A working definition
Public relations is the deliberate management of what an organisation says in public and of the relationships through which that reaches people. Two words in that sentence carry the weight. Deliberate separates it from the accidental impressions every organisation gives off anyway. Relationships separates it from a single broadcast: the reporter, the regulator, the employee and the neighbour are all standing channels that exist before and after any particular announcement.
What it is not
It is not advertising. Advertising buys a guaranteed placement and controls the wording; public relations offers material to someone else who decides independently whether to use it and how. The trade is control for credibility, and it only pays off if the material is genuinely worth someone’s space.
It is not marketing either, though the two share vocabulary. Marketing starts from a market and works back to what should be offered to it. Public relations starts from what the organisation is doing and works forward to who needs to understand it, including people who will never buy anything.
It is also not reputation insurance. Reputation is the accumulated result of what an organisation does; communication can describe that accurately or inaccurately, but it cannot substitute for it. Work that tries to is usually discovered, and the discovery costs more than the original problem.
The four areas
Most communication work sorts into four areas, and this reference is organised around them. Media relations is the outward work of supplying journalists with usable material. Crisis communication is the same work under time pressure and incomplete information. Internal communication is the inward work of telling the organisation about itself. Measurement and evaluation is the discipline of finding out whether any of it made a difference.
Why the order matters
Organisations tend to meet these areas in that sequence, and the sequence is worth keeping. An outfit that has never thought about how it speaks to reporters in ordinary weeks will not suddenly do it well in a bad one. An outfit that has never told its own staff anything will find the internal channel empty at the moment it most needs it. Measurement comes last only because there has to be something to measure.