Today's Public Relations

An Introduction

Robert L. Heath, Timothy Coombs

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781506320366
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Today's Public Relations: An Introduction is a comprehensive text that features all aspects of public relations with specific sensitivity to the message strategies that challenge practitioners to be successful, yet ethical. In this book, authors Robert L. Heath and W. Timothy Coombs redefine the teaching of public relations by discussing its connection to mass communication while linking it to its rhetorical heritage. The text features coverage of ethics, research, strategy, planning, evaluation, media selection, promotion and publicity, crisis communication, risk communication, and collaborative decision making as ways to create, maintain, and repair relationships between organizations and the persons who can affect their success.

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Strategic Relationship Building An Ethical Organization Communicating Effectively

1

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Vignette: The Edison, New Jersey, Pipeline Explosion: Texas Eastern Transmission in the Spotlight

Strategic Relationships: Mutual Benefits

The Definition of Public Relations

The Five Functions of Public Relations

Public Relations and Society

Public Relations and the Rhetorical Tradition

Social Responsibility of Public Relations

Marketplace Responsibility of Public Relations

An Ethical Organization Communicating Effectively

Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations, and Integrated Communication: Similarities and Differences

Marketing: Creating and Positioning Products or Services

Advertising: Creating and Paying to Place Informative and Persuasive Messages

Public Relations: Creating Strategic Mutually Beneficial Relationships

Integrated Communication: Creating Integrated Messages

Circumstances That Call for Public Relations

Organizations That Need Public Relations

Business Organizations

Professional Reflection: Reflections of an Account Executive

Governmental Agencies

Nonprofit Organizations

How Organizations Use Public Relations

Conclusion

Further Exploration

Ethical Quandary: Unethical Organizations and Public Relations Practice

Summary Questions

Exercises

Recommended Readings

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Vignette:
The Edison, New Jersey, Pipeline Explosion: Texas Eastern Transmission in the Spotlight

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On March 23, 1994, a natural gas pipeline owned by the Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation (TETCO), of Houston, Texas, exploded near the Durham Woods Apartments, in Edison, New Jersey. (TETCO was a subsidiary of Panhandle Eastern Transmission, now Duke Energy.) People for miles were shaken by the explosion, which occurred just before midnight. After the explosion, a fierce orange ball of fire could be seen all the way from network television offices in New York City. The chief engineer for the New York Times printing plant in Edison reported that the flames leapt 300 to 400 feet into the air and were so intense that headlights on nearby automobiles melted, giving the appearance that they were crying. Initial news reports indicated that at least 10 people were injured and that at least six apartment buildings were completely destroyed. People from the apartment complex milled about in the street, wearing only their nightclothes; many feared that all they owned had been destroyed. To make matters even worse, emergency personnel had no idea whether or not more explosions would occur. As the fire blazed, the dispatcher for the local fire department reported that the Mobil Chemical Company plant in Edison had also gone up in flames.

Explosion Creates Community Relations Crisis

SOURCE: Reprinted with permission from the New Jersey Star-Ledger.

Upon hearing the news, the mayor of Edison immediately blamed TETCO for the fire. The mayor took legal steps to force the pipeline company to cease its operations because they were unsafe. If you were the vice president for public affairs for TETCO, what would you do? How would you handle the mayor’s action against your company? What facts would you want to know as you researched this crisis and prepared your response?

The executives who led the response to this need for public relations solutions had answers to these questions. Compare their response to what you might have done. See the vignette at the start of Chapter 5 to learn what they did.

Welcome to Today’s Public Relations: Imagine that it’s your first day on the job as a newly employed public relations professional. You are busy at your desk at 10:18 on a Monday morning. Your boss bustles in and tells you to have a media release ready by 4:00—your first important assignment in your new professional job. “Okay,” you think to yourself, “no problem!” You have been trained to write a media release, but before you begin, you need to ask yourself why you are writing it. What do you want to accomplish with this media release? Even more important, consider what this media release means strategically for you, for your department, and for your organization. You must also consider how the media release will affect other organizations, groups of people inside and outside of your organization, and society itself. You must be strategic; you should make purposeful choices designed to achieve specific objectives.

In your preparation, you may consider rhetorical options that are SMART. The SMART approach to public relations thinks beyond tactics to consider all of the following options:

Societal value and meaning: The smart practitioner realizes that each statement and action can have consequences for the quality of society, the community where he or she works. Public relations and its clients do not operate in a vacuum. They are part of society.

Mutually beneficial relationships: Relationship building is required for public relations. A relationship is mutually beneficial when all of the involved parties gain from it and support it. Relationships are mutually beneficial when they are based on wise and sound ethical choices that foster the interests of all of the parties involved.

Advantages through objectives: Public relations is designed to achieve specific purposes, such as to raise awareness, increase understanding, align interests, share perspectives, compromise, reduce conflict, foster identification, and motivate action based on shared interests.

Rhetorical strategies: Rhetorical approaches to public relations require strategic planning based on research to decide on messages and tactics that can be used to achieve the objectives through specific message points. Rhetorical strategies include message development options: gaining awareness, informing, persuading, fostering identifications, and cocreating meaning to build bridges. Practitioners have an arsenal of strategies at their discretion to achieve their objectives: planning, research, collaborative decision making, and publicity coupled with promotion.

