New Media Prof Blog

PR or Marketing?

Posted on 06. Sep, 2009 by admin in For Students, New Media

As I begin to think about the class I’m teaching this Fall at Emerson College in Boston, I can’t help but be reminded that the worlds of PR and Marketing are extremely blurred.  The class is Principles of PR, which is a big topic and there’s a lot of history and a lot of principles. We hope to discuss those that are relevant today.  Of course, I believe the landscape for marketing and PR has irrevocably changed and become intertwined forever.  Frankly, all the rules have changed: strategy, tactics, measurement. I mean just think about it – it is no longer a really big coop to get a newspaper article written about you or your company. The tools of the PR/Marketing trade, some of which are free, have created an environment without clarity in the historic sense.  I think this is all a good thing, actually, availing new opportunities.  And as we all sort them out daily, many of the ’principles’ survive. What is most important is identifying the audience (public), where they are and how best to reach them with a message worth hearing on this superhighway of information we are bombarded with every hour of each day.  This is why I tell my students, you have to break through the noise with a message in PR or Marketing. So if you spend most of your time working on the message only after researching and listening or watching to see what else is out there, you will be more successful influencing behavior. This week, our company sent out an email blast that started with the line: “This is NOT about social media.”  The response was remarkable within an hour, people were emailing and calling to say how refreshing that was in the blurr of messages about social media hitting inboxes every hour. It got attention. That’s the best PR and the best marketing.

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