Our Survey Says: "The PR industry is full of liars"

A couple of surveys for you on this dreary Monday morning.

First up, a BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey reports that 26% of all adults say they regularly or occasionally blog.

Of those:

• 53.7% are male
• 44.7% are married
• 28.4% hold a professional or managerial position
• 10.4% are students.

Bloggers tend to be younger, averaging 37.6 years old, compared to 44.8 for adults 18+ (the "general population"). Ethnically:

• 69.7% of Bloggers are White/Caucasian (vs. 76.1%)
• 12.2% are African American/Black (vs. 11.4%)
• 3.7% are Asian (vs. 2.0%)
• 20% of Bloggers are Hispanic, compared to 14.8% of adults 18+

I'm sure you can make up your own mind about what those figures mean, but the most important fact to take away (if any of these surveys can be said to contain any facts at all) is that 1 in 4 adults blog, which showsn how the blogosphere is still very active.

The second survey comes from Ciao Surveys, which claims that 60.3% of people in Britain believe that PR officers often lie, while only 3.3% are convinced of the opposite. Additionally, only 17.9% of the respondents think public relations have a positive effect on society, against 26.5% who disagree.

Despite these findings, the survey shows that nearly a third of Britons believe the PR industry is a necessary one at 32.7%, as opposed to only 21.1% who believe it to be unnecessary.

Respondents evidently showed a good understanding of the industry because, when asked about their impression of a PR officer's main job function, they stated it is strongly related to: media relations (49.6%), event planning (18.2%), advertising (9.5%) and word of mouth marketing (7.9%).

According to Ciao, 55.1% of respondents seem to be aware of the symbiotic relationship between the PR industry and the media, as they declared that the two are biased by each other.

Some people recognise that the media are the main vehicles for the PR industry's messages, with 13.8% believing that up to half of the content in daily newspapers is initiated by public relations, and a sizeable group think up to 80% of the content in consumer magazines is PR-related.

Ciao does concede that some of the participants lacked a clear opinion on many questions. "In some instances", says the survey group, "approximately half of the respondents answered that they were either indifferent or did not know the answer to the question."

So 60.3% of people in Britain believe that PR officers often lie, but nearly a third of Britons believe the PR industry is a necessary one at 32.7%, as opposed to only 21.1% who believe it to be unnecessary - doens't this invalidate the claims of the survey?

Ciao's online survey involved 1,005 people, aged 18 and above, in the UK during March. But it is Roy Greenslade's comments about the survey that are the most revealing:

I can't let that pass without inserting a comment here: is it not obvious that the participants were merely responding to a list read to them? The media and PR industries are "biased by each other"? Does it, in all honesty, tell us anything we need to know?

Surveys, then - a PR staple used for standby copy for Monday morning newspapers. Given that 1 in 4 adults blog, surveys are also useful for bloggers who can't think of anything else to write about on a Monday morning - including me. Just make sure the survey's relevant to the audience and tells them something they need to know.