Week 5

This week’s readings helped me to understand the nuts and bolts of public relations practice. I thought the readings explained very well public relations strategies and programs.
I think the key point remember from this weeks readings is that a public relations strategy is useless unless it can be evaluated. The readings mention that it is all well and good to set objectives such as “To improve staff happiness” or “To improve the public perceptions of an organisation” but they are useless objective unless one can break down the ways to get to such objectives into smaller, manageable strategies. This made me feel less anxious about working as a public relations practitioner because I was not quite sure exactly how one would, say, overhaul the public image of a whole company or improve overall internal communications. The readings pointed out that such big objectives are achievable through successful strategies.

This week’s readings made me think more about public relations theory and practice in that I realised that more often then not I will be working within a budget that would probably not be enough to achieve the best possible PR strategies or that one could be working for somewhere where management does not see public relations as a key managerial position in the organisation. I could imagine that until recently many organisations only thought they needed a public relations strategy in times of crisis. Hopefully such ideas about public relations have gone as many companies begin to see the importance of public relations strategies and planning.

This week I commemted Gabrielle Ryan.

References
1)Chapter 7 of Public relations: theory and practice / edited by Jane Johnston and Clara Zawawi. Crows Nest, N.S.W. Allen & Unwin, 2004. 2nd ed.

2)Chapter 4 - A Typical Public Relations Program. In C. Tymson, P. Lazar, P and R. Lazar, (Eds.)The new Australian and New Zealand public relations manual (5th ed.) (pp. 74-117) Manly: Tymson Communications . 2006.