week 4: Public Relation Ethics

Ethics is important from image-building in reputation to relationship management. Ethics in an organisation means that the “organisation must be responsible for their effects on the social and physical environments”, and not just serve their own interests. Ethical behaviour involves transparency, accuracy, loyalty, and responsibility.

One who wants to act ethically first has to have Willingness towards ethics. Second, ethics doesn’t appear naturally, it has to be brought up in everyday lives and develops through time. So, we have to keep learning constantly about ethics. After we have reached this level of ethical skill, we need to keep practicing them to improve.

Ethics is developed by the values that we believe in and may vary for some people. We measure whether one action is ethical or not by their outcomes.

Basic instructions to act ethically in an environment are, First we can do “research of stakeholder ethics expectations”. Second, plan the objectives of your PR activities according to the agreed ethical manners within the public. After that we can try communicating the plan/message by choosing the right tactics. Finally, we need to evaluate the overall performance to see the outcomes.

All in all, always try to bring the most ethical issue that you have passionate about and you can get experience by volunteering for causes that you believe in. – Fiona Cassidy.

If ourbusiness promotes ethical issues, it can also increase publicity of the products! Like Body Shop

we could do this too...

week 3 - Theoretical Contexts

The important point in development in public relations is the theory move from functional perspective to a co-creational one. A functional perspective sees publics and communications to achieve the organization’s goals, while co-creational sees publics as a friend in the making process to achieve the goals.

There are 4 steps of theories that can be applied in PR practice:
1. System theory. A system is defined as a set of things that influenced one another within an organization (Littlejohn 1999:41). In order to make the organization compete with the others, the organization needs to adapt to its environment. In an organization, system theory looks through the factors that may affect people inside the groups and how they related to each other. The effect of organization’s adaption is depends on whether the system is open or closed. Open system boasts openness from public feedback, such as from the customers and willing to interact with the environment. In contrast, closed system is system that does not interact with their environment.
Cybernetics, which part of system theory, explain how PR works to analyzed the feedback from the public or audience outside the organization to make changes in an organization, to stabilize and be more effective. If the feedback is not effective then the employees cannot handle the changes, it can leads to employees resign.
Requisite variety suggesting that organization will be more prepared to preserve the changes if it consists of employees with different point of view (Sison, 2009). The more the representative organization from different communities, the more chances they can easily adapt and survive the changes.
Boundary spanning is an area, which factors of organizations and their environment combined to relate the organization become more effectively in outside world.

2. Communication Theories talks about how people communicate. It arises from Shannon&Weaver-info source->transmitter->noise source->receiver->destination-model and also that, in fact, much of people’s behavior are influenced by the media messages they been exposed to. Some ways to communicate the message are: (1)persuade the public for organisation’s benefit with imbalanced effects, such as for organization’s benefit (Grunig&Hunt,1984)- Persuasion, (2)change people’s behavior by make them understand and believe the case (Attitude-behaviour change). (3)make sure the source is reliable and trustworthy.(4)make sure to have an opinion leader that can receive information from media to tell their associate,makes celebrities as spokespeople (5) using ‘fear appeals’ to captivate people attention.e.g: an ordinary man, who is actually a worker in a game company, wrote a blog abt how he got ‘psycho’ after playing this video game. This of course has gain people’s curiosity of the game and result in increase in the sales.

3. Public relations theory, known as The Excellence Theory, believes that public relations are unique management that helps the organization to interacts with social and political components in its environment (Grunig, Grunig and Dozier, 2006). Activities involved can help reduce the problems inside the organization with discussing it with the activist public. Public relation practices are categorized into four (by Grunig and Hunt). Firstly is press agentry which is a one-way communication and publicity dominated. Useful in promoting movies, etc that wants to gain publicity. Secondly, Public information model aims to provide truthful information to audience. Thirdly is the two-way asymmetric model which use scientific information to persuade audiences, but prone to be manipulative (Dozier & Grunig, 1995). Lastly, the Two-way symmetry model meant to establish mutual understanding between organizations and their publics. Most ideal. *both are using ‘two-way’ meaning material formed r using audience expectations as info.

