How Would You Ever Know?

Your important outside audiences behave in ways that stop you from reaching your objectives.

Because you haven’t paid much attention to their care and feeding, is it likely you’ll know they are placing a hammer lock on your business in time to limit damage?

With some luck, you might save day, but why let matters fester until you have a bad situation like this on your hands?

Especially when a proven sequence can help you alter perceptions, and thus behaviors of your most important external audiences making achievement of your business objectives much easier.

Take a quick look at what makes it all possible, fundamental premise of public relations:

People act on their own perception of facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that perception by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action those people whose behaviors affect organization, public relations mission is accomplished

Now, put it into action this way.

First, think about those groups of people whose behaviors can really affect your organization. The test for placing a key, external audience on your action list is this: does its behavior affect your business in any way. If answer is yes, list it.

Let’s take target audience at top of that list and work it over. Obviously, you need to know how members of that audience perceive you, and that requires that you interact with those members and ask a lot of questions. This is monitoring phase.

How do they think of your organization, if at all? Do they have any problems with you? Do negative thoughts creep into conversation? Are misconceptions, inaccurate beliefs, even rumors apparent?