Information leading to action

             I found an article on the Forbes website about how the world of public relations is changing from focusing on social awareness to behavior change.  The article claims that there is an issue with public relations campaigns today and there is a “gap between the impact of the work and the unclear objectives of the work”.  This means that public relations campaigns have intentions, which involve action, but the campaigns are focused too heavily on the informational side of public relations.

            Public relations professional are very effective at creating relationships, which is one reason why they utilize social media so well. “PR people were among the first business people to embrace social media, and they made early efforts to integrate it into their portfolio of services.”  Being able to connect to an audience on a personal level is crucial but that connection also needs to be able to motivate and inspire action.  For example, if your are hired to increase good will towards Justin Bieber in a PR campaign promoting his altruistic side, you would also be wanting that good feeling to correlate with album sales, that is why he hired you.

            The author states that public relation firms have begun integrating into marketing.  Public relations has always operated closely with marketing and the author believes that good social campaigns asks you to do something not just talk about it or feel a certain way about something. I believe that this article has an interesting view on public relations and the points it make in regard to action should be considered when creating a PR campaign. In conclusion the narrative portion of a campaign is the “first mile”, and action is the last step, which should not be overlooked.

Reference:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/giovannirodriguez/2013/09/28/designing-for-action-the-last-mile-in-public-relations/ 

Can anyone say "Crisis Communications" or "Issue Management" in regards to Ebola? Having finished some of those topics last week in Chapter 8, I'm curious what your assessment or insights might be in regards to the Ebola outbreak in the U.S. - from the standpoint of either the CDC, American healthcare facilities - preparedness, and/or President Obama's Administration. If you choose to post replies to this, please try to keep it not about politics, but about applying what you read/learned in Ch. 8 that allows you to now understand effective crisis communications and issue management.

Did someone say Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream?  Count me in!  When I was young, it was a tradition for my dad and I to buy a container of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream once a month if I kept up with my share of the chores.  We always had to try the newest flavor and I have been hooked ever since.  So when I came across the article Ben & Jerry’s Refuses to Change ‘Hazed & Confused’ Name from the PR Daily website, it immediately caught my attention.  

The company’s newest flavor name “Hazed and Confused” has received criticism because certain anti-hazing activists claim it correlates with hazing in higher education institutions.  The parent company of the Ben & Jerry’s brand, Unilever, has claimed a pure advocacy stance.  Executives at Unilever held their ground after taking into account Internet responses and comments.  The company found that its marketing did not condone, support, or infer hazing in any form.  The PR spokesperson for Unilever, Sean Greenwood, stated: “It didn’t make sense for us to change the name…We named it because it’s a pop culture reference” (Stanford, 2014). 

I found this article relevant to this class because it relates well with the material covered in chapter eight of our textbook.  The company chose to use a pure advocacy stance and may have to dynamically alter their response if complaints continue in the future. 

For more details, please visit:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-17/ben-jerry-s-won-t-rename-hazed-confused-after-complaints.html

Reference

Stanford, D.D. (2014).  Ben & Jerry’s refuses to change ‘Hazed & Confused’ name.  Retrieved from http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-17/ben-jerry-s-won-t-rename-hazed-confused-after-complaints.html

I am interesting in an article from Public Relations Student Society of America about personal branding which is named March Brandness with Jason Mollica.

I think this is a curious article, I like is very much. The author talked about how to become the CEO of your personal brand and how to build a personal brand. I agree with everything what he talked about in this article.

I like the four key points in personal branding which are trust, honesty, responsibility and transparency. In my opinion, they are all important key points to help people to build a good personal brand. I think that try to trust others (classmates, friends and so on) is the first step of becoming the CEO of your personal brand. I think if you trust others and make a good relationship with others, others will also trust you. The second step is honesty; I think a good personal brand should be honesty at all time. If you are not honest, you are going to lose friends, reputation and job. The third step is that taking responsibilities for everything. For some examples, take responsibility for your kids as a good parent, take responsibility for your working as a good worker, and take responsibility for your homework as a good student. The last step of becoming the CEO of your personal brand is transparency; try to make everyone know who you are and what kind of personality you have. If everyone knows about you always trust others, you have a high reputation and you are responsible person that means you are succeed to build a good personal brand.

