If you and your team have delivered some important project ahead of schedule, make sure this is known by those that matter (your boss, his boss, heads of other departments, etc.).

If you have successfully concluded a tricky negotiation with an important customer, thus saving their custom for your company, be sure to tell people. If you have clinched a valuable deal to obtain goods or services at much reduced cost, then do same.

Don’t go around boasting of your achievements of course. That is sure to make you unpopular. But you can be more subtle. Does your company have an in-house magazine, for example? The editors are bound to be looking for success stories that show company in a good light. So write them an article.

Is there an opportunity to give a presentation about your department’s work at a managers meeting or at a seminar? Take up opportunity.

If you are in a operational or maintenance type of environment you have a more difficult task than most. It is not in nature of your job to be high visibility. It is usually only at times of crisis that others notice you are there. The more smoothly your department runs – fewer waves you are routinely making – greater danger of being forgotten and more important it is to do something about it.

So don’t be taken for granted. Don’t let your department be forgotten. Don’t become an unknown head of a department of which nobody knows what it does. If you do allow that to happen then you will be last to be remembered when new and interesting projects come up, but first for chop when cutbacks take place.

Now you must select specific perception to be altered, which then becomes your public relations goal.

But clearly, a PR goal without a strategy to show you how to get there, is like French Toast without syrup and bacon. So you select one of three strategies especially constructed to create perception or opinion where there may be none, or change existing perception, or reinforce it. But insure that goal and its strategy match each other. You wouldn’t want to select “change existing perception” when current perception is just right suggesting a “reinforce” strategy.

Here, you put together a compelling message carefully structured to alter your key target audience’s perception, as specified by your public relations goal.

A thought. Combine your corrective message with another news announcement or presentation which may provide more credibility by downplaying need for such a correction.

Clearly you have to produce a compelling message, one that’s quite clear about what perception needs clarification or correction, and why. Goes without saying that you must be truthful, believable and your position logically explained if you are to hold attention of members of that target audience, and actually move perception in your direction.

On a light note, we sometimes call communications tactics you will use to move your message to attention of that key external audience, “beasts of burden” because they must carry your persuasive new thoughts to eyes and ears of those important outside people.

There is no shortage of communications tactics because list is long indeed. It includes customer briefings, brochures, press releases and speeches. Or, you might choose facility tours, radio and newspaper interviews, personal contacts, or letters-to-the-editor. There are many available to you and only selection requirement is that communications tactics you choose have a record of reaching people just like members of your key target audience.

If things slow down on you, accelerate them by adding more communications tactics, AND by increasing their frequencies.

With passage of time, you’ll anticipate that folks will soon be questioning you about progress, so you will already be hard at work remonitoring perceptions among your target audience members. Using questions similar to those used during your earlier monitoring session, you’ll now be watching carefully for signs that audience perceptions are beginning to move in your general direction.

Satisfying curiosity in this regard is largely a matter of laying out results you will receive when you undertake this aggressive public relations plan. Put another way, you may be excused for relaxing when you achieve kind of key stakeholder behavior change that leads directly to achieving your department, division or subsidiary objectives.

end

Bob Kelly counsels, writes and speaks to managers about using the fundamental premise of public relations to achieve their operating objectives. He has been DPR, Pepsi-Cola Co.; AGM-PR, Texaco Inc.; VP-PR, Olin Corp.; VP-PR, Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co.; director of communi- cations, U.S. Department of the Interior, and deputy assistant press secretary, The White House. mailto:bobkelly@TNI.net Visit:http://www.prcommentary.com