Kevin Mercuri

We all know what Public Relations is, right? After all, some of us majored in it back in college. Marketing VP’s argue for a PR line item in each year’s budget, and every entrepreneur in the US understands that they can’t succeed without PR.

Yet, PR is one of those elusive terms. Ask four professionals to define it, and you’re likely to get five different answers.

Is PR merely getting coverage in the news media? Is it the act of forging positive relationships with news media to ensure consistent recognition? Is it the act of creating buzz and associating your product or service with the industry sector? Or is it a combination of these and other elements?

I learned how abstract PR can be to some when I witnessed my mother’s attempts at explaining what I do for a living:

Nosey Neighbor: “What does Kevin do for work? He was always such a good communicator.”

Beloved Mom: “Ummm, he works with news people. Something with big companies in the news. I’m not sure.”

I came to the conclusion that not everyone understands what us PR people do for a living. Being a Type-A personality, I decided to embark upon an educational effort—of epic proportions.

Fast forward a few months, and I came upon the brilliant idea of representing the practice of PR through the medium of interpretive dance. I commissioned dancers and a choreographer, arranged for a performance space, and prepared for a one-night performance at a client’s launch party.

Show time arrived and the dancers began “pitching and massaging” stories and…well, the performance got cancelled halfway through the first act. Seems I was violating some decency provision left over from the puritan era, and the client didn’t want to be associated with—as we call it here in NYC—fringe theatre.

All Mom could ask after hearing about the performance was, “You don’t really go to a reporter’s office and give them shoulder massages, do you?” My co-workers think I’m a soft-core pornographer in my spare time.

Back to square one. I decided to take a less artistic approach and design an Executive’s Guide to PR. Here are some highlights:

• Public Relations is developing a positive, consistent message for a client and disseminating that message, over time, through key news media, generating measurable results that impact the client’s bottom line.
• Public Relations practitioners are constantly communicating with the news media, creating opportunities for coverage and managing their client’s image through careful strategy.
• Public Relations is creating the all-too-elusive buzz about your service or product. Clip books full of articles aren’t worth much if your brand does not become a household or office-wide word.
• Public Relations is the act of sustaining that buzz by constantly massaging and updating your image with fresh stories.

I’m still working on the Executive’s Guide. I expect to have it complete before I go home for Thanksgiving.