I may not know exactly what you do, but I'm pretty sure you're offside!

Do you know exactly what your friends and family do for a living? I have a vague idea how most of mine spend their day but generally it doesn’t extend much beyond knowing the industry in which they work. My good friend T, for example, I can say with absolute certainty that she is in banking. What sort banking? Well, she works for Deutsche Bank, so that would be German banking! But beyond that, I’m a bit sketchy! And as for K, well she is in Accounting. I think!

It’s not that I’m not interested. It’s just that I haven't managed to keep abreast of their various progressions and promotions. And I’m afraid that this isn’t a new thing for me. I absolutely never got to grips with what my Dad did for a living, which is quite ungrateful when you consider that whatever it was effectively kept me clothed and fed. Still, he’s retired now so that’s a weight off my mind! The thing is that it goes past the point when you can ask for clarification.

It puts me in mind of when I bought my first flat and introduced myself to the chap downstairs. When next I saw him he was munching a bacon sandwich but shouted out what sounded like a cheery “Morning Anna.” And to borrow from the Ting Tings – that’s not my name! But he had been eating a sandwich. Maybe I’d misheard. The next time I saw him he was just rushing off to work but as the door slammed behind him I definitely heard “Hi Anna!” Never mind, I’d correct him next time. Except I didn’t see him until he dropped off Anna’s Christmas card and a bottle of wine to apologise for a noisy party he’d hosted. At which point it seemed a bit churlish to put him right. Plus I might not have got to keep Anna’s wine!

Anyway, I digress. The purpose of this is that I was making this rather long and rambling point to a new friend who pointed out that perhaps my friends and family found my chosen profession – PR – to be an equally closed book. I mean it’s a term we’re all very used to hearing. It’s bandied about in the media all the time. A bit like the phrase ‘offside’ in football. But, as with offside, just because we hear a phrase a lot, it doesn’t necessarily mean we know what it is!

So, for the uninitiated, PR is the management of communications between an organisation and its publics. It can be used to build rapport with customers, potential customers, employees, investors or the general public. And generally speaking, PR uses methods and tools that don’t require direct payment. Such as working with the press, speaking at conferences or employee and customer communications.

It would have been fitting to sum up by juxtaposing the above with a neat definition of the offside rule - but despite consulting numerous sources, I’m still not 100 percent clear!"