Be careful as you set your public relations goal. You will need one that is well-defined, and one that responds to aberrations that appeared during your key audience perception monitoring. The new goal could call for straightening out that dangerous misconception, or correcting that gross inaccuracy, or doing something about that damaging rumor.

As night follows day, your new goal will need a strategy to show you how to get there. Fortunately, you will have just three strategic choices for handling a perception or opinion challenge: create perception where there may be none, change perception, or reinforce it. Unfortunately, a bad strategy pick will taste like sauteed onions on your pecan pie. So be sure new strategy fits well with your new public relations goal. For instance, you don’t want to select “change” when facts dictate a “reinforce” strategy.

Because bringing people’s minds around to your way of thinking is a tough assignment, your PR team must get busy immediately crafting needed corrective language. Words that are compelling, persuasive and believable AND clear and factual. You must do this if you are to correct a perception by shifting opinion towards your point of view, leading to desired behaviors.

Review your message for impact and persuasiveness with your communications specialists. Then, carefully select communications tactics most likely to carry your words to attention of your target audience. You can pick from dozens that are available. From speeches, facility tours, emails and brochures to consumer briefings, media interviews, newsletters, personal meetings and many others. But be sure that tactics you pick are known to reach folks just like your audience members.

You might introduce your message to smaller gatherings rather than using higher-profile tactics such as news releases or talk show appearances. Reason being that credibility of a message can occasionally depend on its delivery method being acceptable to each audience. Everyone will want to see progress reports. For you and your PR colleagues, they sound signal for you and your PR folks to return to field for a second perception monitoring session with members of your external audience. Using many of same questions used in first benchmark session, you must now stay alert for signs that bad news perception is being altered in your direction.

Things not moving fast enough? You can always accelerate matters with more communications tactics and increased frequencies.

Clearly, those important outside audiences constitute market segments that are exclusively yours, and you must do something positive about behaviors of those outside audiences that MOST affect your organization. Thus, they are segments you will need to persuade to your way of thinking, then move to take actions that help your department, division or subsidiary succeed.

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Bob Kelly counsels 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