Publicity and PR

Publicity and PR

Publicity is the attempt to communicate, through different media, information that can generate favourable response. Publicity is something that helps you connect with people who don’t know about you yet, or those who may have heard about you, but are still on the fence. The emerging social media environment allows you to connect with these people in a whole host of ways outside of the mainstream media.

Another appropriate description of Publicity is:

It is a particular manner of information projecting through various media of mass communication about an organization, product, and event or influence public opinion.

It is to be noted that publicity can be negative whereas public relation is always positive. PR can never be based on wrong information. In fact, public relations can never be negative because its role is to enhance public opinion. In many organizations, PR person are asked to mend the damage caused by negative publicity. At the same time, positive publicity can be used by PR person to highlight the achievements of the organization.

The older public relations function used to include publicity in a big way. Today, PR may use publicity but it is only a small part of a very much larger public relations activity. But publicity is turned into a positive communication in the hands of PR professionals and they use it for the benefit of the organization. Publicity may or may not involve any expenditure. PR involves personal approach and contacts but publicity is entirely non-personal stimulation of demand for a product or a service.