January 12, 2008
Dear Brooke,
Hello cousin, how are you doing? College is great, I am really enjoying it. In case you didn't already know, my major is public relations. I am very excited about it because it is something that I know I will love to do as my career. I am under the impression that you don’t quite understand what public relations is, so I am going to give you a quick explanation of what a public relations professional does. Firstly, in order to save ourselves time by saying "public relations" all the time, we have made an acronym by saying "PR". When a person asks what my major is, if they are familiar with the Journalism and Communications Department at Utah State University, which is where the PR major is, I would tell them I am a PR major.
PR professionals spend a lot of their time writing. You might not guess that at first, but it’s true. We spend our time communicating to the public, hence, public relations. We do that mostly through our writing. These writings include news releases, newspaper articles, bulletins, memos, calendar updates and many more. If you aren’t familiar with what a news release is, it is an email or paper that goes out to the newspaper industries notifying them of upcoming events or changes that are taking place in the company in order to communicate to the public what the latest updates are. People sometimes get confused that a PR manager does advertising, but that isn’t necessarily the case. They don't write about or sell the actually product, they are mostly selling the company.
There are many different approaches you can take on PR. I know you have seen Happy Gilmore with Adam Sandler. In the movie, the character Virginia Venit is the PR manager for the golf tournament. She handles news conferences and is the person who is in charge of communicating the golf tournament to the public. For example, when Happy goes ballistic on the golf course, she is the one who talks to the reporters explaining what Happy did and smoothing things over. That is something I would enjoy doing, minus the golf tournament. I would rather work for a non-profit organization or a child service center.
If you have any other questions regarding PR, please feel free to ask me. It’s an exciting career with many opportunities. I hope to hear from you soon.
Sincerely,
Alyson Bauer
Hi Alyson,
ReplyDeleteYou did a great job explaining all of the writing that is done by a person in PR. I especially thought you did good in relating PR to your cousin by using the movie Happy Gilmore.
The only suggestion I would make would to change your last sentence in your first paragraph. Maybe make it into two sentences.
I agree that a lot of people get confused about pr, and I like how you talked about that as being public relations acronym.
-Melanie
Nice Job on the post Alyson. I gotta tell you Happy Gilmore, my favorite movie of all-time. Clearly I liked the example you used and it did a really good job of illustrating what PR truly is, again good job and keep up the good work.
ReplyDelete