Is Having an “Awareness” Goal a Cop-Out?

One of my students commented that “awareness” can seem like a weak campaign goal, particularly in contexts in which action is urgently needed. So what are the reasons for building awareness? Why stop there?

In public relations, a good campaign plan requires an evaluation component. Evaluation is based on a plan’s objectives. If an objective is to raise awareness, then evaluation of how successful we are is based on how much awareness we have raised.

This leads to three points:

1.We should not promise something we can’t deliver. When we over-promise and under-deliver, we make a good case that we are incompetent, public relations is ineffective, or both. This could harm our employment and our public relations budget.

In some cases, changing behavior is more than we can do. It’s much easier to raise awareness, and it’s a step in the right direction. How much we can inspire people to change what they’re doing is going to depend on the case. Having an awareness goal can be a cop-out when public relations practitioners are capable of inspiring action; the point is that we’re not always able to do this, so our goals and objectives must fit the situation.

2. People have the right to make their own choices. By making people aware of the facts, we have done our jobs in some cases. We are not in the business of coercing people to do something.

Health Scenario
If some people decide not to floss, that is their choice. It might be our job to raise awareness about the consequences of not flossing, but ultimately, people can make an informed choice to do things that are not good for them, and that is fine in some cases.

Product or Service Scenario
We might not be doing PR for the best product or service. There could be a competitor that is better than us. Ideally, we will be able to have a seat with the “dominant coalition” (the informal group of decision makers in an organization) and persuade them to take actions that will make our products and services the best. Public relations practitioners are “boundary spanners,” helping organizations adjust to what people say, but some organizations don’t listen. If your organization doesn’t listen, you’ll likely have the most success sticking to awareness goals and looking for an employer who listens to PR people. At the very least, if you can demonstrate that your audience is aware of your product despite low sales, then clearly the problem with sales is not awareness. This can lead to a productive conversation in which a company does listen to PR people to find out what it needs to do.

3. Awareness can be a reasonable first step before tackling a goal to change behavior. In some instances, changing awareness is a triumph, and it can be a critical initial achievement that sets up future campaigns to influence people’s behavior. According to the extended parallel processing model, successful health messages require response efficacy (the belief that a solution is effective) and self-efficacy (people’s beliefs that they are capable of implementing the proposed solution). So health campaigns should always carry a recommended behavior, but it might take repeated awareness campaigns before people actually start doing something differently, depending on the case.

Aspiring Professionals Instructed to Establish a Niche and to Be Careful With Online Activity

Suzi Steffen and I held an online panel titled “Extra! Extra! Tweet All About It” with professors and journalists on CoverItLive. Due to the number of participants (more than 200), the discussion was like “chat on steroids” as described by Kathy Gill of University of Washington. The drawback of using CoverItLive was that we couldn’t organize our discussion into separate threads, so keeping track of the path of each discussion topic was challenging.

I’ve taken excerpts from our transcript and organized it by threads. Below is an excerpt from one of the threads.

Tiffany Gallicano Q6: What is your advice for aspiring journalists with regard to Web 2.0?

Ryan Teague Beckwith (@ryanbeckwith):  BE CAREFUL.

Suzi Steffen:  Ryan, you’re scaring me.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  Advice to aspiring reporters: Don’t post photos of yourself on Facebook holding a Mickey’s or Boone’s or whatever.

kathy:  LOL! Ryan’s PSA re Facebook is spot on.

[Comment From Meghan Grall]
Ryan, good advice. Seems like it would be common sense… but apparently not.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  Twenty years from now, there will be naked photos of everyone on the Internet and we’ll all just yawn and move on. Until then, they will get you fired.

[Comment From Tyler] I think anyone that is “credible” in society should never put themselves in a situation for a picture of drugs or hard liquor.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  I think that reporters are now targets. You may not realize it, but people will search through your Facebook profile, your online life, etc., in order to “damage” your brand and discredit reporting that they disagree with. Even if you keep Facebook personal, you should post on there as though it were going out to every subscriber or viewer of your employer.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  Nothing is really protected on the Internet. Remember that.

Dora Valkanova:  Yes, it is interesting because both Twitter and Facebook seem deceptively private when you are alone with your laptop but really, the whole world is watching (reading).

Ryan Teague Beckwith: Everyone is a celebrity now, in a sense. We’re all just waiting to be discovered. I think a lot of people don’t realize that they’re just a news story away from having their online life scoured and devoured.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  It’s not about “personal” and “professional” per se. It’s about your representations of them. I don’t really post “personal” things online, though I do occasionally reference the fact that I’m eating lunch at a certain place or working on my house. But it’s not really my personal feelings.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  As a journalist, you have set yourself up as a person with more credibility than the average person. You give up the rights to certain things, such as expressing your ill-thought-out opinions, when you do that. It’s like being a monk.

