RoseOn Monday, Jack O’Dwyer wrote about the negative association of the word "spin" with public relations, and brought up the long-running industry debate about whether to use the name public relations to describe what PR people do. As he mentioned, the majority of top PR agencies don’t call themselves that any more. But this isn’t just due to the negative perception of PR as spin. It’s because many potential clients don’t know that PR firms provide services that weren’t previously defined as PR.

Since the profession began, there’s been a big gap in understanding between what PR people do and what the business world thinks they do. Most business people equate PR with media relations, which is only part of what we do. In recent years, the understanding gap has widened as agencies have added new digital services. As a result, many agencies have shied away from using public relations in their names to avoid the narrow definition of PR in most people’s minds.

When it became apparent that traditional advertising was losing effectiveness, several things happened at once that caused the boundaries between PR and other communications disciplines to blur:

  • Dedicated digital and social media agencies sprang up, and ad agencies either built or acquired the same services to replace lost ad revenue.
  • PR agencies started using social media as a natural new PR channel. While PR traditionally meant “earned” media, some popular bloggers with huge audiences started charging to mention products on their blogs, and the media began selling “paid content.“ Both of these are advertising and have nothing to do with earned media, but many PR agencies arrange these services.
  • In the last few years, new (or relabeled) agencies have used “inbound marketing,” and “content marketing” in their names. Both of these services are also offered by ad, digital and PR agencies.

We now have a situation where agencies are labelled with different category names, but vie with each other to sell the same services. What a mess, huh? So what should we PR agency owners call our businesses in the midst of this confusion?

Another important image concern about the term public relations is its history. It was previously synonymous with “publicity” and “publicist,” labels used in bygone days when media schmoozing (long expensive lunches, invitations to sporting events, etc.) sought to influence media coverage for clients. We PR professionals don’t consider ourselves publicists and hate those terms. Media schmoozing in PR pretty much died years ago. But we’ve all been in social situations where we explain what we do and people respond, “Oh, so you’re a publicist.” In many overseas countries, PR is still a narrow discipline that continues to include at least some schmoozing. When businesses in those countries first think about hiring a PR agency in the U.S., they’re unaware of the strategic services we offer. Their view of PR is old-fashioned publicity. By using the PR label, we create a false impression to people overseas about what we do. This misunderstanding about American PR is a problem for PR practitioners and agencies.

Some PR firms now call themselves integrated marketing agencies. But excising the term PR is throwing out the baby with the bath water. PR often has nothing to do with marketing. For example, I don’t consider reputation management, internal communications, crisis management or issues management as marketing disciplines, and I doubt many O’Dwyer readers do, either.

Part of the confusion about what to call PR is exacerbated by where it’s situated in a company. In many organizations, the communications department incorporates both marketing PR and corporate communications. Because marketing PR is included, the whole communications department often reports to marketing, although corporate and internal communications manage the company’s overall reputation and should report to the CEO. In other companies the PR staff is split by function, with some under the marketing banner and some reporting to the CEO. However, in smaller companies, the same few staff members (or just one in really small companies) handle all communications. So who should they report to and what should they be called?

I’ve observed that PR practitioners are not only labeled differently according to where in the company they work, they’re also treated differently. The corporate communications label has a higher status than PR situated in marketing departments.

Ten years ago when I founded Bridge Global Strategies, I deliberately avoided using PR in the name. Yet on our website, we describe ourselves as a PR and marketing communications company because our potential clients use those labels to search for our services. If I were starting the company now, I might use “integrated communications” in the name. It’s more accurate than “integrated marketing” and avoids the tainted PR label.

As Jack O’Dwyer pointed out, the Public Relations Society of America clings to its name and continues to emphasize its “Accreditation in Public Relations” or “APR” designation. The APR, because of the limited perception of what public relations is, arguably narrows the perception of the capabilities of those who have it. (Few PR professionals care enough to spend time pursuing an APR, anyway, since most clients and employers are not familiar with it and it isn’t an industry-wide standard.) The Council of Public Relations Firms just changed its name to The Public Relations Council, embracing the use of “public relations.” The PR industry doesn’t seem close to dumping the PR moniker, but maybe it should. The name of an industry organization should reflect the image the industry wants in the business world, and the image of PR is definitely problematical.

As Shakespeare put it in Romeo and Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” meaning the name used to describe something doesn’t really change what it is. While that’s true, the name describing our industry is perceived by many to smell foul, not sweet, so it does matter, because it has the power either to enhance or detract from the image of the profession.

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Lucy Siegel is the founder, president and CEO of Bridge Global Strategies, which specializes in PR ("integrated communications") for overseas-based companies and startups.