Marketing and PR – Where’s the line?

There seems to be a slight misunderstanding of the Public Relations art. The closely related Marketing Dept. are having trouble distinguishing the difference between our practices and theirs.
The key difference between the two can be established by their objectives. Marketing efforts are in place to facilitate the sales process, whereas PR focuses on building and strengthening relationships between the company and its stakeholders.

A company stakeholder can be anyone who is affected by, or interested in the activities and/or products of the company. A stakeholder can be those who happen to live in the surrounding community, employees, customers, shareholders, investors, etc.

There is a fair deal of elements of each job function that are almost identical. In Marketing and PR, we focus on communicating the messages of the company or brand to the most relevant audiences. We both conduct research to decide what those messages should be and determine who should receive them. We both plan and staff company-sponsored events and trade shows, and we both help create content for marketing collateral, assist with advertising and put together similar types of proposals, budgets and reports.

The new online element to PR determines its unique purpose. The intention of social networking is not to sell products directly or to advertise but to create a relationship and understanding between consumer and brand.

The purpose of marketing is to broadcast and sell to the masses. It has one aim in mind, and that is profit. PR however is more than just that. It is listening to and monitoring the brands identity and audiences. The role is also to respond and react to audiences to ensure the company’s reputation is protected. Public relations has come as far as building online communities for brands to monitor and allowed easy two way communication and to maintain long term relationships.

A recent definition of marketing published by the AMA (The Arts Marketing Associations) has developed the idea of traditional marketing to sound more public focused:
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.
PR professional Bill Sledzik comments on this definition on his blog: “Now, tell me our ‘evil twins’ haven’t been reading the PR textbooks... I’m not sure a power trip is a good way to launch a relationship or to serve “society at large.” So I’m hopeful our friends in marketing will just continue to sell stuff. They’re damned good at it — especially when PR helps them!”

What the *Tweet* is Social Networking?

Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, MySpace, Hi5… What’s it all about? The social network phenomenon has expanded over the past few years and has become a part of every contemporary PR practice.
Like many of my peers at university, I joined Facebook to interact with other students and to share my daily on goings with the rest of my online ‘friends’. There was no particular reason to why I joined, other than curiosity and boredom. But before I knew it, I was completely addicted to this cyber craze and like many others, I found myself checking my profile every single day.
The website was set up in the US by four Harvard University students with the intention to encourage students to get to know one another online. It was once restricted to only university members but it now has over 400million members worldwide and has become a social network phenomenon.
I was soon joining ‘Fan Groups’ and ‘Discussion boards’. I was being invited to events, clubs and being advertised products and services targeted specifically to my age, location and interests. I had no idea that I was being targeted or that I had become duped by new age online public relations.
Since starting Public Relations course, I have been looking more closely at online activity on corporate social networking pages. As well as Facebook, micro blogging site Twitter has become a huge part of PR practice.
These social sites are an organic way of monitoring the reputation of an organisation, consumer reactions, product evaluation and recognising market trends. Companies are also able to create a personality for their brand and allow their audiences to communicate directly.
I recently joined twitter but have not been able to get grips with micro blogging or better known as ‘Tweeting’. I’ve realised that is an acquired skill to be able to ‘tweet’ effectively, in order to communicate and interact with the online community.
Whether or not social networking is a trend that might soon die out is yet to be seen. It is growing more popular every day and reaching global masses.
It has become an acceptable way for both consumers and businesses to be self indulgent and creates a personal relationship between the two. It is no wonder that it has become of all major brand marketing and PR strategies.