There's One Clear Thing About Managers and PR

As a manager of a company, non-profit, or group, you have a clear option regarding how to organize your public relations. Organize your resources to provide a range of radio, newspaper, and magazine product and service plugs. Alternatively, employ a more expansive, all-encompassing, and practical public relations model to modify significant external audience beliefs that result in adapted actions – actions that are necessary to accomplish your managerial goals.

Therefore, it also appears obvious that the success or failure of your department, division, or subsidiary will depend on how successfully you use a critical dynamic such as this one: persuade your important external stakeholders—who have the biggest effects on your organization—to adopt your point of view and then inspire them to take actions that will support the success of your unit.

The best place to start is with the blueprint itself: People behave based on their own interpretation of the information at them, which results in predictable behaviors that can be changed. The public relations mission is achieved when we reach, persuade, and motivate the very people whose actions have the greatest impact on the organization to take desired action in order to establish, modify, or reinforce that opinion.

As you can see, publicity placements are still included in the blueprint because of their significance; they are not, and should not, the tail that wags the PR dog.

So, if this kind of public relations appeals to you, you might be surprised at what can occur. New ideas for joint ventures and strategic alliances; repeat business from customers and even prospective clients; positive signs from show room visits; an increase in membership applications and the attention of community leaders; innovative methods from funders and identifying sources; and finally, legislators and politicians who see you as an important player in the association, business, and non-profit sectors.

Who puts in the effort required to get such outcomes? Own a dedicated public relations team full-time? A few people that the corporate headquarters placed in your unit? A team from an outside PR agency? They must be dedicated to you, the PR plan, and its execution—beginning with critical audience perception monitoring—regardless of their origins.

Remember that just because someone calls themselves a public relations professional, it doesn't mean they've bought the entire hog. Therefore, by all means, ensure that the public relations specialists allocated to your unit genuinely understand why it is crucial to know how your most significant external audiences view your business, offerings, or services. Make sure they understand the fact that activities that might benefit or harm your unit are usually always a result of perceptions.

Describe your strategy, or your blueprint, for keeping an eye on and obtaining opinions from members of your most significant external audiences. Inquiries such as these: what is your level of knowledge regarding our CEO? Have you gotten in touch with us before, and were you happy with the exchange? To what extent are you familiar with our staff, offerings, and services? Have you had issues with our staff or policies?

If you can afford it, use reputable survey companies for your program's perception monitoring phases. However, since your PR staff is also involved in behavior and perception, they can work toward the same goal: identifying lies, incorrect presumptions, baseless rumors, errors in information, misunderstandings, and any other unfavorable view that could result in harmful actions.

Next, establish a public relations objective that seeks to address the most severe misrepresentations identified during your primary audience perception study. Correcting that grave misinformation, clearing up that deadly misperception, or putting an end to a possibly lethal rumor could all be the goals.

Once your PR objective has been determined, choose the best approach that will guide you forward. But remember that when it comes to dealing with a perception and opinion crisis, you have only three strategic options at your disposal. Modify current perception, establish perception when none may exist, or strengthen current perception. Make sure the new approach aligns well with your updated public relations objective because the incorrect choice of strategy will taste like mustard on your pancakes. The facts demand that you choose a "reinforce" strategy, not "change."

Once you've finished your homework, draft an impactful message and direct it towards individuals in your intended audience. It takes a lot of work to generate action-forcing language that persuades an audience to agree with you, so you need your best writer to create some extremely exceptional, corrective language. If your words are meant to rectify an issue and change someone's perception or viewpoint to support your position, which will lead to the behaviors you are after, they must also be clear, factual, and compelling.

Have the entire PR team review it to ensure impact and persuasiveness. Next, decide which communication strategies are most likely to draw your target audience's attention to your message. You have a choice from dozens of options. Speeches, facility tours, emails, brochures, consumer briefings, media appearances, newsletters, one-on-one meetings, and many more are examples of communication methods. But make sure the strategies you choose are proven to reach people who are similar to the people in your audience.

Instead of employing high-profile news releases, you can choose to reveal it before smaller meetings and presentations because the credibility of a message sometimes depends on how it is delivered. Soon enough, inquiries concerning the status of the project will be heard, alerting you and your PR staff to begin working on a second perception monitoring meeting with members of your target audience. Many of the questions from the first benchmark session should be utilized again. This time, however, the difference is that you will be acutely aware of any indications that the negative perception is shifting in your favor.

If the program starts to lag, you can always pick up the pace by expanding the number of communications strategies and raising their frequency.

In the end, you want your new PR strategy to win over the most significant external stakeholders to your point of view and influence their actions in a way that best serves your department, division, or subsidiary.

When you stop to think about it, we are really lucky because our key stakeholder audiences respond based on their perceptions of the information they learn about you and your business, just like everyone else. leaving you with no option but to address those impressions quickly and efficiently by taking the required steps to connect with and influence your target external audiences to take the desired actions.

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