Week 6 Blog Journal: Crisis Management and Issues in the Internet Era

Mediated Crisis Management on the Internet

In the essay “Taxonomy of mediated crisis responses”, published in Issue 33 of Public Relations Review, Taylor and Kent argue for the usage of the Internet as a medium of mediated crisis response. They also offer several suggestions for the best practices and individual details of individual steps and actions that can be taken during each phrase of a crisis.

Week 7 Blog Journal: Grand Strategy, Strategy and Tactics

In chapter 8 of Public Relations Theory II, Carl Botan introduces the notion of a meta-strategy level of discursive activity within the sphere of public relations activities: the grand strategy. Grand strategies are organisation-wide or meta-organisational policies or practices which function to direct the actions of all parts of the organisation or organisations. The notion of a grand strategy is functionally similar to ideas of organisation culture in that both are notions professing hegemonic influence that dictates strategy. Meta-strategy exists within a level of meaning that often is invisible to pure ethnography, and the discourses surrounding them are rarely formalised and therefore are hard to prove conclusively. Notwithstanding this limitation, the author proposes a commonplace notion of strategy, which in turn dictates the tactics used.

Week 8 Blog Journal: Evaluation Techniques

Chapter 12 of Richard Stanton’s Media Relations book focusses exclusively on the use of evaluation methods in media relations and public relations. As the scope of PR campaigns are only limited by one’s creativity, there can be all manners of activities and passivities which can be construed as public relations. As such, no one evaluation method can be applied universally across all strategies or campaigns. Adaptation, combination, and derivation and hence the keys to formulating useful and sound evaluations.

Week 9 Blog Journal: Media Relations and News

Steve Jobs versus Dennis Ritchie: Even if you invented computing language as we know it today, you can be a nobody. Image source: Facebook

Chapter 6 of Richard Stanton’s book “Media Relations” describes the relationships between PR practioners(agents),their clients, and the media(more specifically, traditional  media as opposed to citizen media). He then describes how the media , the agent, and the client each desire to fulfil a goal in the co-creation of news, and each asserts a self-motivated influence on the piece of news discourse. Stanton then proposes how the agent(PR practitioner) can work within these selfish motivations to create viable media relations: between themselves, clients, and the media. These involve the profiling of the individuals in the media and the positioning of the issues within frames such as to maximise the news angles that the media wants with the coverage that clients want. These also involved synergies the agent can leverage upon to create unique angles while maintaining the level of client satisfaction.

Week 9- Chapter 6 [Irene Lee @ Khine Yin Win (3119122)]

Chapter 6- Developing Media Relationships Around News

 

In media relations, the media cannot exist without the source, and the source cannot exist without the media. In terms of PR, the source is what the practitioner can do to attract the attention of the media so that there is publicity for the organization or association. It pretty much means that PR practitioners need to beautify a story in order for it to be sold to the media. The angle and issue has to be twisted in a way to attract the media’s attention and create hype and interest to the public. The whole idea sounds easy but it certainly is not.

It becomes worse if what you are trying to sell is a product or service that has little potential of gaining media publicity- such as a car wash service. Thus, it requires a lot of creativity and thought before something can actually happen.

Here’s an example that will further explain what I mean.

Take Organized Clutter Daily (OCD), Singapore’s first professional organizing service. A simple service that pretty much lacked what the media would deem as news worthy. Yet, the organization was able to grab the media’s attention especially the magazines. The organization first started in 2009 and in June to August of that year, they were able to get five magazines, Elle, Men’s Health, Shape, Cleo, Simply Her to cover the organization’s service.

The question was how did they do this and what was so news worthy about a professional service that organized your room?

The answer is that the organization angled their service towards the idea that clutter around the house caused stress and other health related concerns. They also provided simple ideas and ‘do-it-yourself’ advices to keep the house, workplace, or any environment clutter free. Thus, they targeted the lifestyle magazines.

The simplicity of the idea to tie in health and clutter together gave the opportunity for the organization to gain publicity while still selling their service in a non-obvious way.

 

Referencing:

OCD, 2010. About Us. Available at: <http://www.ocd.com.sg/about-us.php> [Accessed 26 October 2011].

Stanton, R., 2007. Media Relations, Oxford University Press Melbourne.

Week 8- Chapter 12 [Irene Lee @ Khine Yin Win (3119122)]

Chapter 12- Measuring Successful Relationships: Approaches to Research Methods

 

In every PR campaign or event, there needs to be a process that measures the success of these actions. This process is called evaluation and it is an essential part of any communication campaign. The reason being is that evaluation allows the PR practitioner and the organization to understand all aspects of the media campaign from the basic stages of planning and designing to the final stages of implementation.

