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by Mihaela Vorvoreanu. Cross-posted at PR Connections
There’s some discussion in the blogosphere about GM’s social media and crisis communication strategies these days, when they just filed for bankruptcy.
The arguments motivated me to finally start a new series of posts, For the Love of Theory.
In response to the question: Can PR save a company? I’d like to offer and overview of a “classic” PR theory, that of Issue Management.
PR can save a company, but not if it’s used to “get the message across”: If it’s used to listen, monitor and analyze issues, to enable the organization to adapt to its environment in a timely manner.
This is exactly what GM failed to do, and what the theory of Issue Management explains:
The theory posits that any issue in society (i.e. environmentalism, vegetarianism, etc.) has a lifecycle that revolves from dormant (no one thinks about it) to potential, as a few selected people start considering it, to imminent, when it starts picking up speed and media attention, to current, when it’s in the center of the public’s and the media’s attention, to critical, when the issue is demanding a solution. After being “resolved,” the issue goes back into the dormant stage, but it can wake up again at a later time.
The Issue Management function of public relations (which is thought of, at least in academic circles, as much more than media relations & publicity) is to continuously:
– scan the environment
– identify issues that can affect the organization
– analyze these issues to determine if action is necessary
– bring the issues to the attention of higher management, along with action recommendations
– design, implement, evaluate communication strategies around the issue (you often see companies taking positions on social or political issues)
Depending on how late/early a company identifies the issue and takes action, it can follow a reactive strategy (implementing actions imposed by others), an adaptive, dynamic, or even catalytic strategy – in this one, the company wakes an issue up from the dormant stage and moves it through the entire life cycle.
Of course, the earlier the company intervenes, the more power it has to frame the issue and to influence public discussion.
Can you see now how the issue management function of PR could have saved GM?
Many rhetorical scholars‘ view of PR is:
The good organization speaking well*
PR is widely understood as the “speaking well” part, but if the PR function is used strategically, and is given a seat at the management table, it is its job not only to speak well, but to help the organization be good.
Ultimately, the PR function can help an organization adapt to its environment (and change the environment to suit it better).
For GM, it’s a bit late. But I hope you can see now how PR can help an organization adapt, survive, and thrive. It’s just time we moved past the “free publicity” paradigm of PR and catch up to a bigger picture understanding of what PR can do for an organization.
If you’re interested in reading more:
Chase, W. H. (1977). Public issue management: The new science. Public Relations Journal, 32(10), 25-26.
* Cheney, G.D. (1992). The corporate person (re)presents itself, in: E. Lance Toth, R.L. Heath (Eds.), Rhetorical and Critical Approaches to Public Relations, Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, p. 167.
Crable, R. E., & Vibbert, S. L. (1985). Managing issues and influencing public policy. Public Relations Review, 11(2), 3-16.
Heath, R.J., & Palenchar, M.J. (2008). Strategic Issues Management 2. Sage.
by Mihaela Vorvoreanu. Cross-posted at PR Connections and on PROpenMic
I place a lot of emphasis on Twitter in my PR courses, but were not sure whether that was such a good idea – from their perspective. So I asked my PR students from the Spring 09 Stakeholder Communication class to respond anonymously to a survey about learning twitter. Their answers are below: Do you believe it was beneficial for you to learn how to use Twitter? Please explain why or why not.
Has Twitter helped you learn in any way? How has it helped (or not)?
Do you feel you “get” Twitter? What about it do you (not) understand?
Aything else you’d like to tell me about Twitter in PR classes?
What has your experience been learning or teaching Twitter?
I spent the last few days at the PRSA Health Academy Conference and had a great time. For more information here is the website: http://www.healthacademy.prsa.org/2009conference.htm
Much of the conference revolved around social media. My favorite session was the Plenary Session conducted by Jennifer Martin, director of PR for CNN. Jennifer gave the audience many great tips for working with social media by explaining what CNN has done. She told us many things about CNN’s coverage of Obama’s inauguration and how CNN.com used Facebook connect to enhance the efforts. It was amazing to see just how many people logged on to watch the event.
She also gave some useful suggestions for anyone thinking about getting his/her feet wet in social media.
1.) Know your audience. You need to find what’s right for you and your public. And, you need to put your public first
2.) Try to connect your efforts to something pro-social. Jennifer talked about CNN’s and Ashton Kutcher’s race to get to 1 million twitter followers. CNN didn’t win, but the organization did make donations of nets and money to a relief organization in Africa, which helped CNN to get some good press.
3.) Nothing is one-size fits all. You’ll need to experiment. What works for one person or one organization may not work for you. Be willing to try and try again.
4.) Expect to make mistakes. Don’t let the mistakes paralyze your efforts; learn from them.
Brigitta R. Brunner
This semester in my PR writing class at the University of Georgia, I tasked my students to create videos which we hope would “go viral.” The purpose of the assignment was put the students’ ability to:
To ensure this wasn’t just a “cool YouTube assignment,” I had students turn in storyboards which I graded as an assignment & gave feed back on publics, appeal and messaging.
