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. Net word count is 630 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly © 2003. Sound Like Your Situation?
by Robert A. Kelly
What a shame! Potentially productive public relations people resting on their oars in a large organization. Just kind of tinkering with tactics and leaving target audience perceptions (and behaviors) to pretty much do their own thing.
Big pain on
way!
Unattended, key public perceptions can morph into painful behaviors that hurt organization.
Just plain shouldn’t happen.
In military-speak, all it takes is some ongoing “intel.”
First, insist that that potentially productive public relations team get busy by prioritizing your most important audiences. They can’t work on everything at once. So for starters, they can identify that really key target audience.
Then monitor perceptions by interacting with some folks who make up that audience, and do it on a regular basis. Same with other important external publics, when time allows.
What’s on their minds? Any negative feelings? See or hear anything that needs correcting? Is there a problem on horizon that may come your way?
The answers to those questions help your crew form public relations goal – altered perceptions leading to altered behaviors. For example, correct impression that you sell shoddy merchandise; or a perception that you favor one particular ethnic group; or a belief that your services aren’t worth price you charge.
Setting public relations goal let’s your public relations team focus on which strategy they want to employ to reach that goal.
There’s not a big choice. In fact, just three are available. They can choose between creating perceptions (opinions) when none exist, or changing existing opinion, or reinforcing it.
