PERSUADE

Persuading your key audiences, third leg of opinion troika, is yet another challenge because bringing these important groups of stakeholders around to your way of thinking depends heavily on quality of message you prepare for each target audience.

It’s hard work. You must understand and identify what is really at issue at moment; impart a sense of credibility to your comments; perform regular assessments of how opinion is currently running among that group, constantly adjusting your message; as well as highlighting those key issue points most likely to engage their attention and involvement; and finally, identify and build into your messages pre-tested, action-producing incentives for individuals to take actions you desire.

By way, those incentives could include very strength of your position on issues, a new plant expansion holding promise of more jobs and taxes for City, or even your organization’s efforts to attract low and middle income housing to area.

ACTION

Moving your target groups to action, hopefully with a mix of activity such as above, can be accelerated, even amplified by careful selection of those media most likely to reach your target audience. This applies whether, among other tactics, you use print or broadcast media, key podium presentations or a series of top-level personal contacts, because when these tools communicate with your target audiences you want them to score direct bullseyes.

Of equal importance to success of your action program will be selection and perceived credibility of actual spokespeople who will deliver your messages. They must be seen as people of stature, and they must speak with authority, personal confidence and conviction if meaningful media coverage is to be achieved.

Now, Let’s Gain and Hold

By this time, your action program should begin to gain and hold kind of public understanding and acceptance that will lead to desired shift in public behavior.

Signs that your messages are turning some opinion in your direction will begin to appear. For example, indicators like comments by a colleague in an outside business meeting, observations in a local newspaper editorial, e-mails from interested parties, public references by political figures and local celebrities should begin to build. Each of these indicators will reflect a segment of local, individual perception which, in turn, will gradually begin to reflect modified behaviors you seek.

And The End-Game? Modify Behavior, Achieve your Goal

When changes in behaviors become truly apparent through media reports, thought-leader comment, employee and community chatter and a variety of other feedback -- at same time clearly meeting your original behavior modification goal -- I believe your public relations program can be deemed a success.

Obviously, your piece of action in business recovery ahead will come at a price. And that will be your cost to efficiently modify behaviors of your target audiences. But, payoff makes it all worthwhile -- nothing less than achievement of your business objectives and, at slight risk of overstatement, a real contribution to survival of your organization.

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Bob Kelly, public relations consultant, was director of public relations for Pepsi-Cola Co.; AGM-Public Relations, Texaco Inc.; VP-Public Relations, Olin Corp.; VP-Public Relations, 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

Modify somebody’s behavior, that’s his goal, and that’s job of public relations agency and its client’s corporate professionals. Fortunately, key to a successful effort is fact that people really DO act on their perception of facts. In so doing, and in a cumulative way, they form very public opinion that those practitioners must now inform.

So, what is their strategy? In short, to reach those perceptions with facts as they know them. Hopefully, messages they use will be clear and persuasive, and will change negative or inaccurate perceptions, then alter behaviors in client company’s direction.

Using three examples above, when activists become satisfied with explanations of company’s new, public commitment to correct their emission problems, protesters can be expected to leave plant gates.

Editorial board meetings with local newspapers and television stations will begin to bear fruit with more balanced reportage of company’s efforts to meet emission standards which, in turn, will reduce negative public opinion.

And, while agency’s briefing sessions with town council staff will do little to hasten a formal vote, a targeted communications effort is likely to lead to a community opinion poll showing positive movement in public, then official sentiment about new highway off-ramp.

In end, a sound public relations strategy combined with effective tactics leads directly to bottom line – perceptions altered; behaviors modified; client satisfied.

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Bob Kelly, public relations consultant, was director of public relations for Pepsi-Cola Co.; AGM-Public Relations, Texaco Inc.; VP-Public Relations, Olin Corp.; VP-Public Relations, 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