What Is Public Relations?

"Public Relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics." - CIPR

Public relations is about building and maintaining reputations, reputations that are built on fact and maintained by trust.

We see what happens when brands and businesses do not the importance of Public Relations and communications with their "publics"; anyone they need to communicate effectively with including stakeholders, employees, customers and the media into consideration. One of the most obvious and urgent impacts being PR disasters and cristes.  By understanding PR you can understand how it can be used to improve your business credibility, raise visibility and enhance communications. Whether you choose to hire a PR Agency, publicist, PR consultant to help you with your public relations or you choose to do it yourself it is important to understand the fundamentals.

In this video Ariatu PR Founder, Ronke Lawal, provides a simple yet hopefully effective definition of Public Relations (PR) and it's overall impact on society at large. Whilst we work primarily with business clients it is still important to understand the influence that PR has on our communities and society as a whole.