In preparation of this month-long team project, we welcomed Converseon‘s Paull Young into our classroom via Skype to tell us the secrets of making videos so good that they just can’t help but go viral. (watch here and here.)
I invited our client for the project, UGA Admissions, to come in to talk about their admissions recruiting process, the distinctly different audiences (parents, high school students, transfer students, etc.) and what they’d like to achieve with the video project. I asked the NOT to tell us the content of the videos they’d like — let us creatively see what we can come up with — but focus on an end-project goal with us instead.
Student were promised bonus points if UGA Admissions picked their video for use in the recruiting efforts. I also held a “viral showdown” where all the videos competed against one another and the top two most popular videos (videos with the most views) got bonus points as well. Interestingly, there was some difference in the make-up of the winners for the Admission-selected videos and the most viewed videos.
In grading the viral videos, I created a standard rubric looking again at publics, appeal and message. Given Paull’s advice to the students, I also looked for whether there was a call to action. Additionally, I looked at the technical quality – could you hear the dialogue, were the transitions adequate, etc. All copyrighted material (music, images) was both acknowledged in the credits of the film and students provided me proof of permission for use for everything. (We don’t believe in stealing music or photos here & that was another lesson I wanted to teach.)
Because these videos were posted on my YouTube account, I was able to look at the YouTube InSights data for each video. Along with the graded feedback from the rubrics sheets, students received print outs of the InSight data on who was looking at their video (gender, ages, location), how they found the video (referrers & search terms) as well as the neat “hot spots” graph which I annotated to show where people might have rewound the video or at which point they abandoned watching it.
In the end, the students loved the project and I feel it showed the professional approach PR can take with making social media content. Just because it is on YouTube does not mean that you can steal music to play in the background or that you should forget everything you learned about messaging.
I gave students a month to work on it outside of class. They were in teams of 3-4 people, self-selected. They were given full creative control of their content for the video & just received consultation-type feedback from me. They checked out my flip cams to record the videos (2-day check out for each of my 2 flip cams) & most of them taught themselves how to use iMovie to create the video. While I offered some level of tech support, few asked me any questions at all.
If you’re curious, UGA Admissions selected:
#1: Lessons Learned: Katherine Durham, Danielle Sender, Devin Zimmerman
#2: My UGA: Kristin Ballard, Ryan Barnes, Magan Cowart, Meredith Schneider
The viral showdown winners were (views as of April 28, 2009):
#1: My UGA: Kristin Ballard, Ryan Barnes, Magan Cowart, Meredith Schneider (1,922 views)
#2: There’s no place like home – UGA: Staci Dale, Katie Brown, Katie Holcomb (1,369 views)
You can watch all the videos, some admittedly better than others, at this YouTube playlist.
Dr. Kaye D. Sweetser, APR, is an assistant professor of public relations in the H.W. Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She blogs at http://kayesweetser.com, and can be reached via e-mail at sweetser[AT]uga.edu. This was cross-posted at the so this is mass communication?.
Shel Holtz to deliver free webinar on transparency at noon EST on May 20.
You can read more info on their site, but the webinar is at noon EST on May 20.
In touching on this ethical issue in PR, they promise to “share practical techniques and case studies on how you can (and why you should) deliver your communications with greater openness and authenticity.”
And now a note about webinars.
There are very few webinars out there that end up being worth the time, let alone the price tag, it costs to “attend.” That said, I’ve had consistent success with webinars sponsored by Thomson Reuters. Their webinars are specific with case studies and real how tos on “how to do X” — not just generalized “isn’t it great to do X” information.
Dr. Kaye D. Sweetser, APR, is an assistant professor of public relations in the H.W. Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She blogs at http://kayesweetser.com, and can be reached via e-mail at sweetser[AT]uga.edu.
By Tiffany Gallicano, University of Oregon
(Cross-posted to The PR Post and PR Open Mic)
The swine flu outbreak is an opportunity to talk with students about basic principles of risk communication. Risk communication includes encouraging people to take preventive measures in the face of risk (anything from evacuating before a flood to taking daily vitamins) and helping people cope with risks, such as terrorism. Below are guidelines for risk communication.
1. Think through your word choice. Does the situation warrant the label of “pandemic,” or would “outbreak” be appropriate? You don’t want to scare people unnecessarily or have the opposite problem of leaving people unprepared.
2. Look for aspects of the risk to highlight, depending on whether you want to heighten or ease the sense of risk. If you want to increase public concern about global warming, your message strategy would differ from what you would do if you were developing message points about the swine flu outbreak. Based on Peter Sandman’s research, people feel more comfortable with risks that have the following features:
3. Acknowledge uncertainty when speculating. For credibility, risk communicators needs to be accurate in their communication, which usually involves using tentative statements. Also, for situations like the swine flu outbreak, Peter Sandman shared the following sound bite with reporters: “Everyone needs to learn how to say, ‘This could be bad, and it’s a good reason to take precautions and prepare’ and ‘This could fizzle out.’ They need to simultaneously say both statements.”
