chapter 9

Chapter nine is all about crisis management. To prevent a crisis from happening, or having a good response time to a certain crisis, every business whether it be a fortune 500 hundred or the mom and pop shop in small town needs to have good crisis management. Having good crisis management can keep your business thriving after said crisis and keep the company in good relations with the public and its clients. Crisis management is the the managing of outside influences on your company, no one can do that. It is the managing of response to the crisis. The practitioner needs to have a thorough understanding of three things,that one, the public and political environment in which the crisis occurs, two the culture and inner workings of the organization facing the crisis, and three, human nature. That is how will the persons and groups involved most likely react to the crisis itself, to attempts at alleviate it, and to various communications, events and activities. A crisis that has happened that we all know about is enron. Enron was lying to people about what they were doing with peoples money, and in turn Enron went bankrupt and lost a lot of people their jobs and their income. First of all, Enron could have prevented this whole scandal if they wouldn't have been sneaky about it in the first place. If they didn't even start lying to people about what they were doing, they wouldn't have to have had faced this crisis. Two, since they weren't being honest about what they were doing, their crisis management team probably had to work way more than if they would have been honest about it the whole time. I really don't know what their crisis management team could have done to ensure enron would still have a good reputation and would still be around, but since they didn't handle things well being to end, enron is no longer around as a company.

Chapter 10

Chapter ten talks all about standards, ethics, and values within the P.R. field. The very first sentence in the chapter is this, "Regulation of human conduct by standards rather than by brute force or basic biological drive is the definition of civilization." That if you are regulating human conduct by standards rather than by force, things will be more civilized. And that within that definition there are five factors when talking about regulation. Tradition, public opinion, law, morality, and ethics. These factors add up to the five standards for the regulation of human conduct. Big companies are just names on paper, and it is the people that run them. And that people do put their own conscience and moral judgement into their line of work. Depending on whoever is running things is going to determine what kind of moral your company will have. I think a case that one can look at and see that no ethical thought was put into what he was doing is the Bernie Madoff case. That he was stealing from people for many many years. His company was very successful, and he was already a very rich man, outside from his stealing from other people. Because of what he did, he is now in prison for the rest of his life, and from his thoughts and moral on the issue of stealing, he has cost people everything they have in their life. Companies themselves do not have moral or ethics. Its the people that are in charge that place their own moral and ethics into the company. And whatever you believe does come across in your work.

This chapter also talks about someone giving a gift to a company and if the company can accept it.In our society, gifts and favors are looked at as bribes to get better in with a person with authority. An example from my own life comes from whenever I played basketball in high school. We had a parent on the team that "donated" all new shoes to the varsity team. Well the next game his daughter all of a sudden was a started and played all the games for the rest of the season. That gift or "donation" was highly frowned upon because of the implications that it had.

Chapter Seven and chapter eight

Media Relations and Public Issue Campaigns and Debates.

In chapter seven its all about Media Relations. That the media can play a huge role in whatever it is you are dealing with. That the main power of the media is to make us aware. The media can either help make you or break you. There are a lot of strategies for the new media that we are facing. People want to be served, not sold, involved not told the news. Some of these strategies are building relationships face to face. Whenever a relationship is formed, people trust and will accept whatever you are trying to communicate. Make internal publics top priority. Please your employees first before pleasing the public; happy employees mean happy consumers. Consider and "under the radar" approach to bypass media. Go direct to key publics, and dont't make yourself, you as a reporter, overly visible. It may attract bad media. And expand research. Go into great research whenever you are dealing with cases and stories that will be in the public eye. Get the facts, all of them, and get them right. A case that is dealing with the media is the David Letterman sex scandal. David letterman was being accused of having affairs with many of his woman employees around his office. His accuser said that if he didn't pay him two million dollars, he would write a book about Lettermans affairs. Not only did Letterran come forward, he came right out during his show and admitted to everything. He used the media to disarm the man who was blackmailing him. Since Letterman took the public honest approach to the whole situation, people still trusted him. His reputation and show are still intact and doing well.

Chapter eight talks all about public issue campaings and debates. The handling of public issues makes evident the linnk between public relations and the idea of democracy. In this setting, an issue if a subject on which there are two or more strongly opposing arguments, emotional involvement with a large group of people and concern that the decision will have an impact on people's lives or the smooth functioning of society. Issues can be assigned into four categories; latent, emerging, hot, fallout. Each discribing what kind of issue is being brought to the table. One of the issues that is and has been in debate in the government and media is the issue of abortion. Many people are for and and many people are against it. Right now, abortion is legal in the United States. That woman can choose to do what they want as far as getting an abortion or not getting an abortion. This issue is definitely a "hot" issue. It is in full out debate right now, and I think will always be in debate.

