The Stanfords had only one son, Leland Jr., whom they loved dearly. He was fond of playing at their sprawling Palo Alto ranch, especially on his miniature railroad with 400 feet of track. In 1884, while family was vacationing in Europe, young Leland, just two weeks shy of his 16th birthday contracted typhoid fever and died. The family was devastated. That tearful morning Leland Sr. turned to his wife Jane and said, “The Children of California shall be our children.” With that passionate thought, Stanfords decided to donate their millions in remembrance of their young son who never reached his 16th birthday. Today, you are all fortunate to be blessed with an American Treasure - Stanford University. .

Unfortunately, you’ll make no headway at all without right strategy to tell you how to proceed. But keep in mind that there are just three strategic options available when it comes to doing something about perception and opinion. Change existing perception, create perception where there may be none, or reinforce it. The wrong strategy pick will taste like bleu cheese dressing on your liver and onions, so be sure your new strategy fits well with your new public relations goal. You wouldn’t want to select “change” when facts dictate a “reinforce” strategy.

The challenge now is to prepare a nicely put together message and direct it to members of your target audience. It’s always a problem to create an actionable message that will help persuade an audience to your way of thinking.

Obviously, you need your best scribes for this one because s/he must build some very special, corrective language. Words that are not merely compelling, persuasive and believable, but clear and factual if they are to shift perception/opinion towards your point of view and lead to behaviors you have in mind.

Once your PR team has vetted work product, it’s on to next selection process -- communications tactics most likely to carry your message to attention of your target audience. There are tons available. From speeches, facility tours, emails and brochures to consumer briefings, media interviews, newsletters, personal meetings and many others. But you must be certain that tactics you pick are known to reach folks like your audience members,

By way, you may wish to avoid distributing such a corrective message from rooftops, and unveil your message before smaller meetings and presentations rather than using higher-profile news releases Reason is, credibility of any message is fragile and always at stake.

You’ll soon hear calls for progress reports which will tell you and your PR team to get busy on a second perception monitoring session with members of your external audience. You’ll also want to use many of same questions used in first benchmark session. Big difference this time is that you will be on constant alert for signs that bad news perception is being altered in your direction.

I’ve always thought it fortunate that such matters usually can be accelerated simply by adding more communications tactics as well as increasing their frequencies.

At end of day, what you want your new PR plan to do is persuade your most important outside stakeholders to your way of thinking, then move them to behave in a way that leads to success of your department, division or subsidiary.

Your biggest success secret will be when your “target publics” -- those all important outside stakeholder audiences – actually act upon their perceptions of facts they hear about you and your operation. Which means you really have little choice but to deal promptly and effectively with those perceptions by doing what is necessary to reach and move those key external audiences of yours to actions you desire.

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 communications, U.S. Department of the Interior, and deputy assistant press secretary, The White House. mailto:bobkelly@TNI.net Visit:http://www.prcommentary.com