Public Relations Theories Course

Now it is time to round the course off. First I'd like to say that this course gave me a lot. These theories about how different aspects of public relations work, were very important to know. Some of them may seem obvious, but still need to be "put in paper" so we won't forget them. For example if different acts of crisis communication are said, it seems so logical that why should anyvody right it down, but in a crisis situation it is very easy to forget them. That is why those kind of theories have to be written down. 

Or if we think about stakeholders, of course they are important, everybody knows it. But if you read an article about the reasons, you start to see it from another angle. 

The most difficult for me in this course was probably reading those academical texts, which were long and, to be honest, sometimes quite boring. But after reading and thinking about what was written, I understood the reason of reading so they were useful. I liked the lectures, where our lecturer managed to explain these difficult theories in easier and more understandable language. The most interesting topic for me was probably crisis communication. It seems pretty hard to handle sometimes as PR professional, but interesting to think and discuss about. 

If public relations would be an animal, it would be a squirrel. They are cute and soft, but also clever, they know how to prepare. Squirrels collect acorns like PR people do plans for different situations. And if winter or needed situation comes, they both use their collected stuff to handle it. 

Happy Christmas everyone!

Ethical dilemmas of PR professional

Being PR prefessional isn't always easy. There are many ethical problems that may occur. It would be easy to be perfectly ethical if the company asks you to act so. But unfortunately in many cases the head of the company wants PR professional to lie or hide some important facts that may damage the reputation of the organization. Then PR person has to decide whether to be ethical or loyal to his or her job. 

If PR professional decides to be ethical and honest in that kind of situation, there is a risk of loosing a job. But being not honest can be even worse. These lies almost always come out and then the reputation of the company is certainly damaged and so is the reputation of PR person. So the best solution in the situation will be to convince your boss going the ethical way. Being honest about the problems from the beginning is much better than lies coming out later. Then the organization has to deal with real crisis.

There has been discussion that PR professionals should be ethical guardians in organisation. I think it's right because PR professional's work is most visible for general publics and that makes it even compulsory for them to be very ethical. But not only because of the publics.  "Public relations is the comparatively recent expression by business of the old precept ‘do unto others as you would have them do to you’ . . . To say of a man he is ‘a good chap’ means the same thing to all Englishmen" Jacquie L'Etang has written. Company should always think about why they exist and how to be beneficial for more people outside of the organization. Decisions should be done reckon with Corporate Social Responsibility. 

I support rather utilitarian standpoint, because rules should be done in favour of people. So not following rules, but making sure as many people as possible are happy, should be the priority. 

International Public Relations Association has written an ethics code for PR people. I read IPRA's code of ethics, where I think all the most important clauses are in. If you follow this code, there shouldn't occur problems about being ethical. 

Hesburger's crisis communication

My next task was to analyze some organization's crisis. I chose Hesburger's crisis that happened in July this year. It was actually a leak from inside. Hesburger's employees got e-mails, which told them to remove worms form salad. One of them decided to put the picture of it to Facebook where it started to spread very quickly. Soon many online newspapers wrote about it and even Reporter made a story. People were most shocked by the fact that the manager told employees to remove worms but still use the salad.

So what did Hesburger do about it? Their development director told to Õhtuleht that quality is very important to Hesburger and the mail was sent only to make an extra control. (Õhtuleht, 2012)

After veterinarian office's checking they threw away the salad because some worms were really found.

Emphasising their interest in best quality was a good step but I think they should have done more. I didn't saw any apologize from them. Yes, apologizing shows that they admit their guilt, but in that case, it was obvious anyway and denial would have done it only worse. Fortunately they didn't deny it. As next step I would have scapegoated the one who sent the e-mail. It was actually done but they told it only to veterinarian office who mentioned it in Delfi's article. I think it should have been Hesburgers most important defence for themselves. Saying that it was one person's mistake and Hesburger usually don't tolerate this kind of action would have done them more faithworthy. I also think they should have thrown away all the suspicious salad immediately when the crisis occured.

Some people think that this crisis was made from Hesburger itself to get attention. The numbers of sale actually started to rise after the crisis. It sure got them a lot of attention.

Even if it wasn't made from them, I think Hesburger was strongly responsible for the crisis but they got over it and even increased the number of sales so they did a good job.

Social capital

It seems to be that nowadays public relations theories suggest more and more not organisation-centered communications. In last post I was talking about identifying and dealing with issue arenas, instead of stakeholders and organizations. In this post I would like to talk about social capital which also suggests more two-way symmetrical relations.

Social capital is just like financial or human capital. If financial capital is money, which is a bit easier to define, then social capital is connections among individuals and groups.

According to Putman's theories, people who are associated in some groups are more trusting, politically more active and communicate with their neighbours more. He thinks that social capital helps people get more we-feeling, stay healthy and trusting. He even says that social capital affects more than relations between individuals and groups, it changes the whole society. The stronger the social capital, the better society.

I agree with him in that theory. I guess that we-feeling and belonging to somewhere really helps people to be trusting and more active. It is obviously good for confidence.

Social capital is very important for reputation. Good social capital means strong networks, which "amplify information about the trustworthiness of individuals or organizations; that is, their reputation." (On Putnam, 235). It makes clearer how it is related to public relations. If organization has a good social capital, it is much easier for it to work properly and have a good reputation among other organizations and individuals.

Sources:
R.D.Putman: Bowling alone: America's Declining Social Capital
Luoma-Aho: On Putman: Bowling together-Applying Putnam's Theories of Community and Social Capital to Public Relations

Stakeholders and issue arenas

"Stakeholder is any group or individual who is affected by or can affect the achievement of an organization's objectives." (Freeman, 1984)

Stakeholders can be, and usually are, very different. That's why communication with every stakeholder must be different and prepared specifically for that stakeholder. Organization can never communicate the same way with it's customers and other organizations. These two are just interested in different things. 

