Scanning

• 4.9. Answer the following questions:

1. Most departments are small, but the problems and assignments are many. Can a small department cope with the influence of issues? What can bring success?

2. The position of a spokesperson seems to be attractive and of prestige. Is it because this person is popular and respectable? What quality comes first? Or does everything depend on what organization the person speaks for? Or on the CEO?

3. Does a PR practitioner have a right to sort out the public or the audience which to communicate with? The act of communicating is half a job, is it not? Must PR specify the public in its programs?

4. Will it please you if you are assigned various types of activity by your PR boss? Yet may it be interesting?

5. Which branch is the most boring - financial relations, internal communications, or community relations? In this case you must be either finance-educated or psychology-trained, mustn’t you? Which would you select among the three?

6. You’re a linguist, also trained in history, literature and psychology. Would you like to practise public affairs? When will you feel fit for this function? Here to be a looker and a talker is far from enough. A public affairs practitioner is another politician. Is he/she?

7. A PR person working in the line of publicity and marketing communications is supposed to be economics-educated. If he or she is not, but assigned this task, what could help to deal with trading and manufacturing companies? Would the person rush to get economics-oriented education?

8. Is PR a rewarding and promising occupation? What prospects are in store for a young practitioner?

9. In practice, a PR specialist can’t be a nine-to-fiver. It is over-time work that determines his/her life style. Will he survive?

U nit 5

The Role of Research in Public Relations Text 5

(Life of human beings is research in the study of communications. But what communications – this side or the other side? The PR side or the outside? You speak your mind, then read the survey of a specialist.)

PR is only as good as the research that underlies it. Nothing creative can happen in the blind. PR, by definition, depends upon a repository of information in the minds and hearts of the target audience. Research defines what information may be missing and how existing information can be credibly reorganized. Research is of strategic importance. Research helps target information to strike responsive chords and to produce credible effects in its targeted audiences.

PR research can be broadly classified into two categories: factual research of public information and public opinion research. It is the study of the listener, watcher, or reader who makes up the “public:” the practitioner “relates” to.

Factual research can produce clues. Opinion research can produce hypotheses. When processed by the creative mind of a publicist, such clues and hypotheses lead to effective campaigns.

Reading may be as important a function to public relations as writing. Much of the practitioner’s world involves accumulating, evaluating, classifying, and synthesizing information and ideas.

To work at their best, public relations men and women must have easy access to such minimum reference tools as a good dictionary, a thesaurus, an atlas, at least one almanac, a compendium of governmental statistics, and a library at the end of the telephone.

Even the smallest public relations department or counseling firm needs a reference library and some method of culling useful information from newspapers and other periodicals. To keep current, practitioners must be exposed to the press and other daily media important to their organizations.

In any PR organization of more than a few people, a librarian quickly becomes a must, even if the person cannot devote full time to this task. Few busy PR practitioners have the time to read all the publications crossing their desks. Somebody has to scan many of them to clip out those items the professional ought to see and may want to route to others. This is an important form of PR research.

Once someone has been designated as reader and clipper, that person is usually asked to dig facts out of standard references for articles and speeches.

Few PR activities can be accomplished without some element of literature research. Most matters can rarely be dealt with without reference to authoritative sources outside the organization.

Larger corporations, trade associations, and PR firms tend to maintain libraries staffed with professionals. In some organizations, there is a substantial department to conduct research.

In a large department, researchers do much more than simply clip articles and monitor newswires. Research projects constantly flow into such a department and can range from requests for four reference-book information to quite elaborate sometimes difficult undertaking. Researchers are made a part of the PR team.

A small PR department or counseling firm that wants to establish a research capability with limited funds needs the minimum reference works previously mentioned.