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.