Monday, September 17, 2007
week nine
'Sponsorship and event management'
Sponsorship can be separated into three types –
- Philanthropic,
- Corporate, and
- Marketing.
Philanthropic sponsorship is basically a contribution to a community-based cause, which can develop a positive view of a company in its publics.
Corporate sponsorship is when a company sponsors an event not linked to their business, such as a drinks brand sponsoring a sporting event, to gain high-profile exposure.
Marketing sponsorship is used to create increased revenue by giving cash and goods to, e, a high profile celebrity or person like a film star.
Ambush marketing is when a company tell stories about itself of being associated with an event when it has no official, legal or moral rights to do so. The most common paths for event ambushing are:
- Advertising in event publications
- Signage sales
- Sponsorship of an individual or sporting team.
The readings urge that sponsorship also provides potential sales for businesses through marketing their brand or product in ways that are highly visible to a target or mass group which may contain potential consumers.
For example, Toshiba shared these objectives and attempted to achieve this through exclusivity, image association, signing rights, trading and media coverage.
Event management is also a key part of a PR practitioner’s job, which covers a broad range of events. According to my reading, events management needs strong leadership, defined objectives and a strong event theme and image. Event management is shown to be a tactic, which requires the maximum attention to point detail and extensive planning of all things. There are numerous incentives for holding events including media coverage, product demonstration and revenue generation. To gain all these incentives practitioners must be creative enough to manage the events. In order to achieve the best media coverage a media release is generally issued that talk about the event and sponsorship. Media functions are stuffed within the main event and event handbooks are distributed to the media with the sponsor’s logo. Events involve the implementation of strong crisis and issues management practices and also a focus on risk management. It is helpful to predict failure and negative occurrences and pre-preparing a plan to solve these.
Even Event management needs extensive planning, evaluation and consideration in order to achieve the successful execution of an event. The range of case studies discussed in the readings also exhibits the point of PR’s creativeness in sponsorship and event management is a must for a hit show.
The potential for marketing tactics always hurdles up the sponsorship proposals. It is something a PR practitioner must be aware of as a successful ambush may diminish the effectiveness of the main sponsors.
Apart from Reading, the week’s presentation also provided me with some nice example about the reading. But I still remained confused till the end of the debate about the issue of fight. Both the sides discussed about the good and bad impacts of sponsorship. I want to raise one question, ‘if you don’t have a sponsorship at all, my dear negative side, then how would you be able to see your favourite sports matches?’ I still have no answer for this.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Friday, September 7, 2007
week eight
Media Writing
The readings for this week focused on media writing.
"Writing is one of the foundations of a successful public relations practitioner and the ability to communicate messages clearly and concisely is one of their differentiating skills." (Treadwell and Treadwell, 2004)
I think the key point for this week's readings is that it is very important to form healthy working relationships with journalists in order to have success in media relations. But the journalists are very doubtful when dealing with public relations practitioners because most of them believe there is always some ulterior motive to contacting them. Also the readings highlight that overall; journalists find writing by practitioners to be meagre and missing the proper aspects to make a story newsworthy. The individual preferences of journalists regarding the way they are contacted and what is sent to them ensures that journalists look out for your information rather than thinking of seeing it turn up in their inbox. Press releases or media releases were already discussed in the professional writing course, so the reading for the week became much clearer. Another point raised in the readings was the disparaging attitudes amongst journalists when it comes to public relations. Practitioners need to target specific media in a much similar way to what they do in targeting their external and internal stakeholders etc. A media person, who is a PR or a journalist, should always be working on improving my writing and should work towards building good relationships with each other.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
week seven
The term media relations is often used synonymously with publicity.It is understood under the following situations and areas by the spectators.
Media release are brief news items that will convey key messages regarding events, issues and so forth. They usually contain elements of who, what, when, where, why and how as well as newsworthy aspects.
Relationship between PR and media can be nurtured or enhanced by knowing what is newsworthy which can be determined by proximity, prominence and currency, human interest, the unusual and money.
Media outlets run to strict deadlines. This varies for different media.Newsroom must understand the role of newsroom personal and the hierarchical structure. I understood this topic in more detail as at the same time I was writing for a fortnightly cultural magazine, and the editor gave me a hard to achieve dead line. But I don't blame her, as even they have their own deadlines for editing and publishing stuff on paper and even on net.
All media styles have different requirements which the practitioner know. A practitioner always considers the mediums particular needs such as supply of information. The practitioner should define the audience they wish to target their message to. They should consider aspects that might concern their audience.
