Define Pr

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.

- Abraham Lincoln -

"Fundamentally, public relation is relations with publics." (Public Relations Writing, 2000, p.10) The publics can be any group of people that shares a common interest.

Through communication in different ways organizations want to establish, develop and maintain a positive relationship with different groups.

This is just a basic definition of public relation but in fact it is much more challenging to really define and practice public relations.

Due to the world's rapid change through advanced technology public relation became more and more a global activity. Nowadays it is one of the fastest-growing fields of professional employment worldwide. The public relation profession has to be constantly adapted to the needs of society through which different people and different organizations from different countries form a variety of definitions.

Public relation is no longer considered as one-way but two-way conversation. One-way communication such as war propaganda wants to gain a unit public opinion by influencing and persuading the public opinion to increase the organization's business whereby two-way communication creates mutual understanding with the idea that an organization also changes its attitude and behaviour constantly and not just the target audience.

Although marketing and public relations have different outputs of reaching out to public through communication, yet there is confusion between marketing and public relations. Before defining public relations with all its wants and needs it is important to understand the difference between those two.

Public relation is concerned with building relationships and generating goodwill for the organization. Marketing instead is concerned with customers and selling products and services.

Anyways, through different definitions this essay gives you an overview and a better understanding of what public relations is and does. It shows you the importance and function of public relations in an organization especially in today's world.

"Public relations is the management of communication between an organization and its publics." (Grunig & Hunt's, 1984)

First of all it is important to recognize that pubic relation is a management function.

The success of a company depends on relationships with the public such as consumers, suppliers, investors, employees, government and media. Since public relation practitioners are the once who do the actual communication between their organization and its public it is obvious that public relation is a management function.

"Public Relations is the management function that establishes and maintains mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and the publics on whom its success or failure depends." (Effective Public Relations, 2005, p.1)

Public relation is a management function that helps achieve organizational objectives, define philosophy, and facilitate organizational change. Public relations practitioners communicate with all relevant internal and external publics to develop positive relationships and to create consistency between organizational goals and societal expectations.

The organization's philosophy for example is established through the help of public relation practitioners. Structuring a company philosophy and carrying out that philosophy in practice makes an organization trustable to the public. Without that basis an organization would not be able to integrate financial, management and internal and external relations.

Public relation practitioners also help an organization to adapt to a changing environment as well as successfully competing in today's market.

"Public Relations is the distinctive management function which helps establish and maintain lines of communication, understanding, acceptance an cooperation between an organization and its publics; involves the management of problems or issues; helps management to keep informed on and responsive to public opinion; defines and emphasizes the responsibility of management to serve the public interest; helps management keep abreast of and effectively utilize change, serving as an early warning system to help anticipate trends; and uses research and sound and ethical communication as its principal tools." (Rex F. Harlow, 1976)

PR is an important tool within an internal communication and external communication. Different types of tools that has been used to emphasis intermediary between the management and the employees within the organizations. From there, internal relations such as communication, understanding, acceptance an cooperation between an organization and its publics; involves the management of problems or issues will be reduced.

Public relations involves counselling organization leaders, and implementing planned programs of action which will serve both the organization's and the public's interest and the multiphased function of communication management that is involved in researching, analyzing, affecting and reevaluating the relationships between an organisation and its various publics.

Different functions of PR in role playing in an organization, they requires PR practitioners to diversify different roles in an organization such as management of relationships between individuals and public - people who are somehow mutually involved or interdependent with the organization. Part of PR is also to plan and sustain program as part of an organization's management as well as to deal with relationships between