‘PR has become a tool to sell same things repeatedly’

President of International Public Relations Association (IPRA), UK, Richard Linning, expressed concern over increased redundancy and loss of creativity in the practice of public relations (PR) as it has become a commodity and being treated as a business tool for selling the same thing over and again. 

A guest speaker at a lecture session held recently by Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication (SIMC), on its Lavale campus in Pune, Linning spoke on public relations and its importance in the success of businesses worldwide. 

Speaking about the current crisis that the PR industry is going through, Linning said, “The big loss is not monetary but is the loss of trust. The quintessential part and basis of every business is trust, which can only be built through relationships. The simple set of principles for managing these relationships, which helps the business in making money, is public relations.”

Public relation is more of a dialogue, said Linning and stressed that PR practitioners must engage and use the feedback to mould the message in a way that best suits the receiver so as to get maximum out of any discussion.

About the emergence of new media, Linning expressed his concerns over what he termed “auto-propaganda”.

“It emerges from the personalisation of our search by various Internet agencies to feed us with just what it thinks we like. This is resulting in narrowing down of our perspectives as we are not exposed to new domains of thought and expression,” he said.

Linning tagged search engine optimisation (SEO) unethical and an act of manipulating technology to grab more eyeballs. He expressed his apprehensions over the current excessive use of this tool by PR practitioners.

“The emergence of new media has made the job of PR practitioners tough as tracking of the channels, through which the news travels fast, is difficult. It is not easy to engage in a dialogue when the expression is restricted to 140 characters as on Twitter,” he said.