The Limits of Advocacy

When one enters into public relations, they are in the relationship business. On some level, any public relations effort or campaign pertains to connecting with others. For some, it is a matter of persuading persons to support a particular cause, buy a product or adopt a certain belief. For others, the effort revolves around establishing an alliance with others to confront a problem or challenge of mutual interest or concern. Also, in both cases the public relations challenge is identifying ways to sustain the initial connection you have made with publics external to yourself or client. None of these goals are particularly easy, of course, but nonetheless they are vital to any successful outreach effort.

One of the growing aspects of public relations is spokesmanship. While it has been around for a good while now, in recent times we are seeing a lot more spokesmen and women than ever before. This is not a bad thing as having a professional communicator on-board to help articulate a position and answer questions primarily from the press is a good thing. This is especially true when it comes helping organizations and other entities maintain positive ties with various publics. A good spokesmen can be a key player in this regard. However, based on many of the spokesmen I see, hear and read about these days, particularly in the political arena, I am coming to the conclusion these representatives are not doing nearly as good of a job as they could and should.

These professionals - and both political parties have them - seem to view themselves as being in the advocacy rather than relationship business. The difference is that when one's sole purpose is to be an advocate for something or someone, their focus is short-sighted. When one seeks to establish and then maintain relationships, their focus is much more long-term in nature. How they present their position revolves more around building on commonalities they share with others. Advocates, on the other hand, tend to concentrate on out-arguing their opponents. This is unfortunate because they tend to do little more than reinforce those who already share their views and contribute little to building  bridges with others.