Post #8: Reading Response on Chapter Seven (Chia and Synott, 2009).

Chapter Seven: Public Relations Management in Organisations

Again, following up from Chapter Six, this chapter now looks at how PR is managed in organisations. The theoretical aspect for this study is that of systems theory, of which an open system is the way to go in this day and age, because organisations do need to interact with their internal and external environments so as to identify and remove and problems (Morgan, 1998, as cited in Chia & Synnott, 2009), as well as to selectively adapt to changes in the environment (Chia & Synnott, 2009).

We then take a look at the different parts that a PR team can play and their areas of focus, before going into the differences between internal and external publics (inclusive of audiences, in my opinion, because the 'audience' aspect does seem to imply one-way communication). Lastly, the chapter identifies external forces that can affect PR practice such as activism and CSR. This sums up the main points of this chapter.

This time around I'd like to look at the characteristics of excellent public relations programs as listed in the table on page 202 (Grunig, 1992, as cited in Synnott, 2009). I believe this table does need a little updating, because in a University of Southern California study of 500 (American) PR departments, 13 other best practices for the departments were listed. Three main points of this study that I found lacking in Grunig's 1992 table were:

1. Establish an effective social responsibility strategy for your organization.
2. Establish an effective digital-media strategy for your organization.
3. Establish an effective issues-management strategy for your organization

In this day and age, when the general public are becoming more and more educated and aware of the various social and environmental issues, (corporate) social responsibility has become a very important area for the organisation to look at. It is given a brief mention towards the end of this chapter, where it is mentioned that CSR was integrated into organisations through acts of philantrophy and care for the environment (Chia & Synnott, 2009). Thus, PR at the department level does need to take into account this and come up with suitable CSR programmes to enhance the reputation of the organisation, such as when PSB Academy adopted Singapore Children's Society as its charity partner early last year and held a charity bazaar which raised a total of (the memory is vague here) approximately two to three thousand dollars.

Digital media is also fast becoming the way in which every sector of the demographic (most commonly among the youth/working class, who have greater spending power) gets their information. As such, online newspapers, forums or blogs can easily sway the perceptions of said public and without jumping on the bandwagon an organisation is certainly to lose out. PR departments therefore need to come up with proper digital media strategies to implement in programs as a form of outreach to widespread publics. I thought that the WhyOhGee digital platform (this has unfortunately been  deactivated: http://www.singapore2010.sg/whyohgee) for the Youth Olympic Games was quite a good PR tactic to draw in young people to create a positive image about the Games, it included information and several up-close-and-personals with athletes from Team Singapore.

Lastly, issues-management. Yes, I know I like to harp a lot on this, but in my opinion this is a very important part of what consitutes an excellent PR program at the departmental level. Definitely along the way some issues or crises will come up, be it internal or external. The PR department needs to be wary for all these and be able to respond as soon as possible. There is a section on managing internal and external relations in this chapter, that which I shall not dwell upon too much, but the fact remains that this is should be a primary concern of the PR department. Internal issues might arise from matters like organisational change or sweeping pay cuts, which the PR (also corporate communications) department must address, or external ones like those I have highlighted in the previous posts that seriously damage reputations.

This ends my post for the week.