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 760 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly © 2003. How to Take Advantage of Public Relations
Decide once and for all to do something about those outside audiences whose behaviors affect your organization most.
When members of those “publics” of yours perceive and understand who and what you are, and like what they see, behaviors that flow from those perceptions will put a smile on your face.
Good things happen like converting sales prospects into customers, convincing existing customers to stay with you, or even toning down activist rhetoric. Even internally, productivity often increases when employees conclude that you really do care about them.
It’s all possible when you commit your organization to confront head-on those key target audience perceptions and behaviors.
Easy to do? Well, it’s not so hard when you have a roadmap to guide you.
Right at top, try listing, say, your top three outside audiences whose behaviors can really affect success of your organization. Let’s pick audience at top of list and go to work on it.
Can’t take any chances on being wrong about what they think of you, so now’s time to start interacting with audience members. Ask a lot of questions. What do they think of your services or products? Is there a hint of negativity in their answers? Do you detect evil effects of a rumor? Are their facts inaccurate and in need of correction?
What information gathering like this does for you is let you form a public relations goal. It could be as simple as correcting an inaccurate perception, clearing up a misconception or spiking that nasty rumor. Your goal might even have to take aim at a widespread belief that’s just plain wrong.
With your goal set, how will you actually affect those perceptions? Of course, that takes a successful strategy. But when it comes down to really doing something about opinion, we have only three ways to go: create opinion if there is none, change existing opinion, or reinforce it. Just make sure strategy you choose flows logically from public relations goal you set.