Recently, Bloomberg Businessweek published a story announcing an important initiative spearheaded by PRSA and MWW Group to bring public relations into the fold at more top business schools.

This is an important effort that our industry should rally around. Every day public relations professionals help companies communicate their value to customers, investors, the media and other stakeholders, navigating clients toward higher sales and greater brand awareness. Yet, as an industry, we often don’t practice what we preach. We’re doing a poor job communicating the value of public relations to the C-suite that we serve.

Sure, business leaders understand the benefit of public relations expertise when it gets them out of a crisis, but communications experts should not only be brought to the table when it’s time to clean up. Rather, public relations should be as intrinsic to a business strategy as the advertising budget, finances or the inventory, and it should be taught in MBA programs right up there with accounting and talent management.

Business schools have the opportunity and a responsibility to graduate well-rounded leaders, who have all the tools in their toolbox, including a core set of public relations skills. Yet, according to a recent survey conducted by PRSA and Kelton Research, and funded by MWW Group, 98 percent of business leaders agree that MBA programs aren’t doing enough to instruct future leaders on corporate communications and reputation management strategy. As a result, business school academia is failing to prepare future business leaders for the modern reputational and communications challenges they will face.

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It’s a fact: the PR discipline is all but invisible within most MBA programs.

At the business-school level, where many future leaders are shaping their fundamental views on business and marketing, PR barely gets a mention. More specifically, in nearly 80 percent of MBA programs, students do not receive any education or skills training on the strategic value of PR, the critical role that it plays in protecting brand reputation and its vital function within the marketing mix [1].

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Editor’s Note: The excerpt below is from an op-ed by PRSA Chair and CEO Rosanna M. Fiske, APR, which was published Oct. 6, 2011, in the Harvard Business Review. A full version of the opinion piece can be read here.

Last month when Netflix CEO Reed Hastings hit “send” on his now infamous “I messed up” blog post and summarily announced the formation of the “Qwikster” business to run Netflix’s DVD network, a new chapter in botched crisis communications was written.

After more than 27,000 comments, significant customer backlash, and a startling drop in the company’s stock price, we can finally step back and discern several lessons from Hastings’ communications faux pas.

Chief among them is how business leaders can use strategic communications techniques to stop adding fuel to the digital-age fires. Throwing half-hearted apologies at an issue will just exacerbate a festering problem — and people will view it as an obvious and empty attempt to quiet the masses.

Case in point: Netflix’s 11th-hour blog post and apology video. While the CEO smiled throughout the video, customers rightly questioned its intention. Overall, the communications were vague, bizarre, and left customers wondering: “Are you really apologizing to me, or are you doing this because someone else told you to?”

Here’s where this crisis situation failed: Most reputation blows require a clear, strategic message, explaining two things: (1) what went wrong, and (2) what you are doing to rectify the situation. At the same time, remember to “stay above the fray”, as corporate communications expert Paul Argenti advises in The Financial Times. That is, don’t allow feelings of regret to cloud your best communications judgment.

Read the rest in the Harvard Business Review.

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This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending my first Leadership Rally as a national board member of PRSA. A common topic of discussion was the incredible opportunities that now lie before our industry.

As Facebook and Audi join BP and Toyota in the lineup of venerable companies that have seen their brands tarnished in this volatile media environment, the value that PR offers has perhaps never been more evident. As the media landscape continues to transform and the impact of traditional advertising and marketing erode, our industry has an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate the role that PR can play in building trust and relevance for major brands and companies.

The reality is that despite the opportunities that stand before us — and the significant gains that have been achieved in reinforcing PR as a critical business function — there are still too many business leaders who fail to appreciate the value and strategic role of PR in safeguarding trust, relevancy and reputation and protecting brand value. To many decision-makers, PR remains a “nice-to-have” in the marketing mix.

A 2010 study conducted by Ball State University sheds light on what may be a root cause of the problem. The study, which analyzed MBA coursework at 40 universities, found that PR is absent in most programs. In B-school classrooms, where future top executives are building a foundation of knowledge that will shape their philosophy on business strategy, PR is almost completely invisible.

It’s no wonder that MBAs enter the workforce with a general lack of understanding of PR and that too many believe our industry provides marginal value as a strategic business function.

Most PR practitioners will attest that communications is most effective if it is applied during a time when people are still shaping opinions. This rationale forms the basis of the PRSA MBA Initiative, an industry-wide effort, spearheaded by PRSA, to help educate the business leaders of tomorrow on the Business Case for PR™.

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As 2010 comes to a close, I look back and reflect on a year that changed how the National Education Association (NEA) and other national advocacy organizations manage their public relations. For NEA, three key events changed how we manage advocacy communication: passage of health care reform legislation (a win for NEA and its members) and the education jobs bill (meant to save more than 200,000 educators’ jobs), and the effects of the midterm elections.

For public relations professionals, what’s important about these events — health care reform, the jobs bill and the election — is how public relations demonstrated its value as part of a national member-driven advocacy campaign.

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