Communication Overtones Comments
Pick up a copy of "Women and Public Relations: How Gender Influences Practice." Also see "Escape from the Velvet Ghetto."
- Amanda
Impossible. Sales or operations departments means money. It is easy to see the direct relationship between actions at those areas. It is a matter of results that you can measure in terms of money (if you do this you can earn this amount, if you don´t, maybe yo can lose)...And talking about the past, because I did this I earned this money...
But in Corporate Communications or PR how can you measure our actions in money? If you did 200 press releases how much money did your company earn?
Benito Castro, Seville, Spain, Europe.
What I take from this is that PR jobs are less important overall to a company’s or organization's structure.
I used to argue this point 10 years ago when we were trying to figure out how to measure our worth as a PR office. Sure we were making placements, but all we had to show for that was a few clippings.
The real measurement for most CEOs is how did you improve the bottom line, and that is where we have failed ourselves because we haven't found a way to show how relationship building and maintenance improves the cash flow.
Also, this means that CEOs will continue to look down on PR as something less important than all other input centers and therefore they will believe it must be relegated to the less important employees - women.
I agree with you that this impacts all of us, women or men, because we understand how important our function is to the corporate structure, but we haven't done a stellar job of selling it. See, you were right. I'm going to need to know more about Marcom at some point!
Well, one problem is the stereotypical view of PR as being a "pink industry," that it is dominanted by women. Not sure how statisically true that is, but I think that is the perception.
Another is one hit on by Michael: Our lack of being able to justify in $$ the impact of public relations. Because we are about perceptions, messages, information, awareness and other intangible qualities, it's not easy to measure success in terms of the bottomline.
I have seen stories and trends (sorry, didn't post them to Delicious) about the growing importance of PR (at least v advertising). So, there is hope. The successful companies get it and don't care if a man or a woman is in charge.
We just have keep the effort up -- and practice what we preach: Use our own PR skills to promote the importance of PR.
Mike
Thanks for the interesting post. It's also a bit sad that we know things about men's and about women's brains now that we did not know 5 years ago -- but we are not applying these to help both genders to advance together. Great reminder that we need to do far more -- keep up the great site.
I can only see that the trend is there - the why, how, what... is a different matter. Our society is still 'male' when it comes to the highest posts (the soc-alled glass ceiling). Also, from the other side, I guess PR is still too often (wrongly) linked to 'entertaining' people (OK, I am oversimplifying here), and who does that better than a 'hostess'. This is of course miles away from reality and from what PR is truly all about, but the questions I hear some potential students ask when they come to open house days at our department say it all. No wonder misconceptions about PR are so widespread. But then again: it all starts there, doesn't it? If men keep away from a career in PR, the pink industry (great phrase, btw) will be there for a long time to come...
http://www.odwyerpr.com/members/
..._commentary.htm
For 20 years, the percentage of women in public relations has been exploding, worldwide. According to researcher Dr. Romy Froehlich of the University of Munich, in the U.S. it now stands at 70 percent for full-time employees and 90 percent for members of the Public Relations Student Society of America. In Australia, it’s at 80 percent and in Germany, at 68 percent.
Ellen; You bring an interesting perspective to the conversation, namely, how men and women differ in the way they see the world. I popped over to your blog see that your expertise is in brain development. Very interesting, would love to hear more on this subject from you.
Serge; Yes, popular culture and other stereotypical imaged perpetuate this problem.
Amanda; A study in 2000 also showed that 70 percent of the profession was female. I wonder what it is today. I think it is time for an update in that research. However, this revelation alone does not solve the issue. I still think that the marginalization of PR profession and the women in it goes back to the fact that we need to tie what we do with business outcomes.
The bottom-line is, PR needs to get more sophisticated. Ironically, PR professionals are supposed to be the best communicators in the company. However, there seems to be a disconnect between PR and senior management, because PR can’t communicate effectively to the powers that be.
Now that I identified the problem, how do you communicate to the senior management you ask?
Simply put -- charts and graphs -- the language of those who make the decisions and control the money flow. However, the charts and graphs must be able to tell a story and the information must be actionable or it means nothing to them.
This demonstrates ROI and gives the people who are accountable, accountability. Therefore, it makes them look good and by proxy, it makes you look good. And more importantly, indispensable, because you are now perceived to provide real value.
Where do you get this intelligence to build charts and graphs?
Media clippings, blogs, and broadcast summaries can be purchased, and in some cases, can be accessed for free.
Using this information in combination with your own business logic and intelligence, you can provide insight to trends, gauge effectiveness of campaigns, and in some cases attach dollar amounts to media coverage.
Now that you shored up your own credibility, where do you go from there?
Why stop with your own intelligence? It’s now time shore up other departments with the information you’ve just gathered and compiled.
Help out the marketing department by providing competitive analysis and insuring brand integrity. Help sales out by identifying leads and providing real life success stories and third-party endorsement from respected industry analysts.
You can even cross-reference your intelligence with other departments’ intelligence to get even more out of your information, which will further ingratiate you with senior management.
My MediaMiser colleagues and I have written a couple articles to help people better understand how proper media analysis can help turn news into knowledge.
Relationship Management: Knowing and Communicating with Your Key Publics
Communications Analysis: Real-Time
Brand Management - Beyond Marketing
Also, we’ll be launching our own blog site to help develop new concepts and ideas. Great topic.
Best of luck,
Brett
Wow Brett; that was an entire blog post. I look forward to hearing what you have to say and will check out your articles. I think that you are right on though. We all need some business acumen, and to speak the language of management.
I'll probably spin it out as a blog post.
It's a great topic.
Brett; I hope you do, we need to talk about this more.
Hi, there are lots of jobs search in india for new skills. So develop your new skills.
replicawell
Louis Vuitton Grmaud Ngrimaud
Louis Vuitton Roadster
Commenting by HaloScan
