Please feel free to publish this article and resource box in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication or website. A copy would be appreciated at bobkelly@TNI.net. Word count is 1025 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly © 2004. PR: Focus on What Matters!
Sure, as a manager, you have a talented member of
PR team assigned to your department, division or subsidiary, or housed at your agency, and s/he is darn good at placing product and service plugs on radio and in newspaper. Which may be all you want. And that’s fine.
Unfortunately, when your PR folks concentrate primarily on tactical fixes like publicity placements, at least be aware of what you are NOT getting.
You don’t get a comprehensive effort that persuades those important outside folks to your way of thinking, then moves them to take actions that help your department, division or subsidiary succeed.
You don’t get use of high-impact, fundamental premise of public relations to deliver external stakeholder behavior change – kind that leads directly to achieving your managerial objectives.
And you don’t get creative potential of your assigned PR team needed to positively impact behaviors of very outside audiences that MOST affect your business, non-profit or association.
That’s a fair amount NOT to be getting!
It certainly doesn’t sound like best use of your public relations resources, but it’s fixable. In which case, you might begin to see results such as prospects starting to do business with you; fresh proposals for strategic alliances and joint ventures; membership applications on rise; customers starting to make repeat purchases; capital givers or specifying sources starting to look your way, community leaders beginning to seek you out; welcome bounces in show room visits; politicians and legislators starting to view you as a key member of business, non-profit or association communities, and even higher employee retention rates.
From Day 1, you have to get public relations people assigned to your unit on board. Make certain they all accept realities that it’s vitally important to know how your outside audiences perceive your operations, products or services. And that perceptions almost always lead to behaviors that can hurt your unit.
Get your team involved in plans for monitoring and gathering perceptions by questioning members of your most important outside audiences. Questions like these: how much do you know about our organization? Have you had prior contact with us and were you pleased with interchange? How much do you know about our services or products and employees? Have you experienced problems with our people or procedures?
After all, your PR people are in perception and behavior business to begin with, so they can be of real use for this opinion monitoring project. Professional survey firms are always available, but that can be very expensive. But whether it’s your people or a survey firm who asks questions, your objective is to identify untruths, false assumptions, unfounded rumors, inaccuracies, and misconceptions .
