Challenges Facing Public Relations
As we speed further into the 21st century, more of the old world problems that apply to public relations are phasing out and more new problems are becoming more and more obvious. Some things, however, remain practically the same. One of the issues that is just as relevant now as it was 40 years ago is the matter of recruiting quality staff.
There are a few stereotypes that stand in the way of getting a higher number of people interested in the field of public relations. The leading stereotype that they look to overcome is the idea that public relations is a career to follow if you are possibly not smart enough for mathematics or chemistry, since all it appears they do is look at trends and complete biased press releases painting their companies in a positive light. Universities can and some already do combat this by improving the weaknesses of the applicants that struggle in these areas by requiring statistics and math courses as part of an intensive curriculum. Some public relations professionals have specialized themselves in a mathematics and statistics field as a separator, and work as freelance agents and are more flexible and specialized than the standard hire.
Some companies that are in need of public relations employees are actively looking for more ethnically diverse employees to add to their work force. The thought behind this is possibly to better represent themselves to the public, while also allowing those employees to voice their opinions and tastes, better reflecting how the diverse world outside the office might think and feel about a certain product or a company as a whole. Another reason for this move is possibly to better understand some ideas that might be not offensive to one race of persons, but perceived as wildly insensitive to others. The hope is to catch these miscues before releasing them to the public and causing a crisis.
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A completely different problem facing the public relations community is the issue of fake news, and how to combat it and overcome the obstacle. Fake news is becoming a larger and larger problem each day, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. People are more prone to listen to and trust bad news, regardless of whether or not the news is actually true. People are especially not going to listen to companies official statements because they often feel those are all just lies, when they would rather listen to how their Facebook friend shared a link of an anonymous article claiming a certain product gave them cancer. Public relation agencies and companies are combating these with a few different methods. First, for the small scale incidents, they often choose to ignore the issue, and over time it will fade away and people will forget. For larger issues, companies often just go to lawyers to handle the cases due to the defamation.
The public relations industry is one of the fastest growing industries out there, and with every day it grows larger, more issues will prevent themselves. Industry leaders just have to hope to stay ahead of the curve.
- GH
