Principles of Public Relations

8/28
What is PR?
Public relations is a strategic communication process that
builds mutually beneficial relationships between organizations
and their publics Public Relations Society of America (PRSA)
Issues of power with this definition, the power between the
people and the organizations is not equal
What do PR people actually do?
Coordinate events
Write speeches
Media relations
Crisis communication
Counseling
Internal communication
Public affairs
Analyst relations
Investor relations
Promotions
Lobbying
Social media management
Media Relations
Press/media relations- Friend or Foe?
Friend- building relationships with journalists,
advantageous, looking for commonalities
Foe- you are the gatekeeper of information, constantly
telling them when they can release info and have access to
info, blacklist journalists who do them wrong
Its not free (MSFT spent more than 900M in 2012)
8/31
Advertising
Advertising: pay for space- exchange dollars for ads, in PR in
the US you do not exchange money
More control, direct
Lines are blurring with PR- social media blurring these lines
Whats this about Public Information?
Refers to the public interest obligation of all ethical PR
practitioners
What is the public interest?
Squishy, isnt it?
Really hard to define- people will have competing
interests

 Media industries tend to overgeneralize, producing

content that the people want, even though thats not
true
Who gets to decide what the public interest is?
Prof Reyes #1 Principle of PR
What is the business/mission problem you are trying to solve?
Research Media Publics Persuasion and Relationships
A Brief History of American PR
Ivy Lee
Rockefeller image
Edward Bernays
Propaganda
Smoking
9/2
PR
Gut Check
Whats problematic about the history I just gave you?
Implies that Americans came up with PR, which isnt true at
all it has been a thing since before we could write
Very negative history of PR
No women in this history
PR: Ethics and Regulation
Ethics vs. Law
Ethics
How we ought to behave
Values, morals
Law
How we must behave
Laws, regulations, penalties, fines, punishments
Ethics
Normative- theologians and philosophers
What does it all mean? Why?
Comparative- social scientists
Aka descriptive ethics
Compare cultural values
9/4
PR: The Ethical Dance
How do you balance multiple stakeholders (audience, investors,
client, coworkers, government, press)?
What are your personal ethics? Are they flexible? If so, when?
What do you do if your employer and/or client are engaged in
something unethical (subjective) and/or illegal (objective
under law)?

Education/persuade them
Refusal
Ask to be given another task
Take the assignment

9/9
The PR Problem with PR
Problem
Pejorative: spin doctor, flack, propagandist, corporate shill,
mouthpiece, manipulator
Better connotation: storyteller, influencer, practitioner,
professional, representative, spokesperson, persuader,
advocate
Ethics and Media Relations
Reporting ethics
Bloggers as journalists
Professionalization- objectivity
Access
Partisanship
How does this contrast to ethics of traditional journalists?
9/11
Ethics and Controlled Media
2006- The Edelman and Walmart Blog Scandal
Astroturfing- Doing something in PR that is very fake, creating
some sort of campaign or organization that has a false front
that is more than just language for unethical public relations
When in doubt
Disclose, disclose, and disclose some more
Avoid big claims unless you have loads of independent
research to back it up
Copyright
Most companies have rights and reproduction policies postedread them
Creative Commons
Proper attribution is critical
Images from the British Museum (among others) are free!
Pr & The News Cycle: Y U No Ethics?
Persuasion
Reminder: What is the business problem?
Research media publics persuasion and relationships
Harold Laswell- An Administrative (Functional) Theory of
Communication
Who says what, through what channel, to whom, with what
effect?

9/14
Persuasion
Unpacking Persuasion
The Who
Credibility
Expertise
Objectivity
The What
In general, tell BOTH sides of the story
UNLESS, the situation meets all three of the following:
The target public is poorly educated
The public is friendly to you
The public is not likely to hear/read the other side
Is this council ethical?
The Whom
Two-step flow
Media opinion leaders individuals
No mutually beneficial relationships
Is it as simple as that?
This is not a pipe, and other delicious complexities of
communication
Stuart Hall
Encoding and Decoding
Breaks it down into three different readings
Dominant reading- taking the reading for the
absolute truth immediately
Negotiated reading- part of what youre saying
resonates but another part doesnt, what exactly is
coming through loud and clear and is accepted and
being persuasive, and what parts arent working and
not being persuasive
Oppositional reading- convince someone who
completely rejects your idea, need to persuade them
to at least a negotiated reading, saying that at least
some parts are true, very hard to do
Techniques of Persuasion
Fear
Research says a little works
But when (if ever) is it ethical?
Creating Meaning
Are you going to go my way?
Head and Heart in two different directions
Fear and emotional would be on the heart side

