Reputation Management: A driving Force for Action& An Issue-Crisis Perspective

Reputation of an organization is an honor of it. But once it has trouble inside, crises will shut it down.
After taking a glance at both of these two chapters—chapter 8 and chapter 10, things get a bit clear for me. Communication is important between one organization and the rest publics. PR people need to know the market`s current situation and how the environment is like, then name out the steps which they think are useful on a list. To make sure they decline the crises of one particular organization to the least, and on a contrary, to increase its reputation till very high.
It is the basic way of thinking as a PR person, nonetheless, it is hard to implement, there are various issues generating all the time. Many ones are like once you settle one issue down, multiply different problems will come out again.
Many organization`s main goal is to gain profit, in my opinion, there are a lot of “profit” which the organizations are catching up with are intangible. For example, reputation is one of their wealth. Organizations need to keep their eye on money and reputation at the same time. But if their PR has got these two for them, meanwhile, some problems occur will make crises and that is to say a PR cannot focus on prize without mentioning the weaknesses.
Although it seems to be easy to get to the destination, PR people still need to be careful with declining the weakness of it.

PUBLIC RELATIONS MANAGEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS

How to intensively work in an organization as a PR practitioner is another theme from this book. As the Introduction part mentioned that climate change is just one of the external forces or issues that has the potential to affect the health of your organization.

In some organizations, the public relations department is also known as the corporate communication department. However, they consider it as a middle bridge for communicate with the side on this side of the bridge and the other side. And it offers a framework and vocabulary for the effective coordination of all means of communications with the overall purpose of establishing and maintaining favorable reputations with stakeholder groups upon which the organization is dependent (Cornelissen 2004:23).

As chapter three has mentioned about the theoretical contexts, moreover, what says here in this chapter is that to consider a theory is useful, since it is a guide to practice. Well, what is the most important theory here is the systems theory. The public relations management role in organizations is grounded in systems theory. In this chapter, it tells the connection of open and closed systems with the public relations.

To sum up, it is important to get well with external publics, who have the potential to affect organizations during times of stability and change.

Strategies to Proactively Manage Activity

Strategy is very important in PR studies. It presents a role as one that is highly strategic in the way that communication is planned to support achievement of the organization`s objectives. Significantly, language here used in the field reflects three different concepts in public relations, they are separately contested space, intentional representation and intended meaning.

After saying all these above, strategy actually is central to the role and function of public relations. There are nine steps of creating a strategy which are research, analysis, goal setting, setting objectives, identifying publics or audiences, developing strategies, devising and implementing tactics, monitoring and evaluation.

Research should be done before you actually do the motion, then it will be easier for us to start with the analysis. To analyse the results from the research is wise and rational. However, a SWOT analysis is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and offers a way of sorting and evaluating your research results.

After going through all the work and the steps, the most important is the goals and objectives, and they are set to clarify what is trying to be achieved.

It is complicated to do a successful PR program. We need the basic steps above, and also during the steps, we need to find many objective helpers which points to the sponsorship.

Theoretical Context

From this chapter, there are approximately four steps to help us to know a bit more about how to be and how to work as a PR person.
Theories are sentences from books which can be seen as a few lines in pages of a book. However, how to implement them is what we are going to do after finishing reading it. Theory is just a frame and example for us to understand. How much you understand weighs the same as how well you can implement and handle issues in the near future as a PR person.
Theories like system theory, communication theory, public relations theory, rhetorical theory, cultural theory, and critical theory are all listed here. Nevertheless, views vary from person to person, then they will help us to build our own constructs about public relations and develop some working theories that we will test out in our working life.
How much the organization adapts is determined by whether the system is open or closed, and communication theory helps us to see clearly how people actually communicate and how many various ways they can communicate. After knowing how to deal with communicating and how one particular organization adapts this environment, what next is Public Relations theory.
However, these theories are quite useful such as Cultural theory. Cultural studies explore political economy, communication, social theory, philosophy ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class and gender. Culture is important for a PR practitioner, as chapter13 says, “In Asia, governments control economic and political activity far more than governments do in Western democracies.” Obviously, different culture illustrates different ways of managing the PR system.
Being a PR practitioner shows that we need to know more and more about not only the inner situation, but also the outside environment.

FOCUS ON ASIAN PUBLIC RELATIONS MANAGEMENT

In Asia, many countries like China have a very long history. However, in China, people are close- minded, and it is a trend for the ancient China. The government of Tang Dynasty, or any of the Dynasties, enjoys such a way of administrating their era.
In Asia, the countries are mostly considered as the third world which means that there are different and competing levels of economic and political activity. Nevertheless, economics and politics play important roles in the dynamics of public relations development.
In China, the government controlled their media, and that is to say the PR system has been limited by the government too, for the government in Asia has controlled their economic and political activity.
From my point of view, a PR person needs to get close to the regional environment. They need to know how their government will treat their media, and their long last history. It is not easy to work in an exotic country, since the language and the culture play a very important role in developing relationships and framing issues.
It is like doctors need to study most of the diseases but what they will do in reality will depend on what disease their patients got.

