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Comment by xphilter | Hacker News Reader

Can someone with experience with this help me understand the point of a PR team to talk to press? As an outsider, it just looks like another form of marketing—-never confirm or deny anything and just put out press releases that are filled with business jargon. And when it’s actual a sticky situation, any communication is going to be drafted by legal or execs. Maybe I’m wrong though.

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In most places I have worked, it is not called "PR", it is the Communications department. They typically do edit and revise all the public communications, in particular for public companies. You are partly correct that communications need to be careful to not divulge confidential information, nor information that could impact any regulatory requirements for public companies, which can feel like jargon. But they also will often help draft internal communications when announcements need to be sent to the entire company. Their role is to improve the effectiveness of all communications, making sure that people know what is going on, how it impacts them, what actions are needed, and where to go with questions. You'd be surprised how much gets written that fails to effectively communicate such things.

1. It's a skill that needs practice and most professionals are not trained in. 2. PR is an entryway for collecting and managing stakeholder questions that might warrant future board level action (in communication). 3. PR is usually close to the board and has it's own dynamic with marketing being further down the chain.

Elon dismantling PR makes sense. Probably they rubbed him the wrong way too often. Why bother.

I can only assume he wants to run the PR show himself by going on Joe Rogan and twitter. His man-of-the-people strategy does seem to have some merit. "Elon Musk" is arguably a stronger brand than Tesla.

I’m not sure having the Elon Musk brand be stronger than the Tesla brand is a good thing. He is a bit impulsive and seems like an asshole at times. People put up with it because, so far, his companies have produced some great products.

When the other car manufacturers finally catch up to Tesla, the negative perception of the Elon Musk brand may drive some buyers away from Tesla.

The genius stroke is combining modern sensibilities with traditional masculinity. He manages to do solar projects and electric cars, hell even smoking weed, without looking like a hippie. I guess the trick was sci-fi and fast cars.

I dislike the way "traditional masculinity" increasingly seems to used as euphemism for "being asshole".

I definitely have friends who would and could buy Teslas if not for the asshole techbro image cultivated by Musk. IMO, that is kind of silly of them, but it's foolish to pretend people don't consider their self-image when considering a car, especially a luxury one. Plenty of people don't want to be associated with him.

He's the main reason the Tesla stock price is so high. If you are a shareholder of Tesla that cares mostly about capital gains, you really want it to continue.

>When the other car manufacturers finally catch up to Tesla

Wasn't that his public goal?

That is why I find it absurd when people compare him to Steve Jobs.

Steve always use his brand to sell Apple. Elon always use Tesla to sell his brand.

But so what good does a PR team do. Maybe for Tesla specifically not much. It's like how Border Cafe in Harvard Square used to be - always so busy with hour+ waits that there is no need to bother with reservations.

For a regular large sized company there are press pieces written every day that want an informative quote, shareholders cold-mailing you, customers trying all kinds of angles except the regular ones to get in touch, TV-shows that want your CEO on. All this gets managed in a way that at least suggests some uniformity in what you proclaim externally. Sure, there's domains that overlap PR / (internal) communication and marketing but generally they are treated as different tasks and organised as such.

TL;DR - They manage one single external voice. There's value in that. As other point out, Musk is a communications study in and of himself.

> Can someone with experience with this help me understand the point of a PR team to talk to press?

Simple: PR teams are some sort of equivalent to the "triage" at emergency rooms. Basically they scan incoming requests for stuff that could land the company in hot legal water or signalize a coming shitstorm (e.g. if journalists ask for information regarding potentially damaging stories during their research), misdirected customer service stuff (pretty common, especially in companies ... not exactly known for decent CS reps), youtubers/other influencers looking for merch gear, shareholders inquiring about financial or other information, movie makers / photographers interested in showing off company products, reps of athletes wanting a sponsorship deal... all of this usually goes through the PR dept who forward it to the appropriate departments or answer on their own.

The key role / function of a good PR team is that the individual departments don't get flooded by bullshit (you don't want to waste the expensive time of the legal dept on a youtuber wanting a Tesla for a rap music video).

So? That's one of the ways to avoid PR snafus. PR departments are added after snafus like this one, which have nothing to with legal and execs drafting responses, but normal day to day communication with the userbase.

https://www.polygon.com/2019/8/18/20811014/apex-legends-iron...

It's great to talk to a press if the press has goals aligned with the company: make people more aware of a product / service. As an example my girlfriend wrote a book, she talked to the press about it, which made interesting content for the newspaper and the radio, and got some recognition in return for free.

But as Tesla doesn't pay for advertising (unlike its ICE competitors), the incentives are not aligned, so Tesla and the press had bad relations for a long time.

The job of PR is to align the press with the company. The "R" in PR stands for "relations." It's not just sending out press releases.

The press tends to be antagonistic toward any big company. Good PR counteracts that, in part by finding and helping the members of the press who like the company.

No company was better at PR than Apple under Steve Jobs. They carefully groomed key reviewers and helped build up a pro-Apple ecosystem of media properties.

Edit: I should add that Apple's PR under Steve Jobs was led by Katie Cotton, and her dept. was famous for rarely responding to direct requests for comment on the news of the day.

> It's great to talk to a press if the press has goals aligned with the company: make people more aware of a product / service.

It's also great to talk to the press when the story and the company's goals DON'T align. If a company is being investigated or impacted in some negative way, then not commenting looks worse on them.

Legal and execs will make sure you won't get sued. They won't make sure you don't alienate all your customers away.

Think of PR pros as lawyers for the court of public opinion.

It'd be an interesting strategy - you could just say to reviewers 'if you want to review our cars then buy one yourselves.

Think of it as marketing that targets both the customer and the employee base.

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