chapter 6

Chapter 6 was all about consumer relations. It starts out saying that
public relations is concerned about internal relations and publics. It
also cares about noncustomer external publics and the enviroment in which
the organization operates. Savvy consumers make buying decisions based on
how companies run their busnesses according to a 1995 survey by public
relations firm Porter/Novelli. Five major buying habits were, 1. product
quality, 2. the companys method of handling consumer complaints, 3. the
way a company handles a crisis in which it is at fault, 4. challenges by a
government agency about product safety, and 5. accusation of illegal and
unethical trading process. Communication with consumers and the products
they are buying is such an important process of consumer relations.
Companies need to research and meet the needs of their consumers to ensure
a successful business. An example of this would be the dominos pizza
campaign. Dominos researched their company and if it was meeting the needs
of their consumers. The result was that they were not meeting the needs of
their consumers. So they made a campaign about how their pizza was
satisfying the consumers and made honesty their campaign. After they
remade their pizza receipe and came out with their campaign, their pizza
sales increased. Im not sure if this is because of the campaign or that
their pizza really was better. To bring it to a local level, the dominos
in Corpus has seen an increase in their sales. This is a perfect example
of consumer relations and how the company wants to meet the needs of their
consumers.

Chapter Five

Chapter Five-Investor Relations

Chapter five is all about investor relations. The body of investors is not
just the weathly anymore. More and more middle class wage earners are
looking to a more secure future. Since the stock market is such a topic of
debat these days, a public relations practitioner must be on top of all
the topics whenever dealing with investor relations.

Investor relations has a lot more red tape and demands that need to be
meet more so than say community relations. Investor relations usually
deals with a lot more money, the government, and Wall Street. I
interviewed Barry Gross, CEO of Gross Capital. He deals a lot with
investor relations and Wall Street. He is the voice between the companies
and their investors. There are three organizations that practitioners
represent, corporate, government, and non-profit.

In case 5-2 titled, "Bankruptcy: Communicating for Future Success," it
deals with the issue of public companies declaring bankruptcy. I have
always thought of declaring bankruptcy as a very negative move that a
company can do. But in this section, it says that a company that declares
bankruptcy can use that as an important tool for effectively operating an
enterprise. In the Harvard Industires case, a communication plan was set
in place in the event of the company filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A
strong emphasis was placed on answering questions quickly and effectively.
Getting all the answers everyone needed all at once, and not have to
re-tell their story over and over again. Harvard did announce Chapter 11
bankruptcy, but since they have had a plan the whole time, is will be
ready to re-establish its leadership role as a leading industrial
manufactor, and all the stakeholders will know about it. The key is
keeping up good communication between everyone that is involved within the
bankruptcy.

Chapter Four

Chapter Four- Community Relations.

This chapter in the book is all about community relations. In the very beginning of the chapter it says, " It is necessary for organizations to live by a community's ordinances and social mores."

In this chapter, it talks about that successful community relations are planned,organized, and systematized. That within community programs, there should be fivce considerations. Targeting, Participate or own, here versus there, "official" versus employee activitiies, reaching opinion leaders. All of these considerations are looked at to ensure that ones community can create and keep good PR with which ever organization it is in relation with.

One of the PR cases that the book talks about is the "Grassroots Efforts Save a Historic Piece of Land." This case was about the small town of Exter, New Hampshire wanting to perserve of piece of land that the historic Town House of Exter stood. It was there that New Hampshire declared it independence from Great Britian. The people of the city wanted to perserve and keep this piece of land in its natural state. But the taxpayers association did not want this to happen. How the community went about keeping this piece of land in the community was a very smart and good example of good PR between organizations and the community. For example, the community needed to get a broad specturm of well-respected opinion leaders in the community to support and be a part of the efforts to keep this piece of land there own. It works. The connections the community had with the big organizations helped to get the community what they wanted, their piece of land. The piece of land was turned into a nice park were the community could enjoy their history.

This chapter was a very good example of how keeping good relations with big businesses within the community can definitely play a key role in helping your community get what you want out of your community. With the support of a big organization, people can gettmore done within their community then they ever dreamed of.

Katie

Chapter Three

Chapter three is all about employee-employeer relations. I really liked and appreciated this chapter because I personally, have had really good employee-employer relationships and really bad employee-employeer relationships. I think that this chapter really hit the nail on the head as far as how employeers should view their employees and how they should be treated. At first whenever I first started reading this chapter, I didn't really know how public relations had anything to do with relationships within a company. Usually when I think of PR, its between two different companies, not relationships within one company.

The first PR case about employee-employeer relationships that the book focuses on is on page 31 titled, "Investing in Employees Pay Offs." It was a case of the Malden Mills fire that destroyed a lot of the company. Everyone's jobs were at risk. A similiar problem occured in 1980 when the Mills had to declare bankruptcy and laid off workers. After re-inventing itself, the Mills opened back up, and re-hired all of its employees that had been laid off due to the bankruptcy. This is a perfect example of great employee-employeer relationship. After the fire, all but a handfull of workers were hired back to work at the Mills. And, its employee-employeer relationship runs roughly at 95%. This is an example of wonderful relationships within a company.

This chapter gave many examples of different kind of relationships between employees and their employeers. It also goes to show that a company can have employees that are more than willing to want to work for them is they keep a good relationship with them.