 

Evaluation helps to determine the effectiveness, achievement of goals and efficiency of goals in a PR campaign as Stanton suggests. He further relates how evaluation should be conducted in three steps- formative, process and summative evaluation.

 

The formative evaluation takes place at the start of the campaign and to simply describe it, it is the step that allows the media practitioner to reevaluate the already thought out plan for an event or campaign. On a more important aspect the formative evaluation requires thorough research on all factors concerning the planned campaign and will aid to prioritize the research and design to fit with client’s objectives.

 

The process evaluation takes place throughout the campaign and seeks to evaluate the success in between phases of a campaign. For instance, for every event of the campaign, the media practitioner will conduct an evaluation to access the level of success of the ongoing campaign. The evaluation could be conducted in terms of media coverage and whether the actions that took place by the organization were viewed in a positive or negative light by the media.

 

The summative evaluation is the final process of evaluating a campaign. It is the end evaluation of all the events and actions that took place during the campaign. Summative evaluation as the name explains is the summation of the campaign.

 

Personally, I think evaluation is a process that will really help develop the PR in a company for both present campaigns and future ones. Evaluation is important not only in the communication aspect but also, for other initiatives. It is an important process in the introduction of a new product and it helps to understand whether the process is successful, reasons behind why it is or is not successful and more importantly, how it can be improved.

 

Referencing

 

Stanton, R., 2007. Media Relations, Oxford University Press Melbourne.

 

 

NPO Media – Blog Journal – Week 8 – Louis Lee

Based on readings from Media Relations, Chapter 9,  Community, Not-for-profit, and Interest Groups

For nonprofit organizations such as the Salvation Army or the Red Cross, profit is usually not their primary goal and their stakeholders (including the media) are not  usually their shareholders.

Not-for-profit organizations commonly rely on ideologies, the shaping of ideas to form a coherent argument that will justify actions. These include liberalism and conservatism (often referred to politically as the “left-wing” and “right-wing” or “left” and “right” parties respectively), socialism, feminism and the so-called “green ideology” with its inclination towards ecological conservation and grassroots democracy.

21st Century ideologies, Stanton claims, have a tendency to cannibalise elements from other ideologies and reform them to suit the needs of the individual community.

The watchword in this chapter is “Community”. “Community” as explained by Stanton refers to “an organized political, municipal or social body” alternatively “a body of people working/living together or a body of people having a faith, profession or other identification in common”. Coherent argument are shaped to justify actions, such as affecting change or acting to retain a status quo.

The “community” is powerful because it conveys a sense of belonging, a sense that they allow individuals to identify themselves with a particular subset of culture and in which they “fit in”. It may not truly exist given today’s itinerant fast-moving culture, but this community ideology, with its existence springing up within the larger surrounding system, still retains its power.

Not-for-profit organizations capitalize on the relationship building process, considering the support of those within the communal sphere and the transference of the individual relationship of trust and support to its stakeholders (including that of the media) the central strategies in this regard.

In media this is ostensibly regarded as “core competence”, the reason why community groups perform better at building media relationships through selectively choosing media , while successfully framing and focusing on core issues they are tackling.

Not for profit ideologies are based on the aims of support and assistance, staffed mainly by unpaid professional volunteers and  adopting conservative or liberal views to mesh with whichever community (and government party) they wish to be affiliated with. Like corporate bodies, not-for-profit organizations tend to have media coverage and stakeholders, at times having access to limited funding from the government or associated parties.

Reference:

Stanton, R. (2007). Media Relations, Oxford University Press Melbourne.

 

 

 

 

 

Week 6- Chapter 11 [Irene Lee @ Khine Yin Win (3119122)]

Chapter 11- Risk, Uncertainty, And Crisis: How to identify and manage team

The emergency landing of Quanta’s A380 at Changi airport and BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill, all of which occurred last year are just examples of the crisis that organizations or even individuals can face. In general, such a crisis can happen anytime and any place of the day and the most important factor after the incident is how the organization chooses to react to it.

 

This is where the organizations public relations come in. The steps they take are going to be of great importance because it will determine whether the company will make further losses, which are both tangible and intangible. Tangible may include the money and stock prices while intangible could mean the fate of the reputation. And at the end of the day, the organization wants to save both.