Stakeholders have always been important for organizations because it's hard or even impossible to work without them. In old times stakeholders weren't named that way but that doesn't mean they didn't excist. Nowadays every working organization knows its stakeholder sand tries to keep them satisfied. Because of the fact that now we live in a society where information moves in seconds, the stakeholders are even more important. 

The society is even called network society. Technology has a huge part in our everyday lives and that changes a lot. If one stakeholder is unsatisfied, it can spread the bad experience online and that changes the reputation of the organization. But it doesn't have to be a bad thing. With the help of technology, organization can spread their information really fast. For example in a crisis situation when being fast is probably the most important thing. 

So communication has changed a lot in 20 to 30 years. Technology is one thing but the other change is that organizations have to be more opened noadays. When people can see what is happening inside the company, they trust it more and feel involved. That makes every stakeholder more satisfied.

Stakeholders are important but nowadays the new theories say that issue arenas are even more important. "Identifying issues should precede identifying stakeholders." (Vilma Luoma-aho and Marita Vos, 2010)

Issue arenas should be places where stakeholders and organizations discuss on-line through media. 

They also say that now issues are in the centre of the communication instead of organizations. The reason is development of technology and that huge moving of information. People read on-line reviews and hear things so fast that communicating with stakeholders only isn't enough for the organizations reputation.

A good PR should:

1) Find the right issue arena

2) Facilitate public debate in these arenas

3) Thereby manage organization's reputation

I think issue arenas are not an illusion but working of these depends on a situation. For example if the situation really involves only one stakeholder and organisation. Media might not even be interested in it and the debate isn't necessary. But in some cases issue arenas might help to rise the company's reputation a lot. 

The text is based on two articles:  Manuel Castells: The contours of the network society

                                                    Vilma Luoma-aho and Marita Vos: Towards a more dynamic stakeholder model: acknowledging multiple issue arenas

The Body Shop

My second post will be about The Body Shop's PR through social media. I chose that organisation because I have noticed that they are doing a good job.

I investigated their Facebook account. The Body Shop has a general Facebook account called The Body Shop International and also every country has its own.
Entering the international page, you can see their mission which is: "We believe true beauty comes from the heart. For us, beauty is much more than a pretty face. It’s about feeling good and doing good, too."

I really like their point of view. "We harness the skills of artisan farmers and add our expertise to create effective products that are wonderful to use." They never use animal testing and all products are 100% vegetarian. I think that beauty products which are made without harming anyone and by helping farmers are much better to use which makes it also a good ad for the company. At least it works for me. 

The communication with costumers is two-way symmetrical. Costumers can post to their Facebook wall and all their questions have been answered. The Body Shop regularly posts pictures of their new products and asks costumers opinion so the Facebook page is pretty good. 

In my opinion The Body Shop Eesti is even better than the international page. It is more active and shows pictures of using their products and different events which The Body Shop has made in Estonia. 

The Body Shop has a Twitter account, where they advertise products and add information about charity work they are doing and the results of it. 

They also have a blog which I started to like so much I decided to share it with you. Here's the link: http://blog.thebodyshop.com
It contains of pictures of their products, charity work and some good quotations. To get more information you need to click to those pictures.

As I read my post from the start I started to feel like the advertiser of The Body Shop because everything I have written says good things about them. And actually I don't have anything critical to say about them so I guess the PR team of the company has done a good job. 

Social constructivism and crisis communication

I made this blog for my new course of Public Relations Theories. Here is the first post about social constructivism and crisis communication. It is based on Mats Heide's article about Berger's view of social constructivism.

I read the article and after reading discovered that it is still hard for me to say in one sentence what social constructivism is. So I used my good friend Wikipedia which told me that "Social constructivism is a sociological theory of knowledge that applies the general philosophical constructivism into social settings, wherein groups construct knowledge for one another, collaboratively creating a small culture of shared artifacts with shared meanings". (2012)

My second question was how is social constructivism connected to crisis communication? In Mats Heide's article it is pointed out how crises are social constructions produced by the organizational member's perception and sense-making processes. (Heide 2009, 43)

Berger who is basically the father of social constructivism has written that the social world is a creation
of human beings and they in turn are also the creation of their social world. I quess that sentence explains nicely the system of social world. 

"People always attempt to habitualize their activities to achieve efficiency, and step by step the habits become embedded as routines in the general stock of knowledge. After a while the habits are externalized, and they spread through language and discourse to other people who were involved in the original habit. In other words, habits are knowledge that earlier generarions have produced and that new generations learn through communication." (Heide 2009, 49)

I got to thinking about that paragraph and couldn't help but wonder how it affects me? How many things I do in my everyday life are just habits that have been made up by people who lived long time ago in a society that was very different from the one I'm in. We  do a lot only because it is normal to do so and never wonder why. 

"Crisis is often a result of poor communication between organtizations and its publics and consequently more focus should be put on the precrisis phase and on building and maintaining longlasting relationship." (Heide 2009, 43)

Crisis can damage organization so badly that it never works again. That's why so many focus of communication sciences are on crisis communication. I have learned PR about two months now and the  word crisis communication seems to be in every text I read which only proves that it really has to be important. I read from the article that in order to avoid crisis, organization has to adapt to changes in the environment. I agree with that statement but this is only one step. In order to avoid crisis, organization has to pay attention to many different angles and some crisis still aren't possible to avoid. I got to thinking that maybe it isn't always a bad thing. Maybe it is like in economy where ups and downs are just part of the progress and crisis motivate organizations to change and develop in a good way.

That's all for now, hope you enjoyed.