1.2. What is Public Relations?
You have news to share—information that
would benefit the Linux community. You have some idea of the
people you want to reach with your news and views. Now the
problem becomes: How to reach them in the most effective way? The
better the communications between you and your audience, the
higher the profile of your organization.
Generating publicity is not as complex as you might think.
Most of the success of public relations centers on knowing what
to do and when. Implementing these initiatives can dramatically
increase awareness of your business.
Public relations (PR) is often confused with advertising,
merchandising, promotion, or any of a dozen other buzz words in
the marketing communications vocabulary. (By the way,
marketing communications is a broad term that encompasses all of these disciplines.)
Public relations is about doing something newsworthy that
you want to communicate, and then telling your audience (or very
likely, several audiences) what you have done.
One of the most common public relations vehicles is the
brief "New Product" announcement
you see in magazines and trade publications. Often only a few
lines or a paragraph in length, these announcements herald the
launch of future products or services. These short announcements
are typically triggered by a new product release, which may be
accompanied by various forms of communications such as internal
announcements to the organization's employees
and external news releases to the media, stockholders, user
community, and other groups. News releases trigger a chain of
events that result in visibility.
There are some important terms that may help you understand
public relations. News media
refers to all the places where people read or hear about news,
including newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and the
Internet.
A news release, sometimes referred to as a press release, is a printed or
electronic document issued by organizations who want to
communicate news to editors, journalists, industry writers, or
other media groups. Journalists write about the story for
publication (if it is considered newsworthy), while editors
control whether the story actually appears in a newspaper,
magazine, website, or broadcast.
A news release contains important facts, quotes from key
people, dates that the news happened (or will happen), and
contacts for additional information. The news release is concise
and usually runs no longer than two pages.
Public relations, then, can be thought of as the process
that delivers your news to the people you want to reach through a
broad, influential, and far-reaching news media community.
