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 1020 including guidelines and resource box. Robert A. Kelly © 2004. Managers: PR More than Tix and Plugs?
You bet! And in three ways vital to you as a business, non-profit or association manager.
To succeed, your public relations effort needs to do something really positive about
behaviors of those outside audiences that most affect your operation.
It needs to deliver external stakeholder behavior change – kind that leads directly to achieving your managerial objectives.
And it needs to do so by persuading those important outside folks to your way of thinking, then move them to take actions that help your department, division or subsidiary succeed.
All three, hopefully long before anybody worries about theater tickets or radio plugs!
But how do you get to point where all three of those dynamics actually contribute to your success as a manager?
I believe fundamental premise of public relations is a good place to start, herewith: 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.
Get organized around that premise and you could get behavior changes like more membership applications; customers making repeat purchases; new proposals for strategic alliances and joint ventures; community leaders beginning to seek you out; welcome bounces in show room visits; prospects starting to sniff around; capital givers or specifying sources beginning to think about you, and even politicians and lawmakers who view you as a key member of business, non-profit or association communities.
May sound painfully obvious, but you need entire PR team assigned to your unit on board for this ride. They need to accept that fundamental premise of public relations.
A not so obvious first step? Make certain whole team agrees – really agrees -- why it’s so important to know how your outside audiences perceive your operations, products or services. Be deep-down-sure they accept reality that perceptions almost always lead to destructive behaviors that can damage your unit.
Carefully go over just how you plan to monitor and gather 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?
Your PR people can be of real use for this opinion monitoring project since they already labor in perception and behavior vineyard. Yes, you can always bring in a professional survey firm, but that can be hard on wallet. Whether it’s your people or a survey firm who asks questions, objective stands: identify untruths, false assumptions, unfounded rumors, inaccuracies, misconceptions and any other potentially hurtful perception and prepare to deal with it.
