Andi Narvaez: All of the above

Yesterday I got up at 6:30am (an ungodly hour for me) in order to make it to the first day of BlogHer’s 6th Annual Conference in New York. I have met and had great conversations with many of the women here and picked up some great tid bits of knowledge from the sessions, but I honestly don’t think I could summarize or try to encompass all of it in one post.  In lieu of that, I grabbed links to useful BlogHer ’10 resources and the live blogs.

But my job is not done.

This semester I’m taking “Public Relations Publics” at university of Maryland, which focuses on what matters (or should) the most to public relations practitioners — the people.

We discussed the difference between the terms “stakeholders” and “publics” and agreed that stakeholders are those who are affected by what the organization does and have stakes in the results of those actions. Publics are not only affected by organizations’ actions, they also have the potential to become involved in those actions and to influence organizations that way. This concept of publics comes from the Situational Theory of Publics, developed by University of Maryland Professor James E. Grunig (yay Maryland).