At the end of the day, after all of the strategies and tactics are implemented, after the press releases are written and sent, and after the star-studded haute affairs wind down, building and maintaining trusting and mutually beneficial relationships are, and will always be, job one.

Indeed organizations must dedicate much of their energy to building relationship factories in order to survive and thrive rather than well insulated silos focused only on the bottom line.

The tsunami that arose from the depths of unscrupulous organizational actions at the onset of this century and washed away much of the trust between organizations and their publics has far from abated. It is thus increasingly imperative for organizations to acknowledge and embrace the importance of relationships before they can transcend the dark fog of public distrust and advance toward more perfect and mutually beneficial outcomes.

The principles underlying the practice of public relations, a functional area within the IMC framework, implicitly signal our interconnectedness as they embrace and forward the ideal of developing mutually beneficial relationships with one another.

It is not enough however for organizations to merely implement public relations strategies and tactics in order to create and sustain long lasting relationships with their publics; a genuine companywide comprehension of the importance of placing the good of their constituencies above tactically improving return on investment must underlie those actions.

Unfortunately even with greater emphasis being placed on the practice of public relations today in the midst of a great crisis of trust between organizations and their stakeholders, the organization and the underlying ideology of public relations still often seem at odds with one another, like strange bedfellows struggling for some semblance of common ground; the first, a highly individualistic and opportunistic spirit stomping his way up the latter of ?success? on the cadavers of those left in his wake; the other, a collectivist with meaningful relationships on the mind and disdain in her heart for the self-serving corporate and political policies of our day, a time when dreams of socioeconomic equality have been extinguished by schemes for greener bank accounts. So caught up with accounting for bottom line results, these organizations of willful ignorance and greed have forgotten that their own accountability ultimately lies in the hearts and minds of their publics and have placed them on the back burner. For these organizations and their ?PR practitioners,? public relations amounts to maintaining the status quo through the implementation of tactics and grand affairs of pomp and glamour rather than building and maintaining relationships of trust with their stakeholders.

Ultimately the practice of public relations works best when its underlying principles are well understood and interwoven within the framework of the entire organization; only then will strategies, tactics, and messages exude the sincerity necessary to build bridges of trust with stakeholders. By contrast, PR cannot be applied as successfully to organizations that view this function as merely a magic trick of flash and pageantry and make use of its tactics for the purpose of paving over the rough and stony terrain of corporate misconduct and greed. It is therefore essential for corporations to integrate every facet of their operations with the true essence and purpose of public relations so that it becomes less a magic trick in the organization?s IMC repertoire and more a holistic way of ?being.? In doing so, everyone will benefit and a more accurate and effective implementation of public relations and IMC will be achieved.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we must remember that the principles of public relations, building and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships, will only flourish in the boardrooms if it first flourishes at home, in the schools, among people of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, and in our relations with other nations. The corporate executives and government leaders who have caused so much widespread gloom and panic are largely products of our time, however they are ultimately responsible for and must be held accountable for their behavior. A truly holistic practice of IMC involves more than uniting functional areas within organizations and organizations with their publics; it also acknowledges and seeks ways of improving the destructive divisions we find in society at large.