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?

Nobody enjoys filing, at least nobody I?ve ever met. But like it or not, keeping track of paper information is crucial to living an organized life or running a successful business. The biggest problem most people have with filing isn?t how to store it, but how to retrieve it. So how do you create a filing system that works? Here are three basic steps to get you started.

1. Sort your material into BROAD TOPICS. (common categories are money, house, health, auto, hobbies/interests, family history/identification, insurance, etc.) Try to keep it to about ten broad categories. The plastic tabs on your hanging files should be at FAR LEFT side on FRONT flap of folder, not rear one. This makes folder easier to open, you simply grab tab that you want and pull it toward you to open it. The FAR LEFT tab position is a visual cue for you that this folder begins a broad category.

Also, as you are sorting, this is perfect opportunity to PURGE your files of old, outdated, and irrelevant information that has been taking up space.