Exploring PR's Image Problem
Bob Geller, Senior VP, Fusion NY (@rgeller)
Some people have observed that PR has an image problem. I was going to say “PR problem,” but had to stop myself. The words “PR” and “problem’ are often lumped together. The unfortunate result is that many types of problems – customer service disasters, lawsuits, etc. – are described as “PR problems” despite the fact that public image impact is only one aspect, a byproduct of the given situation.
This contributes to the image problem of the profession, in my opinion.
To dig a little deeper into the topic, I thought I would try a little exercise: I decided to analyze the words that surrounded PR in news articles over the past year.
You can see the results graphically in a word cloud on my blog, Flack’s Revenge. I described the methodology I used in my post.
Here are some of the results in numbers:
Negative word most often associated with PR/Approx. # mentions
- Disaster/36
Positive word most often associated with PR/Approx. # mentions
- Good/18
Cyncical words describing PR/Approx. # mentions
- Stunt/36
- Machine/36
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