Organization Goals

While reading David Meerman Scott's The New Rules of Marketing and PR, I came across an interesting quote:

That's exactly what we marketers and PR people do. We fill our lists with balls and lose sight of the goal. But you know what's even worse. Our coaches (the management teams at our companies) actually encourage us to focus on balls (like sales leads or press clips or Web site traffic statistics) instead of real organizational goals such as revenue. The VPs and CEOs of companies happily provide incentives based on leads for the marketing department and on clips for the PR team. And the agencies we contract with - advertising and PR agencies - also focus on the wrong measures (Scott, 2007, p. 115-116).

I think this is such an important point to make. Taking a campaigns course right now, I really understand the importance of process. Before this year, I didn't really understand the difference between goals and objectives. I also didn't take into consideration that objectives need to be measurable and realistic.

From my experience, practitioners make two common mistakes while establishing a campaign. First, practitioners either confuse strategies and tactics or focus on strategies and tactics before solidifying their goals and objectives. The other common mistake is that practitioners and marketers don't take into full consideration what needs to occur for the campaign's objectives to be successful.

As public relations practitioners, it is our duty to express the importance of establishing strong internal and external relationships and how critical that is to campaign and organizational success. From Scott's readings that's the message that I resinated with me. I think today, we focus too much on results and figures and not on the relationships that need to be formed in order for those results to occur.