21st Public Relations and its trends and developments..

The introduction of Public Relations has been explained by the first and mostly in the second chapter. Talking about the first word of PR— Public, it has two main meanings, the first one is Internal Publics, and the other is the external publics. The previous one is pointing to the employees of an organization which means they are actually inside the organization. External is obviously the situation or the environment out of this organization and mostly it is about the society which is relevant to this organization.
There are many factors influencing being a professional Public Relations Practitioner. Society, Policies, Economic circumstances, regions and cultures are all the factors, for different people from different worlds value a thing differently.
A PR person must put things or difficulties into a smooth way. They need to know both the outside situation and the inner one to make things reasonable and rational. That is to say, we need to make side A happy and comfortable with our plans, meanwhile, the enemy side will think it is rational too, which is to make the bridge of the organization and the outside world harmoniously.
Theories are important although they are easy to say. However, if there is no such a thing like theory, then there is no frame for us to work things out. We need frames to write the plans down on a piece of paper, and eventually, we will implement it in reality.
What is going on currently in the world has affected the trends and the direction of the development of PR people. Organizations cannot survive on its own, especially work on itself and close its gate to this world, otherwise, it will die in a short time.
So globally and locally, many factors affect the duty of a PR person. A question has come out, what on earth is more important? I am so agree with what this book has mentioned—Think globally, but act locally. Developing countries like China is keeping up with the pace of this world`s developed countries like USA and UK. However, everything seems to be international, but we Chinese have a very long history which limited us to stand out and to do the things like young generations in countries like America or Australia. From movie market, we can tell the difference easily, for example, in the US, there are a lot of themes and objectives. However, the ones in China is quite limited, we cannot talk more about our government or make movies which are beyond one particular horizon. That is to say, the methods of performing how to be a PR person vary from culture to culture. In one word, every road leads to ROME.

Public Relations Research and Practise

Doing a research is very important for a Public relations practitioner. However, practicing to be a PR person is tough too.

It is impossible to go through a thing without difficulties, but difficulties can force us to figure out the solutions which we can consider them as information. In that case, we can think of many plans and then implement them.

Public relations is one of the critical strategic tools used by an organization to help it achieve its objectives. During this process, we must do the research which there are two main methods. One is qualitative research and another one is the quantitative research. For instance, qualitative research is all about how things are going and quantitative research is about spreading surveys which are like closed questions.

Practising is as important as the research, however, there are a few methods from the chapter six for us to follow if we want to keep good relationships with the organizations and the publics. There are media relations, government relations, shareholder relations and public relations...etc. Although these relations are labelled differently, we still can use the methods below:

To report processes to confirm decisions and actions agreed at meetings, to sign-off and clearance processes, to processes to follow for distributing media material, and to checklists to follow for organising events. Also, we need to be proactive rather than reactive, and to keep clients and managers happy, keep up the pace of this modern changes.

After finishing doing the research, practising will take its place. However, these two chapters showed how to be a professional PR practitioner. The rest chapters still teach us skills, however, these two are more realistic and lead us to a higher level of PR studies.

Engaging With The Media...

How to engage with the Media is not easy especially finish reading this chapter of Engaging With The Media. There are a lot of things that we must consider and think of while doing the duty of a real PR practitioner.

From what I have read, there are three main players in Media relations, the media, the client or organization seeking publicity exposure, and the public relations practitioner. Being a PR practitioner needs a lot of skills to balance whatever bad is going on. That is to say, PR people must do their work carefully, under-promising and over-delivering can lead them to the road of success.

Detailed duties of a PR person are celebrating anniversaries, writing a really good media release, setting up news conferences, building relationships with journalists and editors and so on.

Since I have mentioned about building relationships with journalists and editors, which means that we need to get along with the gatekeepers who are acting a very important role in Media Relations, normally speaking, the editors, director of news, or chiefs can be regarded as the gatekeepers of the Media.

What these gatekeepers usually do is to consider whether the news is interesting or availably under policy restrictions.

As the same, a PR practitioner is a middle person who needs to understand and be familiar with the inner function of one organization as well as the situation of the current society. So that, they could handle any issues which generated from one particular organization which hired them.

New Media and PR

As the time goes by, everything is changing, so is media. Ways of communication are variable these days, we communicated by writing letters, sending telegrams and calling etc… However, currently, there are a lot more new things are generating such as the Internet.

Network seems extremely convenient nowadays not only in the market, but also for education, entertainment, and so on. From my own opinion, it is fairly important to connect to the internet as a PR practitioner. Internet is a big stage for all the people all over the world, and people from different areas can read news and what is going on in this world, and they may comment on what they are actually thinking, so at least, a PR practitioner knows how the public thinks by reading their comments.

