PR BASICS

They will try to show them the light with regard to Effective Public Relations down and then we will do well if they get the basic book

There are four laws in the beginning of the book which are, in actual fact, about eight steps and there are so many steps missing on the lineup that any man trying to practice PR would fall on his head. They are: fact finding, plan, communicate and evaluate. Find facts about what? Actually, there are three fact finding steps.

A. Isolate what the situation is which requires some kind of fact finding.
B. Sample the opinion with regard to the situation because it might be there and might not be there at all and then you have got to evaluate so that you can advise management of the action which should be taken—or you have got to either get a policy from management or advise a policy to management with regard to this situation.

C. You are already running on management’s policy which you are interpreting and then you get into your fact finding and just start A, B, and C, then you tell them we are going to do something about this or we’re not going to do something about this situation.

Now you go into planning what you are going to do about it and then you actually should pre-test it slightly to find out if you are going to be wrong. Then you broadly communicate this situation and then, after it isn’t have broadly communicated it, you do an evaluation of the situation—NOT to find out whether we did, or not, continue, modify or department—so that we can tell management how they have to hell with the PR development of the policy of all these mismanagement—or die, to oversimplified four steps.

Right away we know a lot of people but it’s nothing in the United States. At first glance that sounds like why PR has only 37,000 PR men in a population of 200 million. that is running almost exclusively on corporations that don’t have any men that there are tremendous numbers of very big PR. And you look over and find out that they want nothing to do with them and it is sufficiently bugged that they make themselves violently unpopular with management.

Management has not spotted what is wrong but they know something is wrong with them. And nobody has an opinion. They are always popularizing and publicizing situations that I know what is wrong on.

It is quite fantastic how much trouble a PR man could make. A guy is blown up in the plant and a newspaper reporter calls up to find out about this. The PR man goes into a complete and immediate panic, does doesn’t do any fact finding, he immediately plans a campaign, he gets this campaign out and he publicizes the fact that the plant blows up people!

All these cats are taken from the field of journalism and I can’t imagine anybody who could get into more trouble than a newspaper reporter because their whole orientation is cut, rot, scandal and so on. That is their viewpoint. This has gotten into PR. The PR newspaper man only thinks in terms of “Oh, let’s get rid of the competition. Let’s put out a bunch of lies and stuff them into the papers.” And that is what they do right now and that is what PR is, and I don’t care what they say in the textbook.

So the “r” of the textbook is quite different than the “R” of the practice. But the “R” of the practice leans close, you use it for good. But if you try to get a code of ethics together for it through the textbook by saying they are just for technology, if you use it. The gloomy message of the book is: Well, PR is using evil, you use it for evil; the future will tell. The book is full of instances of PR knocking out competition and doing this and getting sued for it and telling lies all over the place.

If you read between the lines, it a fantastically violent scene of lies, falsity, brag, undercut, scandal—that’s the field of PR.

The trouble with PR right now is: It is something like handing some kid a pistol which has the entire cylinder area cracked. It is liable to blow the kid’s own head off or the innocent bystander’s. And the person being shot is liable to be left totally ignorant of the entire situation.

It’s a wrong book, but the practice on which it is based stinks, so there is something wrong there. It is like psychiatry; They talk about sweetness and light and all they are doing: is killing people. It’s a fantastic field.

So, if we can refine this so that we keep PR’s on the “R” and put all the steps in that are necessary to do, we’ve got it made, because PR’s has “R” input. Then we have got riches and we have got all the empirical findings of this subject which we define down to a point where it won’t backfire.