Maxim Behar for TBmagazine: PR by the pound

In his weekly column "Max's Column" for TBmagazine, Maxim Behar shares his views on the rising criticism of the PR profession and practice in Bulgaria. How it has been used as political slander and how Bulgarian society blindly accepts these accusations.

“Hey, forget about this guy, he's just doing PR...”. We have been hearing this phrase for years. Lately, however, it is mostly uttered by politicians when they want to say that someone is doing nothing or what he is doing is just a bubble full of air. And somehow, those who do not know what is behind this strange abbreviation, and it is written in Latin, have started to perceive it just like that.

Well, yes! Why not? One political party says to another one - you're just doing PR and that automatically means that said party is lying.

There is hardly a bigger fallacy in our modern, increasingly English-Saxon dialect of the Bulgarian language and it would take a very good effort to disprove it.

Public Relations, extremely ineptly translated years ago in Bulgaria as “public relations”, is in fact solely and exclusively the business of truth, which it makes available to us through its specific tools.

This is the most accurate short definition of this business that I have been spreading for years - telling the truth so that it is understood.

And while someone still thinks they can hire a PR company to “fix” their image or make them go from bad to good or from incompetent to professional, it's still good to know that even that doesn't happen “by the pound”.

Each project is a case by case for everyone and for each individual client. Only one thing unites all these projects and clients. It’s all about the truth.