Why public relations should treat audiences as clients

Audience? Or clients? (Image: fensterbme, via Flickr)

If you work in public relations, who do you view as your client? Just your agency’s contracted clients (your ‘internal’ clients if you work in-house in corporate communication)? Or also your clients’ stakeholders, the groups of people you’re trying to communicate with?

Reading Henry Jenkins‘s Convergence Culture this week for my social media class, I was struck by a particular part of a story about how the original version of the Star Wars Galaxies online role-playing game was developed. (As well as being a great read for understanding the social and cultural implications of social media, Convergence Culture is also great for discovering new forms of geekery you’d never otherwise have heard about. Pixelvision film-making or Machinima, anyone?)

In describing the collaborative approach that Raph Koster and the development team at LucasArts took to developing the Star Wars Galaxies online role-playing game, Jenkins says:

‘To ensure that fans bought into his version of the Star Wars universe, Koster essentially treated the fan community as his client team…’

This got me thinking. Maybe we in public relations should think about our (literal) clients’ stakeholders and target audiences — the communities whose buy-in our clients are seeking — as client teams too.

I’m not suggesting that we ask all of our clients’ stakeholders for feedback and agreement on every decision we make, or that we start billing the public for the work that we’re doing, obviously. But I am suggesting that make sure we work as hard to listen to and understand the needs, problems and goals of our clients’ stakeholder communities as we (hopefully) do to listen to and understand our clients.

Why do we need to do this? Because it’s our job to.

If you accept that the purpose of public relations is to give strategic advice on public opinion and public perception to clients, and to help them act and communicate in ways that will gain the support of their key audiences (which, hopefully, all PR professionals do accept), then understanding the needs, problems and goals of those audiences is an essential part of doing that job properly.

By thinking about audiences as clients on whose happiness our success depends, I think we’re more likely to take their needs seriously and more likely to look for ways for our (paying) clients to give those audiences (a.k.a. stakeholders) what they really want and need. And once our clients are fulfilling the needs and wants of their stakeholders, the long-term support and goodwill of those stakeholders should pretty much be guaranteed.

I guess essentially what I’m saying is that as public relations practitioners, if we think of our clients’ key audiences as clients in themselves, if we listen to them and seek their feedback more meaningfully and more often, we’ll give our clients better advice on how to gain and keep the support and engagement of those audiences in the long term. In other words, we’ll be more effectively doing our jobs.

What do you think? Does treating our clients’ stakeholders as clients in their own right make sense, or is the whole concept just downright confusing?!