Head would be the intellect side of things

Dont break into jail!- the book refers to this as Let
sleeping dogs lie

9/16
Persuasion
Visual Techniques in Persuasion
9/18
Writing for Clarity- Bonus, Social Media Part One
Steps for Clarity
Remember MAM:
Message
Audience
Medium
The Basics
Readability- Length of words and sentences
Variety- Word choice, flow
Human interest- Are you bored? Then your reader is bored
#1 rule
Revise, revise, revise
A comma is like hot sauce use it sparingly!
Clichs give me aliens- they really bother Reyes
Avoid them like the plague- this is a clich
In the nick of time
At the 11th hour
The calm before the storm
Take it to the next level
Think outside of the box
Social Media, Part one
Social media experts: as real as unicorns
Twitter profile
Models from your industry?
What makes someone follow-worthy?
Write a draft profile
9/21
Tweet assignment
9/23
Social Networks
Characteristics
Web based
Public or semi-public user profiles
Lists social connections
Users may track connections
Interconnected

Facebook and Twitter are largest today

Deep connections = more automated bang for the effort
Dont discount traditional media
Gamification

9/25
Advertising/Social Media
Influencers
Traditional/legacy media organizations
Digital media outlets
Citizens/users
Robots
9/28
Advertising/Social Media cont.
Filter Bubble
How the internet isolates us from certain kinds of information,
we do not see what is going on behind the scenes with the
code on the internet, we dont know what is edited out of our
information, we dont have a choice
9/30
Tiering
Why do we tier?
Limited time and resources
Service level agreements- a contract/agreement between a
PR agency and their clients
When tier 1 influencers get in touch with you, you drop
everything to take care of them, tier 2 influencers are less
important and so on
How we tier
General demographic
Campaign specific
Reach
Media mix
Look for their media kit- key to unlocking important
information for your tiering efforts
Creativity
Banana Ladders
Help to become more creative and make things more specific
10/2
Campaign
Anatomy of a campaign (ROPE)
Research- finding out about stuff
Situational analysis- answers are sought for all sorts of
questions about our publics and our competition

SWOT analysis- strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,

and threats
Audience research- who you are trying to reach and the
research about them, figure out the right publics to reach
for your campaign
Segmentation- figuring out who to reach, dividing and
breaking into group the public based on two primary
things: the demographics, and psychographics
(personality, behavior, interests)
Media tiering- segmenting the media based on our
publics
Objectives- goals, what do you want to accomplish
Programming- how you intend to reach objectives/goals
Evaluation- setting metrics and how you reach those metrics

10/5
Case Studies
NPR Case
Business problem- got a huge donation from a listener, were
concerned that this would cause problems with Congress and
the member stations- two of their most important
stakeholders
Needed to figure out how to deliver this news without
alienating the VIPs
Said that the money was going to be an endowment, so
no profit from it- specifically directed at Congress to
make sure that they kept getting funding from congress
10/7
Women working in public relations- stigmas and stereotypes
General info
Women account for 73% of people working in the PR field in
2014, men used to be dominant 20ish years ago
Top PR positions are filled by men who are supervising
women, 4/5 leadership positions in PR are held by men
The velvet ghetto- companies were hiring women and putting
them in management positions just to say that they had
women at the top, but these positions didnt have access to
the top dogs, had a title but not access to the top jobs- PR
positions were also the first jobs to get cut which meant
women in these positions were always the first to lose their
jobs
Women can make more money working in PR than working at
a traditional journalism job, and can work with things that
they like to do, such as relationship building, etc.

Bureau of labor statistics says that women make up 63% of PR

specialists, research shows that women are betting at building
relationships with their clients, much more willing to listen,
prefer to work in teams
Gender bias going on here, society is assigning certain
characteristics to men and women and then reinforces
those characteristics through normalization
Pink collar ghetto- where women dominate a particular field to
the extent that it is considered less status and less pay so
men dont go into those fields
Men make more money at an entry level job because they are
more aggressive at negotiating the salary than women are
Mommy track- jobs designed for women who want to have
more time with their families

10/12
Exam Review Session
Format
Short answers and 2 essays
Content
Anything is fair game, anything from lectures, anything from
textbooks that we were supposed to read, any videos we
watched, any readings on TLearn and guest lecture
Chapter Notes
Chapter 6