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What your aiming at, obviously, is a PR goal that does something about
most serious distortions you discover during your key audience perception monitoring. Will it be to straighten out that dangerous misconception? Correct that gross inaccuracy? Or, stop that potentially painful rumor cold?
Of course, without right strategy to tell you how to proceed, you won’t get there at all. So 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 horseradish on your pancakes, 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 strategy of reinforcement.
Here, you must come up with a well-written message and send it to members of your target audience. It’s always a challenge to create an actionable message that will help persuade any audience to your way of thinking.
What you want now is your strongest writers 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.
After your PR team has signed off on draft copy of your message, you move on to next selection process -- communications tactics most likely to carry your message to attention of your target audience. There are scores that are 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.
An alert: you may wish to avoid too loud a voice with this kind of message and unveil it before smaller meetings and presentations rather than using higher-profile news releases, as credibility of any message is fragile and always at stake.
From this point forward, you’ll start getting requests for progress reports, which tells you and your PR team to begin a second perception monitoring session with members of your external audience. You’ll want to use many of same questions used in first benchmark session. But now, you will be on red alert for signs that bad news perception is being altered in your direction.
It does seem fortunate that such matters usually can be accelerated simply by adding more communications tactics as well as increasing their frequencies.
The value of public relations to managers becomes clearer when you realize that people you deal with behave like everyone else – they 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.
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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
