Closing the Gap
by TomToronto
It’s good to be back to blogging! It has been a while. March is a hectic month, especially if you’re a student or an accountant. If you’re a part-time student working at an accounting firm, well, you get the idea. I have missed blogging though, so I’m glad to get back to it. I’m equally glad that the update to WordPress 2.5 was painless and extremely easy, thanks mainly to my hosting server Host Papa. I’m not sure if other hosts have these features, but there was an easy, one button upgrade option in the control panel. I was dreading uploading and overwriting all those files in the root directory.
While I was absent from my RSS reader, Onedegree added me to their blogroll! I only realized thanks to a healthy spike in site traffic. I’m honoured, many thanks to everyone over there. Full disclosure: there was an open call for the blogroll, and I applied, but I’m still happy to have made the cut.
Now on to some actual content. While researching and writing a final project for a PR class, I found a quote about Issues Management that I think is really poignant. It was in a textbook, but it can also be found on the Issues Management Council’s website. It defines Issues Management as:
“Closing the gap between corporate action and stakeholder expectation.”
I think this quote is really appropriate for Public Relations in general as well, and if you exchange “corporate” for the organization you represent, it’s a great one-line definition for a lot of communications work. It implies the two-way communication model and bridging role that PR tries to embody. It’s not about influencing stakeholder expectation to suit corporate needs, it’s about listening to those stakeholders and working as a mediator between the two. At times that will mean adapting the organization to suit the stakeholders/publics, as much as companies may be loathe to do so.
This is one of those things that I love about PR. It’s not based on pushing products or transactions. It’s about relationships and cultures. It’s about Real People.
More to come about transactions vs. relationships in the near future! Thanks for reading.