Public Relations

Public Relations deals with the public image of organizations, non-profit or business and even high-profile people like politicians or celebrities.

Generally, Public Relations is defined as the management of the communication process which takes place between a certain organization and its various types of public. Public Relations create events and generate subjects which are news worthy, in order to capture the attentions of the media, through which to finally reach the publics. The publicity created using Public Relations is not directly paid and is mainly based on the substance of the subject and how interesting it is considered for the public. Among the Public Relations main tasks are conferences, press conferences, media relations, crisis communications, employee communication and social media engagement.

The European perception on Public Relations does not limit only to the dialog between the organizations and its publics, but it also refers to what the organizations reflect about themselves to the outer or inner publics. According to this view, organizational behavior bares consequences both private and public. In their book on Public Relations, Young and Philips discourse on the new form of practicing Public Relations, via Internet. According to them, social media has become an important tool for Public Relations, together with other types of channels and communication platforms like PCs, tablets, mobile phones.

Public Relations is responsible for the communication with customers, employees, voters, investors, general public, depending on the type of the organization. Any organization which depends on a certain degree on how it is perceived by public opinion, it has a level of public relations activity. Corporate communications involve different disciplines related to public relations, such as internal communications, labor relations, investor relations, analyst relations and, of course, media relations

There are also other public relations disciplines:

• Crisis public relations – dealing with unexpected events with negations connotations for the organization
• Financial public relations – dealing with communicating with business reporters
• Government relations – communication with government departments in order to influence policymaking
• Consumer/lifestyle public relations – making a product or service visible to the public through the means of publicity, rather than advertising
• Industry relations – communicating with trade bodies