PR, and my feet

I’ve been away to a music festival in Wales – called Sheep Music – for the past three days.  The day before that, we had our office party. So, I’m a bit tired and emotional today.

I had an interesting conversation with our legal counsel at the party. Turns out when he started, he didn’t have a clue what PR was about either. People would ask him “So, what exactly is PR anyway?” and he would blather about ‘influencing the media’ without really knowing what he meant. Over time he has a clearer idea but his experience very much echoes mine.

I think the problem with PR is that it’s invisible. One can picture ‘an advert’, which I guess you could call the atom of the advertising industry. So, one can imagine that it’s quantifiable (how many adverts, where are they, how many people saw them etc) and people ‘get it’. But PR is almost the exact opposite. It’s only after time in the industry that you start being able to spot what looks like PR-originated material – the polls, the research results, generally the ‘soft’ news.

So given that PR is invisible, and that I class good communication as invisible, does this mean PR is good communication?

Let’s get back to basics. Some things are much easier to understand. My feet, for example. I want this blog to be professionally edifying and stimulating but I just couldn’t resist posting these pictures. One is of my feet on Offa’s Dyke circa 2002. The other is of my feet circa July 21 2007. Given recent weather conditions, see if you can guess which is which. And I know I’d like to preserve my anonymity so if you can identify me by my feet, well I guess that’s a risk I have to take.

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