Also, new media has gathered this world closer and closer, languages, timing and current affairs are all making this world a one. Globally, PR practitioners can understand people who are living under different cultures and that is to say, it will be easier for PR practitioners to solve issues.

Action is louder than words, although what shoot into our eyes from the Internet is like this, we cannot avoid the different situations coming out in reality. This also gain one difficulty level for the PR practitioners to handle issues, however it is even harder without the Internet which we know it as the new media.

Ethics, theoretically easy but hard to implement

After viewing this chapter, I got a closer look to how to be a good PR practitioner.

Helping one particular organization which you are working for to be responsible for their effects on the social and physical environments is very important which this chapter has explained by one word “Conscience”.

Within “Ethics”, from what I have learnt via reading this chapter, Michael Josephson has mentioned although there are a wide cultures existing in this world currently there are always 10 values to be in common for us to behave ethically. Honesty, integrity, keeping promises, fidelity, fairness, caring for others, respect for others, responsible citizenship, pursuit of excellence, and accountability.

Each of the words above seems very important to go through perfectly. However, from my point of view, it is not easy to handle one thing while considering all these ten values, and what we need to do is to think carefully, intensely, or we can actually write down the steps which we are going to cover and ensure that we will follow these first ten values.

Being ethical or unethical cannot judge a person whether he is good or bad. The only thing causes being unethical is to ignore the requirements which had been required to act as ethical behaviour.

To avoid some unethical and harmful problems, we need to be careful. Also, we need thorough ethical learning, and the ability to use systematic methods to encompass respect, and balance multiple viewpoints. That is to say, we must find the easiest way to show the public the best course of action.

To make it in reality, this chapter gave us some little tips to be mindful of ethics in every situation. There are three sessions, the first is to be willing to see ethics as in a way of making it visible, and the second one is aware of ethics as a challenging area and therefore constantly increasing their knowledge. In this session, the steps of fostering the knowledge aspect of mindfulness are reading, then thinking critically about and discussing what various people have written on ethics, not only in books and academic articles but also in blogs and online forums. The third one is simply called “skill”, in order to explain this, what we should do is to discuss, practice, combine, select, and apply them everyday as part of regular public relations activity.

These above are what influenced me most, since these things seem to be very easy to understand but they are difficult to implement.

About Media Relations..

After reviewing this lecture of Media relations, I recognized that media relation is actually a middle person who has the right and good skills to deal with tough nuts which have been generated among media, media practitioners and the clients.
There are four tactics included into media relations. They are written, spoken, acted and imagined tactics. How these generated was because that a PR person needs to communicate with their clients and somehow the journalists will use the PR person as their reporting resources.
It is very important to handle the relationships between the media and the public`s responses. Also, if we want to help one company to perfectly sell their products, what we need to do is to find out the accurate angle to launch to start, for example, cigarettes are harmful to our human health. However, what we should do is not to start with the weaknesses of these cigarettes, instead, we need to grab the bright sides of them.
From this lecture, I gained a lot. I know how to deal with the public in a very smart way, and I have learnt that to build a relationship with the media should be based on trust during a certain period of time. No theoretical promises before we know we cannot make it, and be punctual, also as a PR, we need to think more and more. More than the media and the public expected.

20th of Jan...

From today`s lesson, I have gained what the relationship between the Public relations and strategy, tactics is.

The strategy is actually a kind of method, a plan or a process to help you to achieve the goal which you are running after by beating down the other competitive options. In this modern world, there are a lot of different organizations need this strategy to help them to gain profit which can be explained as their specifically final goal. For example, the company of Sony wanted to sell their products globally and they hoped they could achieve the destination of being sound all over the world.

However, having the plan to do the motion is not just enough. We also need to predict how well the products would be sold, and wishing for selling out all the products only is not enough, either. What we PR need to do is to do the research and to make sure that they know the best way to offer their stuff with all this competitions (Other brands, etc.) all around the world.

Being a PR needs really high communication stills, except for planning the strategies, they also need to do the research before preparing a strategy. Being a bright and intense thinker is the most important thing, since we need to consider what every possible result would be like and how would we deal with them.

First Lecture of Tanya

It was a privilege to attend the first lecture of Public Relations this morning! After the first lecture of the basic introduction of PR, I feel like putting great efforts on this course, since the basic definition of PR is quite comprehensible.

Moreover, I am quite interested in dealing with the relationships between the public and some organizations.

Nonetheless, I am an oversea student from China, and it will be the challenge for me to write my blogs, reports and essays in academic English, although I had a trimester of writing essays, I still need to increase my English skills to get good marks. From this point of view, I hope I can improve my poor knowledge of English.

However, I would love to show the best of me by explaining the meaning of PR via my actions. 

Gou Yunfan (Kate)