Online Public Relations Thoughts

If the present holds for the next months, 2009 will be anything but happy. Part of the communications challenges facing practitioners will be holding a job. Companies are either communicating because of crisis or ducking out of sight and trying to hold business together. The idea that CEOs should remain visible during hard times is not one that most CEOs accept. They are busy fighting fires. Who has time for communications? The practitioner moves from counsel to nag with insistence that the CEO should talk to employees, shareholders and customers. This is a period in which a practitioner must think like a businessperson and with adroitness suggest areas in which the CEO should get involved for the health of the business. In other words, parroting the concepts of PR is not enough. Concepts need to be joined convincingly to the problems at hand.

If we are lucky, 2009 will be the bottom of hard times and 2010 will see a slow but steady turn. Still, a year is a long time to be fighting for one's existence in the workforce. My wish for all of us is that we survive.