Textbook Chapter 9

Reflections on Textbook Chapter Nine - Strategies To Proactively Manage Activity

This chapter is similar to that of the lecture that I have reflected upon - strategies as part of public relations practice. I learned how the various strategic steps (from research to evaluation) are introduced in fulfilling the three key concept of public relations - contested space, intentional representation, and intended meaning. I was also able to differentiate between the functionalist and constructionist approaches to public relations strategy.

What I like about this chapter is how the concepts could be related to any public relations campaign. This means that it is something that public relations officer got to take note of in ensuring the success of their management or campaign. In this chapter, I learnt that there are 9 steps in developing a proper strategy: research, analysis, goal setting, setting objectives, identifying public or audiences, developing strategies, devising and implementing tactics, monitoring, and evaluation. James (2009) has highlighted several examples to enable the readers to understand the application of such concepts and strategic methods. I personally feel that these concepts are useful for public relations to get an idea on the progress of their management plans. For example, conducting an internal research helps to save time by filtering out information that are deemed relevant to the campaign. Such an approach would give public relations practitioners an idea on what kind of external factors to research on.

However, I felt that there is a need for public relations practitioners to constantly revise their research progress before embarking on the next step. This is because there may be a tendency for them to commit a mistake that they are unaware of and by moving on to the subsequent steps, the likelihood of a campaign failure is high due to the lack of monitoring throughout the plan. In fact, it would be much easier to work from the previous step than to re-do the entire strategic steps which would be more time consuming and ineffective. What do you think?

References

Chia, J. and Synnott, G. (2009), An Introduction to Public Relations: From Theory to Practice, Strategies to Proactively Manage Activity, Oxford University Press, Australia, New Zealand.