Benefits or pitfalls? When donating time and resources in PR.

I’ve heard someone talking about public relations (PR) when I decided to apply a graduate school. Some companies spent a lot of money in PR in order to get them more attention from the public, obtain good images (although we may think obtaining a good image really depends on sound products or service that a company can provide), and build good relationships with the public.

By sending pitch letters to reporters, conducting campaigns, redesigning logos and slogans and applying all the other strategies and tactics, PR practitioners have spent a great deal of time and used all kinds of resources to do their work.

What are the public relations benefits of donating time and resources?

In my point of view, the benefits will be the results that you are trying to achieve—get more publicity, manage a crises, receive donations and many other different goals.

These are all very ideal situations and PR practitioners are hired to reach these goals. To take an example of getting more publicity, all kinds of tactics are used nowadays. Every time when I watch a video, there will be a advertisement before the video starts. I have to wait till it finishes. And just through these a few seconds, a brand, a new movie or a new product have entered into my brain.

However, the benefits are not necessarily proportional to time and resources donated.

Think about our non-profit client for the research class, Hiscock Legal Aid Society. It has a nice and well organized website, blogs and media pitch for every event they organized. However, they have undergone lack of donors for a long time.

Invisibility is one of the results even PR is operated. What makes things worse is PR  may also jeopardize the image of an organization or a person.

Recently, one of my friends is complaining about how some companies misuse social networking websites to promote their products. When a Internet user click one of the “new events” on their homepage, the page is actually not how it appears on the “new events”. Instead, it goes to the social website of a company or a product. It looks like a computer virus because as soon as you enter that webpage, you automatically add it as your “friend”. And it is very hard to remove this “friend” from your friend list.

These companies probably want to get their products being noticed by more net users. However, this is absolutely a bad and unethical way to do this, and people are only going to get mad on these companies and their products.

Benefits or pitfalls? It really depends on how you donate time and resources rather than how many you donate them.

Finally, there is a video for you. Maybe you can get some ideas from it.

Have a nice weekend.

Social media, thoughts after the presentation

This is the second week of fall semester in Newhouse! Philip R. Johnson gave us a presentation about social media in public relations. Here are my thoughts about what he present.

There are many insightful points in the presentation. Firstly, understanding the situation of an organization is more important than using social media that are popular at the moment. Many organizations are using social media as a platform to communicate with the public. However, this tendency does not suggest that social media are always good for every organization. An organization should think about contents, frequency of posting, crisis management when something goes wrong in social media and all kinds of situations that it will confront when using social media at the very beginning.

Secondly, I strongly agree with "the big principle"--focus on relationships, not the technologies. Recently, an well-known Chinese English teacher Li Yang has accused of domestic violence. His wife posts pictures and micro-blogs through  Sina Weibo, a Chinese equivalent of Twitter (click here to see his wife's Weibo). Li Yang has  Weibo account as well (click here to see Li Yang's Weibo). However, facing tons of comments about the violence following his regular micro-blogs, he replies nothing and gives no comment about the accusation.

This is not merely a personal crises. As the founder of Li Yang Crazy English, his silence jeopardizes his company. This is an example of how relationship is not well managed when using social media. While social media offer great opportunities for the public to understand an organization or a person, they also allow the public spread negative information widely and fast.

Furthermore, personally, I agree with the statement "relational schema favors benefits of mutual/accurate exchanges of real self-experiences." My favorite GRE teacher Luo Yonghao is a public figure, the founder of Laoluo English School . His micro-blogs are quite different from many other well-known English teachers such as Li Yang and Yu Minhong.

Luo's blog is quite personal, with all the micro-blogs written by himself expressing his own thoughts about anything he finds interesting. He also reply others' comments time to time. Whereas Li and Yu's micro-blogs are always written with the style of chicken soup for the soul. They are less personal and not written by themselves. Few comments following get replied.

It is a common situation that people pay more attention on the CEO or founders of organizations rather than the organizations themselves. Because people are more willing to talk to a person than an organization especially people don't even know who is behalf on it. However, still, many people seem like micro-blogs that share no real self-experiences in China.

I'm not sure whether this situation differs from cultures. One phenomenon in Chinese social media is many people love the style of "chicken soup for the soul". Celebrities are followed and liked by thousands of fans, even though no comments are replied. Probably it is because celebrities are people and organizations are not. However, sometimes the boundary between webpages of a person and webpages of organizations is not quite clear.

In addition,  I do not totally agree with "shorter posts, higher frequency" strategy. This strategy can be very annoying if the frequency is too high. People do not want to see a full screen of tweets from only one organization. When I meet this situation, I will unfollow this organization's twitter in order to leave some space for tweets from others.

Finally, in respect of full truth, Internet users may want to know that, but sometimes, the full truth may be related to someone else' privacy or other rights. Therefore I think people need to fully consider consequences before telling full truth.



Overall, many principles are quite helpful to understand how to use social media. However, it must take great effort to follow these rules for long-term management.