How Would You Ever Know?

Robert A. Kelly 2003.

How Would You Ever Know? Your important outside audiences behave in ways that stop you from reaching your objectives. Because you haven't paid much attention to their care and feeding, is it likely you'll know they are placing a hammer lock on your business in time to limit the damage?

With some luck, you might save the day, but why let matters fester until you have a bad situation like this on your hands? Especially when a proven sequence can help you alter the perceptions, and thus behaviors of your most important external audiences making the achievement of your business objectives much easier.

Take a quick look at what makes it all possible, the fundamental premise of public relations: People act on their own perception of the facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done.

When we create, change or reinforce that perception by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action those people whose behaviors affect the organization, the public relations mission is accomplished.

Now, put it into action this way. First, think about those groups of people whose behaviors can really affect your organization. The test for placing a key, external audience on your action list is this: does its behavior affect your business in any way. If the answer is yes, list it.

Let's take the target audience at the top of that list and work it over. Obviously, you need to know how members of that audience perceive you, and that requires that you interact with those members and ask a lot of questions.

This is the monitoring phase. How do they think of your organization, if at all? Do they have any problems with you? Do negative thoughts creep into the conversation? Are misconceptions, inaccurate beliefs, even rumors apparent? As unsettling as these data may be, the silver lining is the fact that they let you establish your public relations goal.

Straighten out that misconception, or correct the inaccurate belief, or knock down that rumor once and for all. Reaching your goal isn't going to happen if you don't have the right strategy.

You're fortunate that there are really only three strategy choices: create perceptions (opinion) where there isn't any, change existing opinion, or reinforce it. Now comes a real challenge - writing the message that will alter that perception.

It must make a compelling case, so think like your target audience thinks. Examine what is important to them. Use that line of thought to change a perception -- if you can. At least do what's natural to them and make a smaller adjustment that they will accept. You can take on this task in more than one step when the problem is big enough.

I can never lose with the Powerful strategies used for my online business.