Public Relations
Public Relations(PR) is an activity, unrolling the building up of relationships through communication to inform, solve conflicts and/or to enhance understanding between persons. As demographic pressures have become more and more complex, communication among groups and individuals has become characterised by a very complicated and involved process which has led to the development of public relations as a new discipline e.g., various companies, factories have set up Public Relation Division headed by Public Relation Officers.
Communication experts and specialists in organisations help individuals and groups to foster mutually good relationships among themselves. They try to establish a two-way relationship between the sender of messages and receiver, between the employer and the employee, between the customer and the sales centres.
Although PR activity is often associated mostly with business and corporate interests. most societal problems, today., require PR as a way of maintaining and adjusting relationships with various types of people involved in different public activities.
The different mechanisms through which PR experts build up their contact with the public are paper-print brochures, pamphlets, graphic materials, audio and video materials, radio and television broadcasts, photographs, slides, filmstrips, motion pictures, floppies and such others. This has turn out to be a characteristic feature of mass communication, as it largely deals with several kinds of public in different contexts. These contexts may be in relation to building up the image of an organisation, to resolve conflicts among persons who are involved in sales and production, to establish goodwill in customers and keeping the public informed of policies and implementation by governments and in many similar aspects.
In PR activity, every means of communication is adopted and applied. All the expertise, techniques and technologies needed in mass communication are employed to bring out the varieties of PR products.