4. Rhetorical and interpretive perspectives is a way people build up the meaning, and it shows what the public relations role are. For example understanding how people generate and respond to ideas.
Cultural theory explained the basic assumption of an organization. It reflects the proverb “Different fields have different insect, different ponds have different fish”, which means different country (and organizations) have different culture. Culture is used to define the organization identity, and make it easier for the employees to adapt with the environment they work in and in constructing strategies and tactics.
Critical perspectives can be concluded as focusing on the power and influence inherent in relationship established and managed by practitioners (Sison, 2009).

Week 2

Tracy Jones, in An Introduction to Public Relations by Joy Chia, notes that: “Public Relations are more than just writing media releases these days”, and she advices new public relation graduates to “work with people you admire and 'learn, learn, learn'”.

So what is Public relations? Public relations can be defined as a profession that cooperate with different publics through dialogues and discussions, networking and relationship management. They are needed to keep the reputation of a company while achieving the organization’s goals.
That's why they need to engage with all aspects of organisation as they developed ways to work with community, publics and audiences, and change their practice to meet the ever-changing societal needs & demands. Public relations skills are varied,such as: marketing, management, organization studies, communication, journalism, and media studies. From these major,then it will decide the work and position in organization.

The study in US explain that PR moved through five stages, which are:
1. Publicity
2. Communicating organisation’s effort.
3. Reacting and responding to deal with special interests and relate it to society
4. Planning and prevention are part of management role
5. Status of professionalism development, which international perspective become important.
These are similar with the stages that been carried out by public relations in Australian, New Zealand and Asian PR. However, PR is developing according to social, political, and economic factors. And to the developments of countries, is supported by ideologies. For example, in a communist country like China whereby the government detains much of PR practice, PR in China and other Asian countries write in different style with the US’ usually reports because in US there are more freedom to write than in Asian countries.

Communication Theories
Theory is important because it already written before what has been researched and “found to be need”. If Public relation practitioners know the theories well and apply correctly in their practices, it can be critical to the profession.
[For details about public relations theories, you can refer to week 3-Theoretical Contexts]--

PR from all sectors needs to have the right skills from openness, sensitivity towards change, to good understanding of research.Different companies need public relation to do different tasks, ranging from:
1. Internal communication management
2. External networking and relationship building.
3. Issue management and brand management
4. Research
5. Public affairs
6. Investors relations and financial public relations
7. Developing a new PR position for the organization

For me, it has been a brief introduction to PR world. It's about building relationship with communities, public and the organization itself in the right time with the right communication skills.

Moving on to Chapter 2...

From the reading: Trends and Developments, I found Global and local Trends are always changing. That’s why public relations need to practice and update their skills each day to carry out maximum outcomes for organisations and society. They had to have good reputation in the eyes of public and one way is to act ethically. Today public relations become more effective because of the age of multimedia. The multimedia environment needs to be monitored by public relations as it has changed the way people communicate (with Internet, blogs). Even though it has widened public relations' opportunities in doing their job, these global trends have leads to many other problems.

Another case for public relations is the tension between the local-global views. Like we all know today the Internet is getting more accessible everywhere. This situation is used by activist to fight with local governments. In this situation, public relations can be effective if they understand about the local issues and start working with local experts to understand the culture (Research) to catch attention.

Then, public started to distrust the business where public relations work bcos of the more common speculation found in PR practitioners. That’s why the usage of Code of Ethics is important because as a PR you have to be open and honest to public.

Public relations is more effective than marketers, because when Marketing only works to ‘sell’, PR works to educate public and involving public in communicating the message.

Interesting facts: research found 80% of PR students in Asia and Australia are females. Because men are appeal to higher salary and they are better positioned as manager, whereas women allocate technical position with lower salary. Women are also better in managing two-way symmetric communication and have tendency to be a better listener and communicators than men.