 

http://www.prssa.org/news/chapter/news/display/1314

Brazzle Box Social Media for Small Businesses

Recently we have been learning about how the role of the PR professional has greatly increased with the influence of expanding technology. Giving PR professionals such tasks as keeping up with new media, blogs, twitter accounts, and various forms of social media. This has presented opportunities( direct communication with stakeholders) and challenges( keeping up with these messages and articles. But also opening the doors on the possibility of networking and gaining readily available resources. As of September 18, 2014 a new small business Social media site called Brazzle Box joined the scene. This social media site is there to help small business or entrepreneurs connect, endorse, create or join groups, and to help build effective creative ad campaigns. This site gives companies another opportunity to network, promote, and gain credibility for their business. For more information check out www.brazzlebox.com or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mWvqaPQo-U and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6AGvwSm_WI.

Priceline's Founder Gives Some Tips

I found an article that I thought was pretty good about how to promote your business to the media in order to get media begging to write about you. It is a very short article, but the author, Jeff Hoffman, has some great points. He is an entrepreneur and helped found Priceline.com.

"How Smart Companies Use PR to Get the Word Out" 
http://www.inc.com/jeff-hoffman/smart-companies-public-relations-spread-word.html

Do you care if a company is environmentally conscious?

        The article I found in the news is from Bloomberg, a website that gives updates and the latest news in the business world.  One Public Relations article in particular caught my eye, its title, “Companies Don’t Care Anymore That You Don’t Care Anymore About This Sustainability Thing.” Author Eric Roston begins the article by stating that many people “dismiss corporate sustainability as empty green PR.”  Meaning, that even though there are definitely those people out there who are searching out “green” conscious companies and giving them their business, there are still many people who find much of what they hear about sustainable companies to be a ploy for their business.  Or people who do not care either way whether a company is environmentally conscious or not as long as the product is cheap, convenient, or aesthetically pleasing.  

   However, according to the article many companies still turn to environmentally friendly or sustainable options anyway, to the degree that the decision would be good for the shareholders. From a PR perspective the PR professional’s goal is to shed the company in its best light, regardless of trying to worry about whether or not the decision would entice people into buying the companies products and services.  If one product is from a company you know to be environmentally friendly, are you more likely to buy it than a competitors brand?  Or do you believe some companies only "talk the talk" of environmental sustainability, but don't "walk the walk?"

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-14/companies-don-t-care-anymore-that-you-don-t-care-anymore-about-this-sustainability-thing.html

University of Oklahoma Research

Looking into the news on the PRSSA website I found an interesting article about the University of Oklahoma who conducted some research on the people of Oklahoma, in order to find out what attracts Americans to visiting places in Germany like Erfurt. I thought this would be an important article showing how students conducted surveys and interviews to do their research and the students that had the best data would present it in Germany. This gave the students a lot of experience and they mentioned how you can’t teach this business setting in a class room which I couldn't agree more, especially with the different background people have in different countries. This could be some real experience and if you’re looking at being with a firm that is internationally focused, then it could be a good start to developing those much needed skills that cannot be taught.

I wanted to bring this into consideration for the group, because of how research is the first step towards finding this answer. Then doing the next steps in order to then present data to the city marketing department in Erfurt. I think many public relation firms are doing this because they want to know how to bring income into a location or a certain business. They need to know, what attracts the tourists that makes them want to go back or go there in the first place. In the book the section that I feel is important to mention is defining audiences and segmenting on page 92 because it explains how gathering information about demographics, lifestyles and characteristics help. I believe also this is the reason why they used interviews and surveys instead of a simple questionnaire. These tools helped find beyond the information and onto the reasons behind that decision.

http://www.prssa.org/news/chapter/news/display/1335