Getting to the heart through the ears

October 26, 2006

Dennis Miller of Mansfield U. brings a love of radio and music into his public relations work as he creates podcast series episodes of student experiences over their first year on campus and interviews faculty and administration revealing them to be—guess what—human beings with hearts, aspirations, and disappointments. This guy knows how to interview.

Early on, he moved 80% of his organization’s advertising budget to broadcast, mostly radio, and specifically to the kind of music and programming that would appeal to what he considers the primary audience for college recruiters: mothers and high-school age females. Ask him sometime about his reasoning and he’ll convince you he’s right.

He emphasized the importance of television in shaping young people’s perceptions of their worlds, and how a popular sitcom featuring a student attending a certain urban university drummed up huge amounts of interest in applying for admission there.

His case studies showed how he used radio and TV to measurably increase enrollment in his institution’s nursing program and forensics program.

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How to swim in an ocean of change

October 26, 2006

Bill Mahon of Penn State U opened this week’s Academic Impressions conference on integrating interactive technologies into public relations.

Bill is quietly but startlingly conversant in technology use and adaptation. He presented a compact and compelling overview of contemporary communication trends, from blackberries to time shifting. He showed how consumers of media are abandoning old habits and adopting new expectations, and how traditional media are scrambling, and sometimes succeeding, in adapting to the new environment. He then demonstrated Penn State Live and discussed the thinking and resources that go into this media rich news page. Certain that video is central to the continued success of audience engagement, he has a full time videographer in his modest sized PR staff, and solicits video from departments campus wide as well.

 

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Communication audits for organizations

September 15, 2006

“Communication is what happens to organizations while they are busy making other plans.”

Communication audits are powerful tools that can revolutionize the way an organization communicates its employees and with its external constituents. A communication audit strips away myths and illusions about how well your organization communications and, it well done, provides an accurate diagnosis of the organization’s communications health.

The Handbook Of Communication Audits For Organizations, Edited by Owen Hargie and Dennis Tourish (Routledge, 2002, 2002, 2004), provides an exhaustive look into the many ways audits can be planned, executed, and evaluated. Articles by several contributors examine the strengths of various tools including the questionnaire, the interview, the focus group, and data collection log-sheets, among others. Several studies examine audits of a healthcare organization, a paper mill, a catholic disocese, and a major beverage company, among others.

External audits provide a rounded picture of the communication climate facing a given organization. They provide a standard against which the internal operations can be assessed; they measure outcomes that are significant to the organization; they monitor the social, political and business environment; and they allow one to compare consumer attitudes towards an organizational culture with what employees think is an ideal culture.

Whether internal or external, audit strategy should be ongoing, describing the business challenges that exist, their relationship to communication variables, and the best practices the organization is attempting to employ.

The editors note that, because technology is changing the ways organizations communicate with their publics, communicators should keep abreast of the impact of those changes. Organizations are increasingly called on to provide customers with access to information resources. The lines between internal and external organization parts are growing thinner.

But rather than trying to force communication to the top of management’s already crowded agenda, the editors advise, communication strategy should be linked to what is already dominating that agenda.

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How to prioritize your stakeholders

September 8, 2006

Brad Rawlins recently posted a really helpful paper (PDF, 13 pages) at the Intutue for Public Relations site in which he discusses public relations stakeholder theory and stakeholder management. He guides readers through a four-step process: identifying all your potential stakeholders according to their relationship to the organization; ranking stakeholders by attributes; ranking stakeholders by relationship to the situation; and ranking the publics according to the communication strategy (including key publics, intervening publics, and influentials). Brad teaches communications at Brigham Young University.

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Books about comm measurement and audits

August 31, 2006

I’m reading a couple of books about measurement that offer theoretical and practical value to me as a communicator. Communications Research Measures: A Sourcebook (Erlbaum, 2004) brings together a variety of scales that measure a number of important communication measurement scales, instructions for administration and scoring, and information on validity and reliability. The approximately 60 scales are grouped into the categories of instructional communication, interpersonal communication, mass communication, and organizational communication. They’re drawn from the areas of interpersonal, mass, organizational, and instructional communication.

The Handbook of Communication Audits for Organizations (Routledge, 2002/2004) is aimed at students of organizational communication and communications managers. The first two chapters treat communication’s relationship to organizational success, and auditing communication to maximize performance. The sections that follow include articles on audit methodologies and several case studies. This is a gold mine. I’ll share more about this as I work my way through it.

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A superintendent’s PR portfolio

August 31, 2006

“Targeting audiences with the information and access they want may seem like a daunting task. But with the right approach and the right person creating and delivering messages, it is the most effective, and can be the most efficient thanks to technology delivery systems,” writes Rich Bagin in in the latest issue of Communication Matters for Leading Superintendents, published by NSPRA. Although most key audiences are easy to identify, he says, some powerful audiences are often neglected by superintendents. He points out a few “real sleepers” for that should be considered and addressed.

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More support for intelligent design?

August 28, 2006

Perhaps jumping the gun a wee bit, the Guardian Unlimited reports that the Vatican may be preparing to support teaching “intelligent design” in schools. If your local community is debating this curricular decision, this article offers a heads-up.

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Numbers that undercut the hype

August 25, 2006

It pays to know your audience, and how they consume information.

The podcasts, RSS feeds and blogs that so engage the daily time and energies of geeks are alien or unknown concepts for most of the U.S. adult population, writes Abbey Klaassen in Advertising Age.

Pew Research Center for the People & the Press surveyed 3,204 adults and found that their online interactions were broad but not deep, she reports. Those who logged on for news spent an average of 32 minutes online daily, significantly less than the time the same group recorded for other media sources — 53 minutes watching TV news, 43 minutes listening to news on the radio and 40 minutes with a newspaper.

According to Jupiter Research, 7% of American adults write blogs and 22% read them; about 8% listen to podcasts and 5% use RSS feeds. A separate study by WorkPlace Print Media shows that 88% of the at-work audience doesn’t even know what RSS is.

Even among the younger 12-17 demographic: While more preteens and teens do flock to the web, according to a study by Frank N. Magid Associates, 69% percent never use social-networking sites, 71% have never posted a comment on a blog and 79% have never written their own blogs (though 15% do so frequently).

(via CyberJournalist.net)

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Posted by paul baker

Talk about transparency. . . .

August 1, 2006

Here’s an excellent example of transparency in public relations. Baltimore County Public Schools has posted the entire report of its 2002 communications audit, conducted by the National School Public Relations Association. This document (88 pages, PDF) is a textbook example of how to gather the viewpoints of a district’s several constituent groups (24 in this case), reporting and analyzing the data, developing guiding principles for effective communications, and offering detailed recommendations. I have enormous respect for BCPS for having the guts to post this sensitive document, and for the NSPRA for conducting such a thorough study and producing such a readable report.

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Time for a communications audit?

July 28, 2006

Have you been thinking about auditing the effectiveness of your communications strategy? Here are some resources that may prove useful:

The Extreme Communications Makeover, article by Bob Sprague for ASAE & The Center for Association Leadership

Strategic Communications Plan Tutorial by the SPIN Project

Developing a Strategic Communications Plan by The Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society (IMPACS)

Strategic Communications Planning: A Presentation to IABC Ottawa, article by Peter O’Malley

Tips & Techniques: The Communications Audit, from PRSA

Communications Audit: guidelines from Full Circle Associates

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