Public Relations As a Management Tools

Public relations (PR) and use the effective tools as a communications process is not advertising in the sense that a product is being promoted. Rather, PR is a process of promoting and managing an individuals or an organization's image and reputation as perceived by the public. The management of the image is a matter of persuasion by an admittedly bias technique, but the bias should not represent any aspect of the individual or organization that is not true.

The effort of PR is intended to persuade the public using the media to establish and reinforce reputation, raise the public awareness of the subject, enhance perception of integrity, and motivate action. The most important factors in public relations in the accomplishment of these efforts is to be relevant to the public mindset while trying to persuade particular point of view and to do so with verifiable substance of information.

To succeed in these efforts, PR uses a number of tools to communicate an individuals or an organization's image and reputation to the public, but there are two primary requirements for successful PR: it must be relevant and it must be timely if it is going to reach the public and persuade individuals to action.

Relevance goes to where people live. It must affect and persuade individuals in a very local and personal way to motivate them to action. If your message attempts to persuade a public perception that they must invest in precious metals, but the individuals reached are poverty-stricken, the suggestion will be ignored as irrelevant to their condition. First, they must be persuaded in the tools to lift themselves out of poverty to a condition of disposable income, then persuade how best to use it.

Timeliness is necessary to encourage immediate action. A promotion to attend a local rally of a political candidate in six months might be a good general story, but it is neither timely nor relevant to the immediate concerns of the public.

There are eight basic tools of public relations:

Press release: an announcement of immediate, timely and relevant information released to the media to inform and educate about issues relevant to that community.

Background: historic information to educate the public about the individual or organization origin and purpose.

Special events: shows, conferences and conventions to communicate current product, policy or purpose.

Point of view (POV) articles: organizational perspective on issues affecting public opinion.

Speeches: personification of issues; relevance and timeliness personified individual to individual.

Photos and videos: a visual record of special events and speeches to communicate to a wider audience than when originally presented.

Print content: brochures, manuals and newsletters to put hard content in the hands of the public for confirmation and background on what is verbally and visually presented.

Internet content: websites, blogs and social media in an effort to combine all the above tools to reach the widest possible audience.

By effective use of these tools using relevant and timely content.