4. Give people something to do to lower their risk. However minimal it might be, give people something to do to reduce their risk (see here and here for examples). When the Washington, D.C., snipers were in my area in 2002, I followed police recommendations featured in The Washington Post to walk briskly in a zig zag pattern. Even though I felt silly walking zig zag, I felt like I had some measure of control in reducing my risk. Also note that people tend to feel more comfortable with risk when they choose to expose themselves to it. Even providing the threat level for air travel gives people some amount of choice in deciding whether the risk is worth the trip. For more information about the importance of this guideline, see Kim Witte’s extended parallel process model.
5. Give frequent updates and repeat core messages through various forms of media. An example of this is CDC’s Twitter account (hat tip to the In Case of Emergency blog). Here is a quote from a communication expert I interviewed for my dissertation: “Nowadays, you have to over-communicate… The information doesn’t filter. We have nine or 10 ways of communicating.”
6. Consider cultural barriers. At the University of Oregon Conference on HIV/AIDS in Africa, Pauline Peters, a lecturer at Harvard University, discussed cultural considerations for HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns in Malawi. Simply telling people to wear condoms to protect themselves would not work well in this environment. Many people there viewed condoms as poisonous and associated condoms with illicit sex. A best practice in developing messages is to partner with representatives of the community to determine message design and delivery.
Interested in teaching a risk communication class?
Feel free to use my course schedule for graduate students as a resource, which includes a list of journal articles and other resources. We are reading two books for the class, which I strongly recommend:
I reviewed many risk communication books before selecting these two, and I also paid attention to book cost when making these selections. These books as a combination work well; their different approaches can result in rich class discussion.
— Mihaela Vorvoreanu [cross-posted from PR Connections]
Back when I was a communication graduate student at Purdue, a friend asked me at a party:
I thought for a second (or two!) then I answered:
Many years later, I still believe this is the most important lesson you can learn (and practice!) in communication – and of course, the related profession of public relations.
That’s why I’m happy to see posts such as this one by Todd Defren about Shift’s PR process, which starts with a lot of listening.
Carrie Woodward from Brains on Fire visited our class yesterday to talk about the Fiskateers community. It became apparent how much time and effort they put into getting to know their audience, and how they couldn’t have succeeded without extensive research and listening.
Yet, I see so many PR/marketing efforts that seem to be shots in the dark. Let’s just do this. Why? How? Oh, the details don’t matter. Let’s be on Facebook. Let’s be on Twitter.
I was trying to get the point across to my students, that you need to understand your audience, where they are, what they care about, what they talk about, and how… and I used this example:
Imagine you’re all sitting here in this classroom, waiting for PR class to start, but I walk in a random hall down the hallway and start lecturing there.
They laughed at the absurdity of the idea, yet how many companies do exactly that?
I hope my students will remember this lesson, and I hope they’ll be able to get it across to their bosses.
So there, that’s my most important lesson. What’s the most important thing you know about communication and PR?
-Alisa Agozzino
At the university I work at we are on a quarter system. This means we have 10 weeks of classes every term before our week of finals and then a week of break. The good news is that for those classes that are less than par, it’s over quickly. Bad news is that just when you and the students start to get the hang of the class, it’s over.
The main problem I have with our quarter system is the endless registration. We meet with students 3, sometimes 4, times a year (depending if they chose to take summer quarter). I love see the advisees. I like to find out how their current quarter is treating and if they do have problems, we are able to deal with them before the withdraw deadline. However meeting with these students takes anywhere from a half to a full hour of my time—for two weeks out of every quarter. Combine this with hitting right at midterm time every quarter, it becomes very time consuming and frustrating. I want to give every student the time they rightfully deserve (especially at a private university that stresses student/mentor interaction). Yet with a three course load and research I am ready to pull my hair out.
So as we enter week 5 here in the spring quarter, I sighed aloud today when I arrived at my mailbox with the colored sheet with all my students registration times and pin numbers to register. Here we go again.
— Kaye Sweetser
Every year, PRSA sponsors the Bateman Case Study Competition where campaigns teams across the nation take on the same client and case then work to produce the “best” campaign.
Each school operates the Bateman team differently. Some schools have an application process where “Bate-mates” (as I’ve so lovingly called them at UGA) are hand-picked, while other schools have multiple teams that all compete against each other in addition to other participating universities.
Winning Bateman is big.
But participating is really all the fun.
Students are given a national client that they then must localize. They work tirelessly through the RPIE model, all the while keeping focused on goals & objectives in reaching their target publics.
My colleague Dr. Karen Russell has run our Bateman program for several years now, with much national recognition. She always tells the rest of the PR faculty that Bateman really isn’t as hard as it may seem because the students run themselves: they know what to do, and they almost always do it well.
Though I’m not personally involved with Bateman, I enjoy following from afar to see what teams across the nation come up with.
This year the Bateman case focuses on helping youngsters understand ways to finance college.
Here’s what I’ve seen so far (heavily biased featuring the people I happen to follow on Twitter):
What is your Bateman team doing? Share the links in the comments!
PR Profs 