, is reverting PR professionals back to being publicity hungry. Creating company Twitter accounts that just spews out links is annoying and wrong. Twitter can be a great storytelling tool. Except, each page is 140 characters long. As a heads up, I have a feeling I’m going to be ranting and raving on Twitter a lot more in the near future, so brace yourselves.

Image Source: Druss101’s Flickr