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.

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations

"The Internet has made public relations public again, after years of almost exclusive focus on media. Blogs, online news releases, and other forms of Web content let organizations communicate directly with buyers."

I thought this was an interesting point made my David Scott. I could not agree with Scott more. The media has been a focal point of the public relations practice for years. Since the advent of social media, organizations have been able to take a more direct approach toward communicate with their target publics. Though the media are phenomenal resources for public relations practitioners, this medium is not always controllable and can affect PR approach.

I think we're really going to see a drastic shift in where the public goes for credible information. I think the media could lose it's touch, when the public goes to blogs, organizational websites and resources and organizational social media accounts for news.

Scott is dead on when he talks about the importance of social media. These resources provide practitioners with an avenue to communicate directly with our public. We now have the opportunity to present the appropriate messages to develop mutually beneficial relationships with our publics.

Some question whether or not social media will die. To me, I just can't see it happening. Unless another resource surfaces that enables us to communicate with our public as quickly as we are, social media is here to stay.