 

So yes, when something big and bad happens, the organization’s fate lies in the hands of the public relations. Lets not forget, at such a crucial phase the PRs of the organizations are working closely with the media and even if they choose the method of avoiding, the media is already trailing the organization. One thing to understand is that the media will be the ones framing and letting a great scale of audience hear of the incident. They can choose to interpret it in a positive or negative way. Thus, when a crisis does happen, the best is to stay on top of the situation and show that everything is under control. You can conclude that the media is somewhat the middleman between the organization and the mass audience.

 

Identifying the issue at an early stage can help to diverge the crisis from taking place. This is most certainly a good method to reduce the risk or probability of a crisis happening, but it does not help when the crisis has already taken place. Many of the times, a crisis is unpredictable and today as we all know news will spread extremely fast due to the technology that society offers and this puts the organization in a tight spot where eventually they are not the ones to know of the crisis first. It also means that there will be a great deal of pressure towards the organization because response has to be prompt yet accurate.

 

For instance, during the emergency landing of Quanta’s A380 the Qantas media relations team announced that no parts of the plane landed on the Indonesian island, but to their dismay images of a couple holding what clearly seems to be a big part of the Qantas logo from the plane were surfacing over the internet. The contradicting image of Qantas’s statements showed that Qantas failed to check facts and do a well enough research online to what the social media is hyped up about. They eventually made a statement to clarify the issue. Thus, it can be deemed that Qantas was slow in reacting to the crisis in its first stages.

 

However, to combat the threat of possible negativity they updated their twitter and Facebook page feeds so that the public was able to understand more about the situation. What can be observed from the saga was that Qantas understood the power of social media and quickly saved their reputation from further escalating downwards.

 

Referencing

May, K., 2004. Qantas A380 incident: a lesson in social media and web PR. Available at: <http://www.tnooz.com/2010/11/04/news/qantas-a380-incident-a-lesson-in-social-media-and-web-pr/> [Accessed 22 October 2011].

Stanton, R., 2007. Media Relations, Oxford University Press Melbourne.

Week 5- Chapter 10 [Irene Lee @ Khine Yin Win (3119122)]

Chapter 10- “Timeliness and Budgets” of Media Relations 

As the chapter states, Richard Stanton takes the readers into the importance of timeliness and budget in the designing and planning of a campaign. After reading this chapter, I take on the perspective that these two factors must be taken into careful consideration, as each will determine the successfulness of a campaign.

 

Timeliness as the chapter explains is heavily related to media practitioners such as journalists. Thus, it is just as important to public relations practitioners as these professionals are many of the times working and affiliating themselves with the media, in order to build good relationships with them. PR practitioners should also remember to keep the communication process between their clients alive as clients also have tight schedules. You don’t want an event or media conference held on the same day that your client is having an important meeting.

 

As Richard D Smith explains in his book ‘Strategic planning for public relations’, public relations practitioners need to ‘respect and adopt’ the way journalism works. This includes understanding that news information should involve action, adventure, change, conflict, fame and so forth but, more importantly proximity and timeliness. However, the only argument that I have for this is that not all PR work requires the traditional news coverage of television or newspaper. In fact, PR is known to use magazines as a source of media coverage and as I have learnt, not all features need to have the timeliness factor. Nevertheless, being organized and managing time efficiently is important when it comes to public relations and this is especially vital for campaigns.

 

On another note, I think budget is somewhat more imperative than timeliness. My simple explanation is that without a reasonable budget there will be no PR because even for a simple event to a very extensive campaign, budget is vital and yes the saying- ‘money makes the world go round’ can be very much applied here. From the very research that is done, to the mailing, transport, and equipment and venue hiring, a budget is required.

 

The financial planning between the client and PR agent will determine the elements of the campaign. It will help identify the strategic planning the PR firm will have for the client and will allocate whether sponsorship and funds will be necessary, the type of events that can be held and the usage of media- for instance, flyers, brochures and reports.

 

After the PR assignment, which we were given, I’ve realized that budgeting events appropriately is a much harder task than one would think. In budgeting, there are times where the client will state they have  ‘0 budget’ when it comes to PR consultancy and thus, events have to be planned accordingly so that it results in profits to help subsidize the PR company’s professional fee cost, as well as the overall cost for the event, campaign etc. Needless to say, careful thought and planning has to be done in order for success.

 

Referencing

Smith, D. R., 2005. Strategic planning for public relations. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc: New Jersey.

Stanton, R., 2007. Media Relations, Oxford University Press Melbourne.

It’s a New Game in Baltimore – Blog Journal – Week 9 – Louis Lee

"I believe that we will be judged by what we provide to the weakest and most vulnerable, that is the test, that is my test."

