Person #1
What is public relations?
Interacting with people. A person in PR has to have a good personality, be very talkative, and be outgoing.

Name someone in a high-profile PR job.
Marilyn Monroe: She interacts with her public and has relations with them.

Now, explain your definition for PR, derived from the textbook and class discussion. Ask their impression of this definition.
She said that she basically had that same idea of what PR was except for she had in mind that a PR manager or technician only interacted with one person or a group of people one time. She wasn't aware that a PR practitioner had to work on building relationships with their clients.

Person #2
What is public relations?
How politicians see the public and how they correspond with what goes on in the world.

Name someone in a high-profile PR job.
Condoleeza Rice: I hear about her a lot in the news and on comedy shows. She is in the public eye a lot, and she makes a lot of differences in the White House.

Now, explain your definition for PR, derived from the textbook and class discussion. Ask their impression of this definition.
She thought that my definition seemed more appropriate and that it grasped a broader scope than hers. She also wanted me to mention that her GPA is more than a point lower than mine, and that she doesn't have a clue of what she is talking about.

Person #3
What is public relations?
Communicating with people, talking a lot, the same thing as marketing.

Name someone in a high-profile PR job.
George Bush. He makes a lot of speeches.

Now, explain your definition for PR, derived from the textbook and class discussion. Ask their impression of this definition.
I think that it's similar to what I said but just worded differently. It made me have a better understanding of the whole job description.

The biggest thing that I noticed about my first question to them was how they all seemed to think that public relations was a verb! Their first words in their answers were things like "communicating" or "interacting." And that's not incorrect, but if I were to answer the question, my response would start with something like, "A person who...." I mean, if I asked what a firefighter was, they wouldn't have had an answer beginning with, "Putting out fires." So that was really interesting to me. It showed me how unfamiliar people are with the profession.

When I asked the second question, I got the same facial expression from every single respondent. It pretty much consisted of a look similar to that of "The Rock," a shoulder shrug, and a long period of silence. Although none of the answers were correct in that none of the people's job titles include the words "public relations," I did realize that each person answered who they did because they felt their answer choices had attributes that all public relations practitioners should indeed have. They all deal with publics and try to withhold healthy relationships with them. It didn't surprise me that two of the three answers given to me were personalities in the political science field. I think that a lot of people are under the impression that the public relations field only fills jobs in the government, when we all know that in reality the government doesn't even fill the largest amount of jobs out of all the PR employment settings.

On my third question, I thought that my answers were rather blah. I guess I could have done something to spice them up a bit by asking more probing questions. I didn't. An ongoing theme in the answers was that they learned something by my definition. They didn't really have a full understanding beforehand of what the job entailed, and after they learned my defintion, their cloudiness about the subject seemed to lift.