• November 21, 2011

The Public Relations Society of America is launching a global initiative, “Public Relations Defined,” whose aim is to, you guessed it, define public relations, but via crowd-sourcing. Now if the theoretical physics community had thought of that we might have a Unified Field Theory by now.  

 The effort involves 10 global PR organizations, including the Global Alliance, Arthur W. Page Society, and the Institute for Public Relations.  Apparently the new definition will come entirely from submissions from PR pros and marketers, with submissions accepted at #PRDefined.

People in the biz can submit words and phrases they believe should comprise the modern definition of public relations at PRDefinition.PRSA.org. Submissions will be pulled into specially-built word clouds that will form common themes based on the following sentence structure: Public relations [DOES WHAT] with/for [WHOM] to [DO WHAT] for [WHAT PURPOSE.]

There was a "Definition of PR Summit" preceding all of this on Sept. 9 at PRSA’s New York headquarters. As no definition whatever was arrived at, we can assume the Summit was a bipartisan supercommittee.