Mark Hamilton (@gmarkham):  Q6: You need to participate to really grok it, even if only at low levels. It’s the understanding that matters.

[Comment From digiphile] Answer to Tiffany’s question – register your name or (more likely) preferred nom de plume on relevant social media platforms ASAP. Get a Google voice account. Learn how to use a Flip camera. And choose a second major, like comp sci, science or the like. Niche is where it’s at.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  I second digiphile.

[Comment From Greg Miller] Related to the advantages of a “second major”: once you develop an area of expertise, try tweeting exclusively about that subject for a while. Try to build a reputation.

Mathew Ingram:  At an event I was at recently, Andrew Keen (@ajkeen) said that journalists of all kinds should be thinking about how they can build their own “brand” in a specific area, and using social-media tools to do that — I think that’s a good point.   You need to know how to use these tools at the very least.

[Comment From LydiaBreakfast] Agreed Mathew, @ajkeen’s self branding advice is prescient. We all need our own brands in addition to the one we carry from the publication(s) we contribute to.

Carrie Brown-Smith (@Brizzyc):  Q6 Yes, be careful, but experiment with these new tools and don’t be afraid. Twitter is especially nice I think to help teach students a) what is news and b) how to write with brevity and wit.

[Comment From LydiaBreakfast] Journalism students would do well to establish relationships with seasoned editors and reporters from all over via SM. Not just for seeking work but to expand their professional community and find possible mentors.

[Comment From anblair2] I think Twitter has given a lot of young journalists the chance to meet new people. I never realized how many connections I could make.

Carrie Brown-Smith:  Good point by Amber anblair2. I have to say I wish that when I was in school I had the chance to learn from so many professionals and connect with them via Twitter!

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  More advice: Whenever you think of responding to an angry reader, write out what you would say, take a break, go get a cup of coffee, chat about the weather, come back and delete it. Then just answer the factual question or assertion they made and ignore the mean spirited attacks.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  Respond to them as though they had phrased it how you wished they had phrased it.

[Comment From Alicia] @Ryan Teague Beckwith – That’s good advice about responding to an angry reader. With new media technology it is often so easy to quickly respond to people that we don’t think things through clearly – which is one of the reasons there are so many posts at the end of news articles online that are simply rants.

Suzi Steffen:  Ryan, that is SUCH great advice.

Ryan Teague Beckwith:  Final words of advice to aspiring journalists: You are living in one of the most exciting times to be a young reporter in the history of journalism. Enjoy it.

Should Organizations Provide Interpersonal Training?

A repetitive finding in my research, from my dissertation about an advocacy organization’s volunteers to my current study of Millennial agency professionals, is that getting along with the people one works with or volunteers for is critical to one’s satisfaction with a work or volunteer experience.

I serve on the board of directors for the Cameron Siemers Foundation for Hope, an entirely voluntary non-profit. We give life grants of $5,000 for young adults with life-threatening illnesses to engage in a project that makes a difference in people’s lives. With our annual event around the corner, we’ve been in high gear.

What has been fundamental at keeping us together is that we’re all Landmark Forum graduates. This means that we have all been through extensive training in how to relate to each other, how to communicate when we’re upset with each other, and how to resolve the conflict and move forward. It makes an enormous difference because instead of having things build up as people continue to upset us, we handle things and protect our professional relationships.

Being confrontational is no walk in the park, but it’s much easier with training on how to do it, and it’s much easier because we all have the same expectations about how to handle a situation when someone makes us upset, what the person who is upset should communicate, and how the person who upset the other should respond. We rarely upset each other, but when we do (which is bound to happen within two years of closely working together), we have strong training in sorting things out, and it makes a world of difference.

What do you think about organizations providing interpersonal training?

Resources

Landmark Forum
(life skills)

Vanto Group
(affiliated with Landmark education, provides interpersonal training for organizations)

Cameron Siemers Foundation for Hope
(our organization’s information and a place to buy tickets to our event)

Facebook Event Page for the Cameron Siemers Foundation for Hope
(a place to RSVP for our event)

Facebook Fan Page for the Cameron Siemers Foundation for Hope
(please consider joining)

If you’ll be in the Southern California area, I hope you’ll join us for our event on Sept. 26 at 6:30 p.m.

Here is the pitch from our fan page and our invitation. Our theme this year is a night of magic and miracles:

Ladies and Gentlemen! Children of All Ages! It’s Spectacular…It’s Fantastic…It’s for Charity!

