The Ultimate PR “Scam”

It happens to business, non-profit and association managers when their public relations budget fails to deliver crucial external audience behaviors they need to achieve their department, division or subsidiary objectives.

Behaviors they should have received leading directly to boosts in repeat purchases; growing community support; more tech firms specifying manager’s components; increased capital donations; stronger employee retention rates; new waves of prospects, or healthy membership increases.

If that rings your bell, you need to take two actions.

First, insist that your public relations activity is based on a fundamental premise like this: 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 opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action very people whose behaviors affect organization most, public relations mission is accomplished.

Second, as manager for whom they labor, get personally involved with professionals managing your PR effort. Tell those specialists that you must list, then prioritize those key external audiences whose behaviors effect your unit most.

Identify that outside audience sitting at top of your slate, and we’ll work on it right now.

Nothing happens, of course, until you gather some pithy information. Namely, how do members of that key target audience, whose behaviors affect your unit’s success or failure, actually perceive you?

You and/or your PR team must interact with members of that audience and monitor their perceptions by asking a number of questions: Do you know anything about us? What have you heard about our services or products? Have you ever had contact with our organization? Was it satisfactory?

The trick here is to stay vigilant for negative signs, in particular, untruths, exaggerations, inaccuracies, rumors or misconceptions.

Here, we look at physical security and three key steps a company should take to ensure their data is protected against environmental changes and physical theft.

Step #1: Secure Access Protect critical computer equipment against physical theft by placing it in a separate physical space which has controlled, recorded access. Limit entrance to only authorized personnel.

Step #2: Environmental Controls The space which houses critical computer equipment should be climate controlled through proper heating and air conditioning, including fail-over systems in event of main system failure. Fire suppression and temperature monitoring with an automatic notification system should be implemented.

Step #3: Uninterrupted Power Ensure that backup power supplies, including surge suppression, are in place to provide power to key computer equipment in event of a primary power failure or instability in primary power supply. Now, we examine digital security and four key steps a company should take to ensure their data is protected against unauthorized access.

Step #4: Firewalls A firewall should be placed between company’s internal computer network and each external network access point to stop unauthorized users from gaining access to internal network and company data.

Step #5: Anti-Virus Software Each workstation and server in company should have anti-virus software installed and periodically updated with current virus definition files. Email servers should scan for viruses embedded in external messages and attachments prior to relaying them to internal email boxes.