Let’s start with a basic premise: You like to win.

Whether it’s chess, cards or the communication campaigns you work on, you (like me) probably like to come out on top. Victory is sweet most of the time; profitable most of the time; and fun damned near all the time.

The bad news: No magic pixie dust guarantees a win. The good news: There’s a framework for identifying how you can control the debate in most communications situations. And if you control the debate, you’ll win more often than not.

Nine years ago, I wrote the following as part of an essay. For the archeologists among us, that’s before Facebook and before social media became everyone’s darling.

I don’t predict the future well or consistently, but with nine years’ hindsight, I’d say I had the current landscape pretty much nailed.

As I tell anyone who’ll listen, “I used to do PR.”

For years now, it’s looked/felt a lot more like community relations, but sometimes the community is a pool of editors and reporters, sometimes it’s a market of end customers and sometimes it’s a group of opinion leaders.

Back in the day, we all relied on the media to reach the end user and the opinion leader — that’s why they called it media relations, and there are still times when that approach is the right one to take.

But my guess (and of course, when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail) is that the future of PR looks a helluva lot like the present of community relations.

There are probably two things at work here…

“Why don’t we use focus groups to gather input?”

It takes a lot to make planners, engineers and public involvement professionals all roll their eyes in the same meeting. But the lowly focus group, underachiever of the public-involvement world, regularly generates this reaction.

Why the aversion to a little qualitative research? Let’s face it: Most PI focus groups don’t work well.

That’s a shame, because the technique — a facilitated discussion designed to solicit input about a predefined topic — has a lot to recommend it. Focus groups are relatively inexpensive, they’re flexible and offer project owners a chance to interact with the community in a way that impersonal surveys can never match.

So why the eye rolling? It depends on who you ask.