What makes news? I always ask myself the same question while i am studying journalism and PR. The reading elaborates that there are many news worthy values, which takes the decision of the worthiness of the news (which we have earlier studied in professional writing).
- Impact
- conflicts
- timeliness of news
- proximity
- prominence
- currency
- human interest
Media conference is also an important part of media relation as it allows a wide dissemination of a story, to give all media access at once, to allow journalists to ask follow-up questions. The media releases, news styles, Media kits, Fact sheets, articles etc. are just some tools in the hand of media to achieve their right relation with the public to solve their purpose.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Saturday, August 25, 2007
week six
'The Legal Environment'
Johnston & Zawawi also suggest that maintaining a good public image and reputation is pivotal to good PR practice, in some circumstances it may be better to avoid litigation and seek alternative means of dispute resolution. Under common law the tests for defamation exists where a publication exposed plaintiff to hatred/contempt/ridicule, lowered the plaintiff’s reputation or caused the plaintiff to be avoided/shunned. A company has to work on the legal path for:
- protecting their reputation in industry.
- protecting their creative ideas.
- the practitioners duty for care and respect of other's rights.
- work the purpose of creating global legal contracts in a global legal environment.
- using the technology in a wise way by putting legal directions in public context.
chapter 4 also talks about The Trade Practice Act 1974(Cth), which helps in:
- Promotional activities activities associated with the supply of goods and services to actual or potential customers have trading and commercial character.
- Intention is irrelevant
- Conduct that is merely likely to mislead or deceive in banned by the Act.
- Disclaimers and exemption clauses cannot usually excuse misleading and deceptive conduct.
- Silence may constitute misleading a deceptive conduct.
- Statements of opinion may mislead or deceive.
Working with legal input, public relation practitioners can move towards a systematic approach to dealing with the law. Organisations should move towards developing a legal strategy for their area specialty, setting benchmarks of best practice in potential problem areas, such as contract law, intellectual property, defamation, contempt and consumer protection law. Developing a legal strategy and compliance systems will not eliminate legal problems, but will go a long way towards minimising harm arising from the problems.
'Ethical Practice'
According to Johnston & Zawawi ethics refer to the personal values which underpin the behaviour and moral choices made by individual in response to a specific situation. Ethics are standards of integrity- in a nutshell ethics is about doing the right thing.
In a business, ethics is is about prioritising moral values for an organisation and ensuring its behaviours are aligned with those values. In a Public relation practice, ethical behaviour relates both to the practitioner and to organisation. The practitioners also need to serve public interest. He needs to ask 'will my decision benefit society, even if I hurt myself, my client, my employer or my profession?' Seib and Fitzpatrick (1995) talk about the five duties of public relations professionals as being to oneself, the client, the employer, the profession and society.
The potter boxidentifies ethics in situation, values, principles and loyalties. Three basic ethical doctrines (109). Deontology is the doctrine that ethics is duty-based and relies on moral obligation regardless of the consequences. This system depends on the morals and self-discipline of the individual, however, it will change from person to person depending on their cultural and traditional biases.
PR practice takes care of connection between both ethics and PR by upholding moral and ethical ideals. PR practitioners build a positive image and create a respected organisation throughout the many publics.
Though, the ethical dilemmas, at times become hard to crack the challenges. The challenges can be divided down into three aspects:-
- Interpersonal
- Organisational
- Stakeholder
Most ethical dilemmas come from social responsibility issues and from the relationship issues. These dilemmas usually the result of a poor relationship, inadequate corporate standards and conflicting obligations.
The purpose of PR is to build strong relationships with organisations and different publics to create a pleasant environment in which varying businesses, organisations etc can operate. This conducive environment can only be fully up and running with the help of law and ethics.
Johnston & Zawawi explains "As ethics is important to organisational excellence on the one hand and to public relations on the other, practitioners should be at the forefront of the movement for ethical organisational conduct."
A connection between both ethics and PR is cruical for a PR practice. By upholding moral and ethical ideals PR practitioners build a positive image and create a respected organisation throughout the many publics.The role of a PR practitioner does not remain till this extent. He needs to work as
- Advocate
- Counsellor
- Corporate Monitor, and
- Corporate Conscience
There is a common perception about the PR people that they are the ones who are out to benefit their organisations first and foremost, though no one realises that there are many legal and ethical codes and statutes in place that help govern such behaviour, the common stereotype is somewhat outdated as legal consequences are more common in our age of litigation, therefore making practitioners and their job more socially responsible.