Based on readings from Media Relations, Chapter 8, Government and Politics

Ah, Politics and Government, two sides of the same coin. At least…that’s what my preconception of this topic was before I actually went through this admittedly fascinating chapter while feeling the effects of wrestling-induced sleep deprivation.

On the first few sentences of the “Defining media relations in government and politics” section Stanton makes it clear that “Politics and Government are not the same.” Which honestly wasn’t much of a surprise.

As I read on it seemed to me that Stanton saw Politics and Government as “the way one performs and elevates oneself to a position of authority” and “the logistics of actually running the entity (or entities) one has power over” owing to his definition of ‘Politics’ as “the public life and affairs of government, the activities concerned with the exercise of authority and power, and the capacity to manage and maintain the affairs of a state”, while ‘Government’ refers to “actions of governing, devising and controlling policy and legislation, and the action of managing and maintaining the affairs of the state”, but perhaps that’s just a gross simplification/misunderstanding of his ideas.

In any case, Stanton goes on further to frame the definitions of Politics and Government in the context of his book (concerning Media Relations, of course) as “campaign strategies to get elected” and the “strategies of those already elected to government to stay in power”, respectively.

With that in mind, I’ll state my understanding of the two sections of the chapter: Government and Politics

Now as Stanton goes, it is the job of the government to disseminate news and messages that correspond with health, tourism and security, the model of which he refers to as the “public information model” as per James Grunig and engage its citizens directly to establish a relationship, while building an image and identity through media relations.

A recurring point in this chapter was the importance of building  relationships with the media and affiliated parties, made more significant with the emergence of media advisers/media relations counselors that are paid professionally to form campaigns for the politician who hired them, reducing the “personal” aspect of relationship building.

The relationship-building result of these advisers (using tried and true methods and experience) is often two-pronged, as it sends a message that resonates well with stakeholders as well as the media, and also building reputational capital for future elections. Of interest is the advice to not waste time attempting to build relationships with media who are openly hostile to a government’s policies.

Moving on to politics, I must say that I was mildly surprised that Stanton posits that politically aware voters are more inclined to support a party based on its image rather than its policies…huh, guess the Bread and Circuses strategy applies even now.

Stanton goes on to explain that despite the similarities (political campaigns crafted along the same lines as marketing campaigns) marketing =/= politics. The former is economic (it wants to sell a product or service) while the latter is a sociological discipline, he claims. There is simply too much constant change in values and tangible factors outside of financial matters that influence stakeholders that cannot always be foreseen through conventional marketing efforts. This, however, has not stopped the recent “commodifying” of politics, with political campaigns being done through the same media tools and channels as those of marketing such as advertising. Though this is treated as “unfair and unscrupulous” by the electorate as they are never quite sure when these tools are being applied.

The malleable nature of politics has also done away with the old process of candidates and politicians in their rise to representative office through the steady climb from rank and file member of a political party through experience and successful political campaigns. Instead, candidates can come directly from non-political backgrounds with little in the way of relevent skills or theory and instead relying on hired political public relations experts or personal merit to garner support (which they usually do from immediate family and friends, though little else). Stanton also dismisses the notion that “intuition” is an important factor in the development of a political campaign and reveals how the gossip in the public sphere can be potentially useful sources of information for campaigners.

What caught my eye about this chapter is a certain paragraph on its final pages that discussed political communication campaigns, the “redemption of tokens” as he puts it, referring to the standard practice in advertising or political persuasion to imply positive position, but without specifying the way in which the promised benefits will materialise.

Stanton’s description of how this technique is usually applied with print media through advertising space with a “caption promising a wide range of benefits for  stakeholders (no matter how superficial the persuasion seems, as they deem to elect a candidate on the implication and redemption of tokens based on ill-defined reputational capital) instantly brought to mind the image of one Tommy Carcetti from the Wire (a TV show about the social machine of the American city of Baltimore I watched a few months back) who put up an admirable Kennedy-esque public face and announced his rhetoric with enough skill to have courtrooms eating out of the his hand, but he never quite had the intention of living up to his promises if it meant he secured the seat of authority. The recurrence of the words “political actor” throughout the chapter to indicate a person, group or organisation with a large influence on a political situation certainly didn’t help matters in being reminded of this character.

So let’s end this week’s edition of the blog entry with a demonstration of Carcetti’s honed political tongue from the man himself.

References:

Grunig, J. E., & Hunt, T. (1984). Managing Public Relations. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Kavanagh, D. (1996). New campaign communications: consequences for political parties. Harvard International Journal of Press and Politics, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 60-76

Stanton, R. (2007). Media Relations, Oxford University Press Melbourne.

Mayor Carcetti of the Wire shows us how it’s done.