Functions Of Public Relations

Functions of Public Relations

Functions of Public Relations

The functions of public relations take many forms in different organizations. Public relations specialists handle organizational and societal functions such as media, community, consumer, industry, and governmental relations as well as political campaigns, interest-group representation, conflict mediation, or employee and investor relations. They help an organization and its public become accustomed and adapt to each other (U.S. DOL, 2005).

Public relations specialists handle organizational functions such as media, publicity, employee relations, investor relations, community relations, consumer relations and government affairs. However, public relations are not only about telling the organization's side of the story. A very important part of the job is to understand the feelings and worries of consumers, employees, and other groups. To get better communication, public relations specialists create and preserve cooperative relationships with representatives of community, consumer, employee, and public interest groups, and with representatives from magazines and newspapers as well as broadcast journalism (U.S. DOL, 2005).

To advertise the interest of a company, the public relations department is mainly concerned with the preparation of verbal and written materials, which are intended to influence the public. From a societal approach, as defined, public relations are the firm's communications and relationships with its diverse publics. The publics can include customers, suppliers, stockholders, employees, the government, the general public, and the society in which the organization operates (Van Hook, 2005). The public relations of a company are fundamental to the company's success. Whether the public relations department is formal or informal, it is critical that the organization is concerned with the public relations.

Social responsibility is referred to often from a societal approach to an organization. It is not that the functional approach does not believe in social responsibility, it is just not the focal point of their theory nor is it a theoretical concept that they often use. In social systems theory, social responsibility is considered a symbolic medium of the public communication systems. In the new social order, social responsibility has replace the law of regulating mechanism and plays a major role in adapting social systems to each other. This has been functional to organizations and is used from this societal approach to explain the functions of the organization using this underlying principle (Public, 2005).

Another societal approach concept used in the organizational literature are public affairs and issues management. The focus is on public affairs and issues management versus marketing or investor mismanagement. Issues management is the method of prioritizing and proactively addressing public policy and reputation issues that can take an affect on an organizations success. Many big companies use issues management procedures to keep all their external relations activities focused on challenges and opportunities that have a high priority (Public, 2005).

Media, community, consumer, industry, and governmental relations, which include political campaigns, interest-group representation and conflict mediation, employee or investor relations are all organizational functions handled by Public relations specialist. When the term relations are used, it is often from this viewpoint. This is not an exact science but it is one way to try to separate the two approaches. This is just the nature of the theory and the theoretical concept that the theorists from this approach make use of to describe organizations and their functions. Every theory has concepts and terms unique to the theory, but often others are taken from existing theories (Van Hook, 2005).

A Media relation is organizational because it is considered an organization function from this viewpoint. Investor relations are considered an organization function from this perspective. They are focused and use terms that stand for their theory and ideas about how to explain organizational functions. To make sure the organization has a strong public image Public relations consist of constant activities. Public relations activities include helping the public to understand the organization and its products. Public relations often depend on designing and implementing a public relations plan, which is similar to effective advertising and promotions. The plan regularly includes an explanation describing what, whom, how you want to get across who is responsible for the various activities and when. The plan should also include a budget to see how much money is going to be needed to fund these activities. A media plan and calendar can be very useful because it helps identify what media plans were used and when. Newspapers, magazines and