Nuts and bolts

This post reflects on reading for week 9.

This week's reading is "A typical public relations program", written by Candy Tymson. It way more interesting and concise than the entirety of our prescribed textbook (Public Relations Theory and Practice 3rd edition, by Jane Johnston and Clara Zawawi). Tymson also appears to have covered everything that we've read in the past 2 months or so. I have no idea why they didn't ask us to read this first to give a broad overview of PR.

With that little protest out of the way, I must say that Tymson gives a much more hands on look at what PR is all about. Tymson gives a very practical view of why management invests in PR, and indeed, why PR has often been talked of as being a management function. She then goes on to describe the basics of a PR program and impresses upon the fact that the PR practitioner is in fact involved in a multi-disciplinary role: he or she does market research, comes up with a broad (or narrow) strategy, plans the logistics, calculates finances, monitors responses and reactions from stakeholders and the goes through the whole process again to improve, improve and improve.

Many practical nuggets of wisdom are included, such as not lobbying parliament when it's Christmas, or not getting your CEO to tour factories nationwide when there is not enough time. Pretty sagely. I admire Tymson for being able to illustrate and bring PR alive in a way that the textbook has failed.