Tactics: Each specific public relations activity is a tactic. Writing and issuing a media release is a tactic, as is holding a media conference to respond to a crisis or creating and executing a publicity event to increase awareness for the grand opening of a shopping mall. Strategic responses force the practitioner to ask: What public relations tool should I use, what message content should we feature in our statements, and when should we implement our tactic?

If you have learned to think SMART, you ask questions and develop innovative solutions that make a difference, the heart of today’s public relations. This text is designed to help you think tactically, strategically, and ethically about public relations and to teach you to ask questions and develop solutions that make a difference for your client by building mutually beneficial relationships with people who can positively or negatively affect the future of your client or employer. Public relations can help businesses, nonprofits, and governmental agencies to be successful.

Public relations is an integral part of national and global economies. Today’s public relations practitioners contribute to all aspects of society, from passing laws to influencing consumer purchases to funding nonprofit agencies. Today’s practitioners must face challenges that were often not addressed in the past. The professional practice of public relations requires more than merely being pleasant, meeting people, working with the media, and staging promotional events. Today, the profession is committed to creating, maintaining, and repairing strategic relationships in the face of conflicting interests and ethical choices. These relationships should equally benefit both your clients (or employer) and the people whose lives they affect. The need for creativity is constant. Strategic planning and critical thinking are vital for success. Ethical standards must guide every step of the process. Making a positive difference on behalf of clients or for your employer organization is the essence of professional public relations practice. To have a solid impact, you will need to be an ethical and strategic thinker as well as an effective communicator.

This book is actually designed for several audiences. A student may use it to prepare to become a professional practitioner, but practitioners who already work in public relations can also use it to increase their career knowledge and hone their strategic, ethical, and critical skills. Practitioners may find it invaluable in reviewing for their accreditation examinations.

Our first chapter poses an ethical quandary designed to develop your ethical and strategic reasoning so crucial in successfully practicing public relations. Included in this chapter, and throughout other chapters of this volume, autobiographical insights will offer a peek into what it’s like to be a professional public relations practitioner. You will also find “Web Watchers,” which challenge you to consider real-life examples of how public relations is practiced using the Internet; each Web Watcher encourages you to understand and appreciate the growing potential of cyberspace communication technology in the public relations process.

This chapter strives to help the reader to understand the complexity of public relations within the United States but also as part of a daunting global society composed of many voices, interests, and cultures. Practitioners must realize public relations is neither simplistic nor isolated from other organizations, organizational units, or groups. Public relations is complex. Many theories, much research, and decades of learning best practices help students to understand its role in society and identify when public relations is required. In broad strokes, theory is used to understand the processes of communication, its content, and the quality of relationships. Systems theory helps explain processes. Rhetorical heritage informs how people deal with meaning. Interpersonal communication, especially social exchange theory, gives insights into how relationships are created, maintained, and repaired.

Strategic Relationships: Mutual Benefits

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Today’s public relations helps organizations build relationships. Relationships are strongest when they are mutually beneficial and characterized by “win-win” outcomes. Relationships are best when people share information that is accurate and relevant. Relationships require a commitment to open and trustworthy dialogue, a spirit of cooperation, a desire to align interests, a willingness to adopt compatible views/opinions, and a commitment to make a positive difference in the lives of everyone affected by your organization.

Before we continue to discuss this topic, let’s look briefly at a relationship that has the potential for being mutually beneficial. In 2000, building-products giant Home Depot, Inc., created a relationship with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The goal was to work together to select and market building materials that are harvested with environmentally responsible techniques. This accord ended a long and rancorous debate in which FSC charged Home Depot and other building-materials merchants with environmental destruction. This alliance could help Home Depot claim that its marketing techniques were environmentally responsible, thereby aligning its interests with environmental groups and with its customers who want quality but environmentally safe building materials. This relationship could also help Home Depot defend its marketing policies against the attacks of the more radical Rainforest Action Network. Other building materials companies (Wicke’s, Lowe’s, and Anderson Corporation, a window-building giant) joined in this coalition to meet FSC’s environmental standards. These organizations engaged in two-way communication to collaboratively make decisions. This process could build trust, align interests, demonstrate environmental commitment, be cooperative, adopt compatible views/opinions, and commit to supporting the global market for building materials in an environmentally responsible manner. Once this agreement had been achieved, public relations could use media relations disseminate information about the agreement, attract and keep customers, and reduce activist criticism. This agreement strengthened Home Depot’s reputation as being environmentally responsible. It added to FSC’s image as an advocate for wise natural resource management.

A commitment to help build relationships calls for high ethical standards, strategic thinking, and effective communication. Qual...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Detailed Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Strategic Relationship Building: An Ethical Organization Communicating Effectively
• 2. History of Public Relationships
• 3. Managing Mutually Beneficial Relationships
• 4. The Value of Research
• 5. Elements of Planning
• 6. Taking Action: Strategic Messaging
• 7. Evaluation of Public Relations Efforts
• 8. Public Relations Theory in Practice
• 9. Ethical and Legal Restraints on Public Relations Practice
• 10. Monitoring and Managing Issues
• 11. Selecting Media, Technologies, and Communication Tools
• 12. Publicity, Promotion, and Writing
• 13. Collaborative Decision Making
• 14. Building a Career
• 15. The Future of Public Relations: Globalism and Cyberspace
• References
• Index
• About the Authors