I’ve declined an invitation to write a heavyweight textbook because I’m more interested in writing a lightweight one. My aim is to write A Beginner’s Guide to Public Relations that I hope will be published in the Forward Guide series. Its focus will be vocational rather than academic.

It will be written for two main groups:

1. High School students faced with a choice of college courses and careers advice
2. Graduates from other disciplines needing to turn their skills in a vocationial direction

As a social media enterprise, I’d like to involve others in reviewing chapters and contributing sections to this. (As a social media enterprise, it doesn’t need a publication date or revision schedule; it can start small and grow over time.) While it will be an English language publication, it shouldn’t be entirely anglo-centric in its view of the world. But I need your help to achieve this.

So, if you fit one of the categories above (or were recently in one), then please read on. I’d like to hear from you.

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There are many faster and fiercer species. Yet homo sapiens has successfully colonized the planet from the equator to the poles.

The lesson from evolution appears to be that adaptability is a virtue. Our assets are a large brain, good communication skills, an omnivorous diet and an opposed thumb that allows us to make and use tools.

Despite this, I’m going to argue that success and esteem come to those who discover their specialty, not to ‘jacks of all trades’. It’s apparent among medical practitioners and lawyers, so why shouldn’t it be true in public relations?

Your start point - as with these professions - should be a general mastery of the theory and practice. But financial returns will come to those who gain unique skills and knowledge.

There’s no escaping the law of supply and demand. Don’t let me put you off working in consumer public relations if you have a particular passion and flair for the work, but don’t expect this to be be best rewarded sector. Why? Because barriers to entry are low: many people are interested, and little specialist knowledge is required to make a start. For these reasons, I’ve noticed that pay (both in terms of salaries and consultancy fees) is below average and the hours are long.

By contrast, financial public relations and public affairs work tends to be better rewarded and competition for jobs and clients may be less fierce because fewer people and consultancies offer the necessary expertise.

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You must be familiar with the argument by now. It’s the one about media fragmentation, message bombardment, cost and waste. In short, it’s about the failure of mass marketing. If you’ve missed it, where have you been? You’ve not been listening to the likes of Seth Godin, the Cluetrain authors or Al and Laura Ries. Even marketing academics such as Philips Kotler and Kitchen have been joining the chorus.

Add to this Punk Marketing, written by Richard Laermer (author of Full Frontal PR) and Mark Simmons (a British marketing consultant who lives in Los Angeles and who is - disclosure - my brother-in-law and the source of my review copy).

This manifesto for revolutionary marketing is an assault on the large and the predictable and a plea to replace it with the smart and the tailored. So punk marketing is defined as ‘a new form of marketing that rejects the status quo and recognizes the shift in power from corporations to consumers.’

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On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense. Many people are turning their backs on public relations because the phrase still doesn’t quite sound respectable. What are they turning to instead? Public affairs. Since when did affairs become more respectable than relationships, I wonder?

My evidence for this trend comes from a recent PR Week survey in the UK which showed that careers in public affairs were more highly sought after by graduates than those in technology or healthcare PR. I’ve also noticed it in the frequency in which practitioners seek to clarify that it’s public affairs work they do, not public relations. There’s also a respectability in the academic field, witness Otto Lerbinger’s Corporate Public Affairs published last year.

One of my placement year students is currently working in a junior public affairs role for a UK bank. She gets to her desk by 7.30am in the City of London in order to review the day’s newspapers and to compile reports on debates in the UK and European parliaments. It’s an untypical role for a PR student, but one she’s performing well and which will help her in her ambition to work in financial public relations.

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It must have been fifteen years ago. I was in London with the UK marketing director of the world’s biggest computer manufacturer (at that time). We were discussing that morning’s press briefing with the always-challenging technology press. ‘Never complain and never explain’ he shrugged, demonstrating great calm and insouscience.

The phrase was new to me, but was it right? Surely it was my job as a PR advisor to be ready to challenge the press and to be always willing to explain, justify and defend my client.

Fast forward fifteen years to today. This phrase, credited to British prime minister Bejamin Disraeli, is quoted in Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity’s Life’s a Pitch… as the confident person’s motto. As we know, confidence is infectious.

