Reading Notes Chapter 15: Challenges and Opportunities in PR

In PR there are many challenges and opportunities. This chapter of the text goes deeper into what these challenges and opportunities present to PR practitioners.

 

• An organization’s reputation is the sum of how its various stakeholders view it.
• A significant challenge for those who run corporate or organizational communication functions is to manage the ways the organization engages its key 3 stakeholders

Reasons the communication function gets marginalized:

• Being cast as an implementor
• Being cast as a tactician
• Being cast as part of a functional area

Ways to overcome this marginalization:

• have standing to advise on how the organization should communicate
• the communicator must have a worldview that includes knowledge of issues that affect the company, its industry, the marketplace in general, and emerging social trends.
• the communicator must possess the art of giving advice and of building trust, everything from thinking problems through from the perspective of senior executives to offering insights that would not otherwise occur to a senior management team.

Bernays described public relations as “the vocation of the social scientist who advises clients on social attitudes and on the actions to take to win support of the public upon whom the viability of the client depends.”

Public relations will be among the 10 fastest growing professions in the U.S. through 2016

Clausewitz on Strategy:

• Ends and Means
• Action and Reaction
• Building in Flexibility