It just turns out to be a public relations activity that alters individual perceptions and leads directly to behavior change. Public relations accomplishes that by persuading the key external audiences of a manager with the greatest behavioral impacts on the organization, to their way of thinking. Then move those external stakeholders to take actions that help the organization succeed.
I don’t think public relations can offer much more than that.
Not surprisingly, public relations works best on its own fundamental premise that makes everyone work toward the same external audience behaviors. By making sure your PR effort stays focused, the plan goes like this: People act on their own perception of the facts before them, leading to predictable behaviors that can be done about. When we create, change, or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading, and moving the same people whose behaviors affect the organization the most to the desired action, the public relations mission is fulfilled.
Results can range from community leaders who start looking for you, welcome bounces on showroom visits, and targeted sources looking their way to prospects who start doing business with you, customers who repeat purchases, and even new proposals for strategic alliances and joint ventures.
If, as a manager, that scenario appeals to you, try this path.
First, who handles the work required to produce such results? Your own full-time PR staff? Some people assigned by the corporate office to your unit? An outside PR agency team? No matter where they come from, they need to be committed to you, to the PR plan, and to its implementation, starting with monitoring key audience perception.
It helps to make sure that the PR people assigned to your unit really believe, deep down, why it is SO important to know how your operations, products, or services are perceived by the most important external audiences. Make sure they accept the reality that perceptions almost always lead to behaviors that can help or hurt your unit.
Working closely with the public relations folks, start by identifying who of your important external audiences is behaving in a way that helps or hinders the achievement of your goals. Then list them according to how severely their behaviors affect your organization.
Now, take steps to find out precisely HOW the majority of that key external audience perceives your organization. If you don’t have the budget to pay for what could be an expensive professional survey consultant, you and your public relations colleagues will have to monitor those perceptions yourself. Actually, they should be quite familiar with the issues of perception and behavior.
The best way to get that activity going is to meet with members of that external audience and ask questions like “Are you familiar with our services or products?” “Have you ever had contact with someone from our organization? Was it a satisfactory experience?” Be sensitive to negative statements, especially evasive or hesitant responses. And be on the lookout for false assumptions, untruths, misconceptions, inaccuracies, and potentially harmful rumors. When you find them, they will need to be corrected as they generally lead to negative behaviors.
Now is the time to select the actual perception to be modified, which then becomes your PR goal. Naturally, you want to correct any falsehoods, inaccuracies, misconceptions, or false assumptions.
It goes without saying that a PR target without a strategy showing you how to get there is like a sailor’s sandwich without the knockwurst. By selecting one of three specially designed strategies to create perception or opinion where there may not be any, or change the existing perception, or reinforce it, what you want to do is make sure that the objective and your new strategy fit together. You do not want to choose to “change the existing perception” when the current perception is correct, which suggests a “reinforcement” strategy.
At this juncture, you create a compelling message carefully structured to alter the perception of your key target audience, as dictated by your PR objective.
Your message should be engaging and crystal clear about what perception needs clarification or correction, and why. Of course, you have to be honest and your position explained in a logical and credible way if you want to hold the attention of members of that target audience and actually move perception in their direction.
Then try this. Combine your corrective message with another announcement or news presentation that can provide more credibility by downplaying the need for such a correction.
Believe it or not, I call on the communication tactics that you will use to bring your message to the attention of that key external audience, “beasts of burden” because they must bring your new persuasive thoughts to the eyes and ears of those important outsiders.
You will be glad to know that a long list of such tactics awaits your pleasure. Includes letters to the editor, brochures, press releases, and speeches. Or, you can choose radio and newspaper interviews, personal contacts, facility tours, or customer briefings. The only selection requirement is that the communication tactics you choose have a history of reaching people as well as members of your key target audience.
One lucky factor is that things can always be sped up by adding more communication tactics AND increasing their frequencies.
Questions will soon arise regarding progress. Of course, you will already be working hard to re-monitor the perceptions among your target audience members to test how good your PR program really is. Using questions similar to the ones you used during your previous monitoring session, you will now be on the lookout for signs that audience perceptions are beginning to move in your general direction.
In fact, we are fortunate that our key stakeholder audiences behave like everyone else – they act on their perceptions of the facts they hear about you and your operation. Leaving you little choice but to quickly and effectively deal with those insights by doing whatever it takes to reach and move your key external audiences to the actions you want.
There is never a happier time in public relations practice than when data shows that you have achieved the kind of key stakeholder behavior change that leads directly to achieving your department, division or subsidiary goals.
Feel free to publish this article and the resource box in your ezine, newsletter, offline publication, or website. A copy would be appreciated at mailto: [email protected]. The word count is 1125, including the guidelines and resource box.
Robert A. Kelly © 2004.