Join Cameron Siemers and guest hosts Courtney Cox and David Arquette for an evening of magic and miracles at the second annual fundraiser of the Cameron Siemers Foundation for Hope.

THE MAGIC
Be mystified and amazed by the wizardry of Magic Joe Reohm.

Thrill at the unforgettable spectacle that is the Zen Arts Performance Troupe.

Witness the wonder of Wisdom…Norton Wisdom and his luminous live paintings.

THE MIRACLES
Come face-to-face with pure inspiration when you hear from our Life Grant winners.

Look into the future with our founder Cameron Siemers as he reveals what’s next for the foundation.

Come one, come all for an evening of breathtaking performances, music, dancing, appetizers, a cash bar, raffle and silent auction. Contributions support young adults with life-threatening illnesses as they fulfill a dream, goal, or project that makes a difference in their lives and communities.

Academic Feature: How Does VNR Labeling Influence Effectiveness?

From time to time, I will highlight academic studies that I think are particularly interesting.

Tim Penning started a discussion on PR Open Mic about whether undergraduates should read academic public relations studies. Barbara Nixon, Gareth Thompson, and I expressed agreement that upper-level students should read academic journal articles. Here is a summary of an interesting study.

For this first academic feature, I am summarizing the findings from a study about the effects of labeling video news releases (i.e., “Video supplied by [organization name]“).

This study was conducted by

• Michelle Wood, University of Minnesota
• Michelle Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Lucy Atkinson, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Julie Lane, University of Wisconsin-Madison

and was published in the Journal of Public Relations Research.

Method

• 151 undergraduate students participated in exchange for receiving extra credit in their journalism and mass communication courses for participation.
• Nearly half of the participants planned to become public relations or advertising professionals, which suggests that they could be more favorable to VNR messaging.
• Students were assigned to one of four conditions:

1. reading about VNR practices and then watching a labeled VNR during a newscast
2. reading about VNR practices only
3. not reading about VNR practices and then watching a labeled VNR during a newscast
4. not reading about VNRs or watching a newscast with a VNR (the control group)

Participants then answered questions about

• the credibility of the newscast
• the credibility of the VNR story
• who the source was of the VNR story (e.g., the company, the news station)
• attitude toward the VNR message
• attitude toward the featured company

Findings (people who did not read about VNR practices first)

• Participants who did not read about VNR practices and then watched the labeled VNR story did not think the newscast or VNR message was less credible than the participants who viewed the unlabeled VNR.
• Participants who did not read about VNR practices and then watched the labeled VNR story did not have more negative attitudes toward the VNR message or the VNR company than the participants who viewed the unlabeled VNR.
• Labeling the source of VNR stories slightly improved people’s ablity to remember who the VNR company was.

This means that for people who have not read about VNR practices,

• labeling VNRs helps the VNR organization by slightly improving people’s ability to remember the organization.
• labeling VNRs does not hurt the credibility of the VNR sponsor or attitudes toward the VNR sponsor.
• labeling VNRs does not hurt the credibility of the newscast or attitudes toward the newscast.

Findings (people who read about VNR practices before watching the VNR)

• Participants who read an article about VNR practices and then watched a newscast with a VNR thought the VNR was less credible than participants who had not read an article about VNR practices.
• Participants who read an article about VNR practices and then watched a newscast with a VNR thought the newscast was less credible than participants who had not read an article about VNR practices.
• Labeling the VNR intensified the loss of credibility for participants who had read about VNR practices.
• However, participants who read an article about VNR practices and then watched a newscast with a VNR did not have more negative attitudes toward the VNR company or VNR message than participants who had not read an article about VNR practices and watched the newscast.

This means that for people who have read about VNR practices,

• a VNR message will not have a lot of credibility, especially if it is labeled.
• use of a VNR lowers the credibility of a newscast.
• a VNR will not necessarily hurt attitudes toward the sponsoring organization.

Guidelines to Which the Authors Refer

• Public Relations Society of America: Use of footage or VNRs provided by organizations other than the station or network should be labeled by the media outlet when aired.
• Radio-Television News Directors Association: Reporters should “clearly disclose the origin of information and label all material provided by outsiders.”
• Federal Communications Commission: News stations are only required to label VNRs when the subject matter is a contested issue of public importance, a political topic, or a topic for which stations receive payment for airing.

My Take

• Professional communicators are responsible for providing audiences with information that is needed to make an informed decision about the message. Thus, professional communicators should label VNRs.

Citation

Wood, M. L. M.,  Nelson, M. R., Atkinson, L., & Lane, J. B. (2008). Social utility theory: Guiding labeling of VNRs as ethical and effective public relations. Journal of Public Relations Research 20(2), 231-249. doi:10.1080/10627260801894405