Award winning;) Social Media webcast

Hello! This is a webcast I created to explain in simple and engaging way what is social media, what are its benefits and how to use it.

I hope that you will enjoy it and your feedback is very welcome :)

Update: Lots of thanks to everyone for good words about this video!

[It was done in Windows Movie Maker.]

Spin, PR girls and Public Relations

Public Relations for those who don’t go deeply into the topic is either a light job with lots of fun or on the contrary a mysterious machinations at the top of political and business ladder and media manipulation. That’s because the public perception of PR for is mainly created by it representations in the media and popular culture.

So that from one side we have such representations as of Samantha Jones from “Sex in the City”, Edina Monsoon from “Absolutely Fabulous” or Bridget Jones – the so called 'PR girls' for whom the PR work is all about parties, fun and meeting people.

But on the other side the news media feed us with the examples of mighty 'spin doctors' who have the power over politics, big corporations and media. According to Wilcox et al. (2007) the term was originally “restricted to what often were considered the unethical and misleading activities and tactics of political campaign consultants. By the mid-1990s, however, the media widely used the term to describe any effort by public relations personnel to put a positive slant on an event or issue.”

Probably the most famous spin doctor in UK is Alistair Campbell - Communications Director to the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair until 2003. There is an interesting and worth watching BBC documentary (2000) titled “News from Number 10” where there is shown a lot of Mr. Campbell’s work methods at Downing Street.



Bibliography:

Morris, T., Goldsworthy, S., (2008). PR - a persuasive industry? Spin, public relations, and the shaping of the modern media. Palgrave McMillan.

Wilcox, D., et al. (2007). Public Relations: Strategy and Tactics, Pearson Education.

Activism and PR

The activist groups although without a real governing power, over the years managed to gain considerable power over people’s mindset. They pose a threat to big corporations either by dragging out and highlighting their malpractice or by influencing the law, which consequently impacts on corporations’ business activities.

Perceived as a challenge to corporate PR practitioners, activist groups themselves thrive on PR and its tactics. One of the main threats to big and successful activist organizations nowadays is that they alarmingly start to resemble the big corporations themselves.
                                     

      Some images of activists stunts:

For example Greenpeace has developed over the years such a strong brand that now in many aspects it needs to think and act like a standard company with its all bureaucracy in order to maintain its structures.

Lord Krebs, the former chairman of the Food Standards Agency and current principal of Jesus College Oxford at an parliamentary event on science policy said that "Greenpeace is a multinational corporation just like Monsanto or Tesco. They have very effective marketing departments... Their product is worry because worry is what recruits members," he said. (link to the Guardian article)

Anyway, let’s go back to the most characteristic PR tactics used in activist campaigns, which are: 
1. Stunts
2. Third-party endorsement from opinion leaders, journalists, celebrities, MPs
3. Catchy soundbites and imagery materials for media
4. Social media activity

Prioritizing and understanding stakeholders

To prioritize stakeholders and understand their needs and expectations is one of the core aspects for any organization. Knowing these things we can control their impact by implementing an appropriate system of communicating with them.  

Mapping stakeholders on Power/Interest Matrix is a helpful technique to realize how much influence and interest particular stakeholders have in relation to a particular issue. Accordingly it allows us to determine what steps should we take towards them in order to build good relationships between them and our organisation.



Power/Interest Matrix



The stakeholder’s position on the grid informs us what actions we should take (by Rachel Thompson):

·        High power, interested people: these are the people you must fully engage and make the greatest efforts to satisfy.

·        High power, less interested people: put enough work in with these people to keep them satisfied, but not so much that they become bored with your message.

·        Low power, interested people: keep these people adequately informed, and talk to them to ensure that no major issues are arising. These people can often be very helpful with the detail of your project.

·        Low power, less interested people: again, monitor these people, but do not bore them with excessive communication.

To get to know how to communicate with our key stakeholders we can ask the following questions (by Rachel Thompson):

·        What financial or emotional interest do they have in the outcome of your work? Is it positive or negative?

·        What motivates them most of all?

·        What information do they want from you?

·        How do they want to receive information from you? What is the best way of communicating your message to them?

·        What is their current opinion of your work? Is it based on good information?

·        Who influences their opinions generally, and who influences their opinion of you? Do some of these influencers therefore become important stakeholders in their own right?

·        If they are not likely to be positive, what will win them around to support your project?

·        If you don't think you will be able to win them around, how will you manage their opposition?

·        Who else might be influenced by their opinions? Do these people become stakeholders in their own right?

References:

Rachel Thompson, Stakeholder Analysis. Winning Support for your project

Audiences, stakeholders and publics

These three terms make us confused very often. What's the difference between them? Is there any?

When we talk about audience we think about those people whom we send our message to. In other words, they are receivers of our message. Therefore, we often tend to connect that term with such determiners as ‘active’ and ‘passive’. A passive audience refers to those receivers of a message, who don’t engage with the media content they receive. An active audience, on the other hand, represents those, who engage with the media content. The clear example of passive audience may be the TV/radio/newspaper audience, and active audience are social media users.

