So, what is it that you do for a living?

Our family gatherings are usually a joyous time, though sometimes tedious and downright annoying, depending on who’s in attendance. You know how you sometimes get introduced to "cousins" of yours who were never mentioned your whole existence and now they suddenly materialize and, because you’re in the same age group, you’re forced to socialize with them? Well, that was the case with me this time around.

I always find these situations excruciatingly painful as I’m not sure what topics we would discuss so there I charge with the "so, what do you do?" question. Not only is this question intrusive and can make the receiver either extremely uncomfortable or annoyingly verbose (that of course depends on what it is the person really does for a living), it can also be embarrassing for the person asking it.

I recently found myself in such a situation after having asked a new "cousin", who, by the way, is an internal auditor for PetroSA. He then of course threw it right back at me and I gleefully told him that I’m a publicist and PR consultant. He shot me one of those confused looks and asked, "What does a publicist do?" With furrowed brows, I would often look at the person posing this silly question, thinking "why would you ask something that is so self-explanatory?"

I attempted to answer his question, thinking whether I should launch an academic asault or if I should just give him the "I make people and companies famous" street explanation.

I opted to for the former, rather, to enlighten the poor fellow and gave him a quick explanation: "A publicist is someone who plays middleman between a client and the media. He comes up with various ways to make sure the public gets to know about the client, what the client does and feeds that content or information to the media, who would then publish it (should they find it useful). Basically most of the stuff you read about in the papers and events covered on TV and radio is often fed to journalists by publicists."

After that answer, I could see that my cousin was ready with more questions. He launched, "So how is that different from PR (public relations)?"

At this point, I could tell that were in it for the long haul. I kept looking around the room trying to see if there was anyone who needed my help. I was not prepared to delve into a long conversation about my profession and so I needed to escape from this dude.

Seeing that none was coming my way and my audience was awaiting an answer, I answered, "Well, publicity is really all about making sure that the public knows about your client’s projects, events and of course the client itself.

With publicity you get information out to the media without having to pay for space; whereas, PR is about seeking the mutual benefits of interacting and exchanging information with mass and specialized media and publics. Media and PR/Publicity agents have a co-dependent relationship. One feeds off the other."

I think things slowly started to make sense for him. Anticipating that he would further ask me about how marketing and advertising differ from all of this, I went on to explain that marketing and advertising are all about above-the-line stuff; meaning that they pay to get their message across, while we work on long-term relationships with media and nurturing those relationships by being always available and ready to help out when they need stories.

Furthermore, I told him who my company’s clients were and how awesome it was to work in an industry one loves. I told him that, at the end of the day when all the sweat has dried up there's a whole glam side to PR/Publicity. The VIP access to the hottest parties in town, the slew of invites that land on our inboxes and of course interacting with the "who's who" of the industry. That is, after all, what everyone thinks PR and Publicity is about, right?

I think this made things a bit clearer for him and I could see that he was satisfied with the answer. However long the answer was, I just had to make sure there wasn’t another question to come out of him. All I needed at this point was serenity, peace and quiet.

To be quite frank, I've endured strenuous, hair-pulling and teeth grinding situations with family members and non-media-savvy folk, and I must state that my new cousin wasn’t so bad after all.