So should this phrase be considered good public relations advice? It probably should, but let’s take both parts of it in turn.

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‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em.’

This quotation from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night came to mind when I kept hearing and seeing Richard Edelman in the media recently (he was interviewed for BBC Radio 4 from Davos, spoke to the Financial Times on ‘trust’ and was profiled in UK PR Week).

I’m not implying that his success is accidental. I’m asking what students and graduates should do to maximise their chances of success (greatness, even) in public relations.

There’s the cynical observation of the late, great Daniel J. Boorstin: ‘Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some hire public relations officers’. Seriously, that could work. Try doing your own PR (for example by virtual and by real world networking).

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A discussion paper published by the UK’s Chartered Institute of Public Relations raises lots of questions about professional PR practice and social media.

Some of it is unsurprising (copyright’s an issue online and offline); some of it is just silly (I had thought the issue of deep linking had gone away years ago; if not, how come Google’s still in business?). But one of its questions is intriguing.

This concerns the role of the ghost writer - and the inevitable question of ethics and transparency. Once again, the issue is not new. It’s established practice for PR copywriters to draft quotations in news releases in the name of senior executives and to write bylined articles on their behalf. It’s common knowledge that presidents and prime ministers employ teams of speech writers.

In all these cases, the practice is accepted (and acceptable) because the senior executive or political leader takes responsibility for their words. In the case of the speech, they even stand there and deliver it.

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Think back to the long, hot days of summer. Remember the biggest talking point in PR blogging? It was a double-barrelled fusillade launched from the Australian winter - the claim that ‘Astroturfing is evil’. My link is to Trevor Cook’s blog, but the inspiration for this campaign came from Forward’s own Paull Young.

And who could disagree with them? Of course we all believe in what we do, and want to believe that the public relations we practice is respectable, legitimate, open and ethical. So why not distance our brand of professional PR from the disreputable end of the business? How hard can that be?

I like Paull; I admire Trevor. Yet I only felt able to lend lukewarm support to their campaign (my comment on Trevor’s post hints at some reservations, though my defence of a royal walkabout was perhaps not universally compelling.)

Now Edelman stands indicted of this great evil. (Edelman, remember, is the global cheerleader for ‘the new PR’ and an active headhunter of the best blogging talent including the UK’s Stephen Davies and Forward’s managing editor Erin Caldwell.) Ashley Imsand has already commented at Forward on the Wal-Mart blogging furore.

So where do I now stand on astroturfing and on the crucial issue of transparency?

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(No, nor woman neither, though I’m not keen on rewriting John Donne’s words.) This post is a reflection on isolation (the word ‘isola’ means island) and a discussion about whether social media (and public relations) are part of the problem, or offer potential solutions to social fragmentation.

Consider life in pre-industrial societies (if this sounds remote, remember that we’ve all come from one just a few generations back and much of the world is still in this stage of economic development). The focus of activity is agriculture; this is often a communal effort and each individual is firmly rooted in their community (family, village, tribe). The downside of a subsistence economy is the lack of opportunity (it’s thought that a typical English peasant living at the turn of the first millennium might only have met one hundred people in their whole lives; then there’s the lack of healthcare, education, wealth and social mobility.) The upside is the strong ties of kinship and place. You don’t need TV and magazines and celebrities: there’s enough to gossip about in your everyday life.

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Education goes against nature. The new year starts just when the leaves are beginning to turn on the trees.

Despite my two decades in the real world of work, where each year was punctuated only by a summer vacation and an enforced slowdown around Christmas, I still find the academic year to be second nature. Progress was so easy to measure then: new year, new uniform, new class, an inch or two taller.

How to continue measuring progress - other than the extra inch on the waist - once you’re outside the academic world? Because learning doesn’t end with your degree qualification. Not if you want to develop as a professional and as a human being.

That’s why I’ve decided to sign up to our professional body’s continuous professional development (CPD) scheme, Developing Excellence. This challenges me to improve in three areas: professional practice, education & training and personal development. (For a full-time educator, this should come with my job description, but doing your day job properly doesn’t count for CPD credits.)

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