HOW IS COMMUNICATION RELATED TO PUBLIC RELATIONS?

Communication is the process of exchanging information, impacting ideas and making one understood by others. It also includes understanding others in return. Indeed understanding is critical to the communication process. If one person sends a message to another who disregards or misunderstands it, then communication has not taken place.

Communication is something people do. It has no life of its own. There is no magic about what the people put into it. When no studies communication therefore, one studies people and relating each other and to their groups, organizations and societies , influencing each other, being influenced, informing and being informed, teaching and being taught, by means of certain signs which exist separately from either of them. To understand the human communication process, one must understand how people relate to each other.

The power of communication, through oral and written word and the images that flash around the world to millions of people in real time, is more awesome than any individual or group or even nation. The world has become, “a global village” as the 20th century communication professor once put it. As a sequence, communication has never been a more potent tool and communication must be handled with great care.
Communication in planning public relations, aims to articulate an organization’s vision and support the overall business objectives. When it comes to public relations, communication with the publics, have been categorized into four models. Press agentry, the kind of activity most associated with public relations which are other times referred to as propaganda. It is a way of communication with emphasis on benefit to sender rather than the receiver; public information, which is a kind of information that seeks to provide information to people. And here accuracy is essential because it the release of relevant information to those who need it; two-way asymmetric, which introduces the idea of feedback or the two-way communication. It is however seen as inbalanced or asymmetric because it’s intended to change an audience’s attitude or behavior towards an organization rather than the organization’s practices through persuasion. Lastly, two-way symmetric; which is often referred to as the ideal of public relations. This model involves ideas of dialogue where organization and its publics exchange views leading to both being influenced and adjusting their attitudes and behaviors.
The public relations practitioner is a professional communicator more than anyone else in the organization. The practitioner must know how to communicate. As public relation practitioners known, however, communications with target publics is much complicated than this set of questions suggests.

A public relations practitioner also plays a role both internally and externally. Internally, he develops optimal relations with employees, managers, unions, newsletters, management and brochures are all important medium through which the public relations practitioner communications through to the internal publics.
Also, externally, as he involves himself communicating with groups of people outside the organization including customers, dealers, suppliers and community leaders.
Although all this are endowed with some capacity for communication. The practitioner can earn the respect of management and become trusted advisers; they must demonstrate a mystery of communication skills.

When communication is planned as it should be in the public relations, every communication must have a goal, purpose and objective.

Firstly, the communication goal of an organization is to reform and educate a particular public. For instance if MTN launches a new product, they would come out to the public and inform their customers on how to use the product.
Also a regular goal of communication to public relations is to persuade people to take certain actions. Such persuasions need a lot be overly aggressive. For instance in this time where there are so many telecommunication networks, that is MTN, TIGO, KASAPA, VODAFONE, and AIRTEL. If MTN would want to have more customers than their competitors, then they need to persuade the public with their products and services in order to achieve this aim.

However, motivation of employees is a regular original communication goal. Also a typical communication goal is to build a mutual understanding of a group of opposition.

The 2 step flow theory stated that an organization would send a message to the mass media, which would then deliver the message to the great mass of readers, listeners and viewers for their response. People today are influenced by factors which the media could be one but is not dominant.
Employee communication serves three purposes:

First, internal communication, which is meant to employees to get them to understand the organizations culture and values.

Also, internal acculturate communication is a way of informing employees of organizational development happenings through news.
Furthermore, internal communication is a way of the organisation to listen to its employees, to hear employees concerns and questions. All of these purposes can be served in any variety of ways and new technology increasingly affects the manner in what employee’ communication occurs.

Another importance of communication to the public relations in media relations where the public relations practitioner communicates with large groups of people outside an organization is practicable through the mass medium queries, arranges news conferences and issues news releases. These coordinates coach executives for news interviews and sometimes serve as their organizations spokesperson.
In a nutshell, we can say that communication plays a major aspect of the practice of public relations.