Term stakeholders is related to those subjects (individual people, employees, organizations, communities, companies, customers, suppliers, media, government, distributors, etc.) “who have a stake or interest in a particular organisation, i.e. they depend on the organisation to fulfill their own goals and on whom, in turn, the organisation depends”. (Tench,Yeomas; 2006)

                                                                                                            (Picture from: watchdogwag.com)

Difference between stakeholders and publics is very blurry, but when publics are distinguished they are meant to be “stakeholders that face a problem or have an issue with the organisaion. Thus stakeholders are potential publics, the critical factor being the arrival of a problem or issue. (…) when such a problem or issue arises, stakeholders organise to  become publics and are able to affect the interests of the organisation.” (Tench,Yeomas; 2006)

Bibliography:

1.     Tench, R., Yeomans, L., (2006). Exploring Public Relations. Harlow: Financial Times Prentice Hall.

If your presentation sucks wear red!

The key to successful communication lies in good recognition of the context we operate in. The context consists of: characteristics of people we are talking to (what is the environment they live in, what are their beliefs, attitudes and motivations) and the situational factors within we communicate.

While we can’t do much about other people’s believes and attitudes, we can however take a partial control upon their perceptions during the communicational process. Our perceptions of others strongly depend on type of the medium we communicate through.

The most famous example of that is a case of American presidential debate in 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard N. Nixon. The debate was broadcasted by both television and radio. After the debate it turned out that between the radio and TV audience there are remarkable differences in the candidates’ appraisal.

People who were watching debate in TV better rated Kennedy, whose appearance was simply better that his opponent’s. He was younger, more handsome, his behaviour was smooth. Nixon was acting unsteadily, he didn’t have make-up, couldn’t stand in one place, was sweating. However people who were listening to the debate on the radio, gave the higher ranks to Nixon, whose speech was more convincing for them than the Kennedy’s.

It is a clear proof that the observers’ perception is strongly connected to the medium of communication. It indicates that we should tune in our way of communicating to the medium – maybe if the debate was only transmitted by the radio, Nixon would have won the elections.

The differences which determine our perception on the type of the communication canal we can explain by the psychological theory (Petty and Cacioppo (1981) of two routes to persuasion: central and peripheral.

Persuasion is only effective when the receiver’s attention is respectively direct either to the power of arguments (verbal communication) or to so called peripheral indicators (non-verbal communication).

Directing the attention to the appropriate rout depends, in turn, on the conditions of message reception. When a person is focused on considering  the arguments – for example when is reading an article, then he focuses on the merits of the statement. But when his attention is distracted and he doesn’t recognise the substance and logics of the arguments (which most often happen during TV watching) then the person concentrate on superficial aspects and simple signs which in psychology are called as heuristics – for example if the person is attractive, if is an expert, or if others agree with his view. Drawing on this mechanism we can explain why in 1960’s debate for TV audience won Kennedy, and for radio listeners won Nixon.

So the next time if you don’t have time to prepare your presentation well, at least wear the best clothes you have, or put something red on. According to the central and peripheral theory of persuasion you will divert your audience’s attention from your arguments to the peripheral aspects of your appearance.

References:

Extracts from my BA dissertation (2010): 'Selected methods of building a personal image in the media’

Public Relations and Propaganda

PR is often charged with accusations of being propagandistic communication and media manipulation. It is very interesting issue, as by examining the literature of PR we can find out that even among theorists and academics of PR there is a considerable dispute on the problem of a genuine nature of PR.

Historically the ‘public relations’ and ‘propaganda’ were interchangeable terms and there was no difference in meaning. The concept of these phenomena was a mere response to the popular opinion makers (Gustave Le Bon, Walter Lipmann, Harold Laswell, Edward Bernays) and psychological discourses of that time, that the masses of people in a system of democracy are not able to think and act rationally and need to be guided by elites, as Edward Bernays wrote in Propaganda (1928), in the first chapter titled: Organising Chaos:



Edward Bernays - the father of PR

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

The attitude towards the word ‘propaganda’ had changed after the II World War when it got negative associations due to its use by hated regimes and consequently the term was permanently changed to ‘public relations’.

Many PR academics point out that actually many definitions of propaganda could cover definitions of public relations: “many basic definitions of propaganda could be equally well used to describe public relations.” (J. L’Etang, 2009).



Morris and Goldsworthy (2008) ask what if there was nothing what could differentiate PR from propaganda and they respond: “Our contention is that there are no real moral distinctions: both practices are essentially amoral, capable of serving any cause.” Authors however propone three ways of differencing PR from propaganda, although their nature is more connected to the context in which they operate (democracy vs. regime) and to the potentially available techniques, than to the moral capital:

1.  It [public relations] has far few levers of influence to pull on.

2.  It exists in conditions where many competing persuasive message are communicated.

3.  The public relations practitioner, unlike the propagandist, does not have effective powers of censorship or any lasting control over the media.

To get the bigger picture on how the discipline of public relations was born I recommend watching the documentary Century of the Self:


Bibliography:

1.     Fawkes, J., Public relations, propaganda and the psychology of persuasion. in: Tench, R., Yeomans, L., (2006). Exploring Public Relations. Harlow: Financial Times Prentice Hall.



2.     L’Etang, J.,(2009). Public Relations: concepts, practice and critique. Sage Publications.



3.     L'Etang, J., Pieczka, M., (1996). Critical perspectives in Public Relations. International Thomson Business Press.



4.     Moloney, K., (2000). Rethinking Public Relations: The Spin and the Substance. London and New York: Routledge.



5.     Morris, T., Goldsworthy, S., (2008). PR - a persuasive industry? Spin, public relations, and the shaping of the modern media. Palgrave McMillan.



6.     Theaker, A., (2008). The Public Relations Handbook. 3nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.