"No Amount of Good PR Can ..." (You Know The Rest)

By Gnosis Arts Media Group
http://gnosisarts.com/home/Internet_PR

There is a popular saying among PR pros: "No amount of good PR will make a bad product good." This scene from the now off the air TV series "West Wing" illustrates this point very well. It shows that public relations isn't just about gaining more publicity, winning more awards, or improving a client's reputation. Rather, good PR is also about improving a product, service or organization from the inside out.

Situations like the one above are the reason why some PR professionals are adamant about redefining PR.

To these purists, PR isn't just about "publicity and promotions". These PR specialists insist that, while PR does involve maintaining a good reputation for a business, it's more about sustaining the relationships between the business and its key constituencies (i.e., it's "publics").

In order to do that, purists say, PR professionals sometimes have to act as a sort of "voice of conscience" for an organization (albeit more tactfully than C.J. did in this clip!)

To act as the "conscience of the organization" compels us to make tough decisions. Those PR pros who are driven by ethics may, along with C.J., feel that the type of PR the antagonists here are after is in fact "beneath them," as C. J. lamented.

This kind of PR prods PR professionals to challenge their clients to move toward quality and improvement, rather than just status and prestige. One can already hear the client cries, "We're paying you to get us publicity. We're not paying you to tell us to ... change!"

Ethical PR also foreshadows accountability on behalf of the organization. If our fact-finding and fact-facing investigations reveal that, "well, yeah your product really does suck," Then acting in the best interests of the client lay a duty upon us to nudge our clients in the right direction.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• internet public relations
• what is pr
• publicity
• reputation management

[diesel3replay]

Strange that CJ's boss says she's firing CJ because she needs to keep Roger's business - $20,000 a month = $240,000 a year; CJ later says she was on $550,000 a year and assuming there were other employees, as well as Isabelle, on similar or higher salaries and that the PR firm had other clients, she could easily have done without him.

[petrosianii]

@diesel3replay Thanks for the thoughtful comment, diesel! I hadn't thought of your point, but it's a good point. But being a television show, it was probably just one of those common oversights that happen all the time.

[RegularGiraffe]

"I'm ninth! ... do you know many people were ahead of me?"

"Eight?"

Hilarious

[darkboy820]

@diesel3replay Good point. It is possible that he gave them $20,000 for them to run the campaign and then paid them separately for their services.