Week 4 Reflections and Textbook Chapter 3

Lecture Response

As mentioned in the earlier entries, the job scope of a public relations officer may not be as easy as it sounds. It requires skills and proper expertise in ensuring that all things are managed and dealt with in the utmost professional manner. In today's lecture, I was taught about how one should learn to strategize his or her own tactics in making things work according to the company's objectives and goals.

The acronym SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, can be used as a tactic to evaluate a company's strategy for a particular campaign. It enables companies to identify various aspects of their strategies such as their competitors to work towards improving their competitiveness and in bringing about a competitive advantage to their campaign. I feel that this is a useful analysis in providing respective companies a framework for their strategy. However, adopting such analysis requires one to ensure that they have identified the correct competitors as well as established a specific and well-defined goal. In other words, companies need to have full knowledge about the industry that they are operating in, their position in the market, as well as other factors such as their target audience (which in this case, would be useful for their strategy and tactics).

A series of steps is also required for one to adopt to for a public relations plan - Research, Analysis, Goal Setting, Objectives, Developing Strategies, Devising and Implementing Tactics, Monitoring, and Evaluation. In my opinion, it is essential for one to establish a proper set of research questions and objectives to ensure that the results derived are useful to determine proper strategical plans. In addition, companies should try to expand their research by involving both internal and external research as discussed in the lecture to so that results derived are accurate and covered in all areas.

Therefore, I would highly recommend companies to adopt a crucial approach in their initial stages of planning to achieve an efficient plan and outcome towards their goals and objectives.

Reflections on Textbook Chapter Three - Theoretical Contexts

In this chapter, I was able to understand the various theoretical contexts that public relations practitioners apply to their daily work. I also realized the importance of key communication and organisational theories that have influenced public relations. By understanding the various theoretical concepts, public relations practitioners are able to contextualize and predict outcomes. At the same time, they are able to understand why certain strategies and tactics are not effectively implemented in campaigns. These theoretical concepts also enable public relations practitioners to understand the strengths and weaknesses of their strategies which could be an added advantage to organisations.

Among the various theories studied, I find systems theory an interesting and essential concept for public relations practitioners. Systems theory is subdivided into various components - cybernetics, requisite variety, and boundary spanning. This theory thus emphasizes on the importance of having an open system by interacting with the environment such as the audience or publics. By doing so, public relations practitioners are able to get feedbacks about the products or campaigns that will enable them to improve on.

I also like how the textbook explained a particular organization as a system that consists of several components. This means that an organization could only conduct a successful campaign if it has the full cooperation of the subsystems that it is made up of. As the saying goes, every member is important in the company. Needless to say, teamwork is something that many would emphasize on. It is therefore important that organizations ensure that their various components are well taken care of before they could successfully implement their operations.