Your Public Awaits! (…So What Do You Tell Them?): Why An Effective Public Relations Strategy Is More Important Now Than Ever Before!
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Here at The Raja Show, we pride ourselves on keeping things clean, when it comes to our language. (Raja IS a family man, after all!). We discuss socially acceptable topics on a family-friendly radio station. that serves as our flagship. We’ll happily leave the crass conversations for the other hosts on the other shows on the other stations up and down the dial.
But some things are just too big to ignore, and this Sunday, we will address, head-on, the four-letter “s”-word that has long been the bane of businesses, and the public, for decades:
SPIN
To an often-dismissive public, “spin” is the other word for what is more commonly known as “public relations”, and truth be told, public relations is an ESSENTIAL tool for businesses to effectively get the word out about their company. Whether it’s the launch of a new product or service, a company-wide rebrand, or providing first hand information to the media about a potential “breaking news” story pertaining to that company, for better or worse, an effective public relations platform is one of the first things a company should develop as it grows throughout its life cycle.
Ironically, the element of public relations tends to be ignored when things are going well in a company, but when things go awry, as in recent cases with Subway, BP, Chipotle, and others, including the landmark case for how effective public relations can literally SAVE a company, Tylenol, that’s when the public relations professional can sink or swim.
Publc relations challenges, taken on their own, can be quite burdensome to a company. But in recent years, with the rapidly increasing influence of social media on both the perception of a company among the public, and the company’s increased capabilities to spread the word in real time over a number of channels, the challenges of a public relations team have increased exponentially. It just takes one bad review or anecdote shared on Facebook or Twitter (or Yelp, or Instagram or….well, you get the point), one that lives in perpetuity, thanks to Google, and the best laid PR plans can go up in smoke.
Managing these challenges can be tough, as can be educating the next generation of aspiring public relations professionals about these pitfalls as they arise. While the tenets of “Public Relations 101″ still hold true, the onus is on colleges and professors to not only teach these principles to students, but to expose them to social media-driven PR landmines that they themselves don’t even know exist yet.
One of the fastest-rising collegiate public relations programs in the country can be found in Western Pennsylvania, on the campus of Waynesburg University. In only its sixth year, the program, under the leadership of Richard Krause, the Chair of the Waynesburg University Department of Communications, has already received considerable acclaim from the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA), acclaim that matches, if not surpasses, that of schools that are much larger than Waynesburg (enrollment: 1,400), and that have been in the PR “game” longer.
On this edition of The Raja Show, Richard Krause, along with Megan Bayles, one of the program’s standout students,who, herself, has garnered numerous individual accolades from the PRSSA, will join Raja to discuss the importance of effective public relations strategy to business. They will also discuss how public relations education is changing at a faster rate than ever before.
