Political Public Relations

Politicians always want to build a positive public image and their wishes even stronger than popular stars or normal celebrities. And this is a major task for public relations practitioners who working in political areas. Depending on the new technology, modern media has already gained more power among public compared with ever before, and political PR now is often about protecting or defending politicians, parties and policies from the media.
Compared with commercial PR, political PR is remembered most for the negative aspects. In the business world, it is not common to see attacks on competitors because the consequence maybe drawing attention to opponents. On the other side, in political areas, criticism and negative comments are common tactics. The second thing is personal characteristics – for a company the image of leader is important but not critical. However in political world, leaders of parties or government departments have much higher profiles and they are almost the heart of political PR activity. One of the effective evaluation tools is accounting how they are covered by the media.
It is a normal phenomenon that Western PR firms will be exhausted with enormous rules for public affairs or lobbying in China. For example, public affairs need to follow government leading on issues in order to have a sustainable development. And for most cases they have to be lead by provincial or local authorities as well as national government.