Chapter 4: The Publics in Public Relations

Important points:

• A public is not a stakeholder, but a stakeholder can be a public.  A stakeholder has an actual interest in the organization.  A public is a group of people who share a common interest.
• We can use the resource dependency theory to answer the question of why we need relationships with these publics and which public should receive the most attention.
• Publics are constantly changing.  However, publics are always categorized into 3 groups: latent, aware, and active.