Page 101 - DLIS102_LIBRARY_AND_ITS_USERS

Library and its Users

Notes brochures, newsletters, photographs with captions, copies of any media clips, and social mediums.
With the way that the industry has changed, many organizations may have a website with a link,
“Press Room” which would have online versions of these documents.
The art of public relations is more than simply press kits and social media. ‘PR’ is synonymous in
many people’s minds with “Press Release”, but the tools of the PR industry are actually many and
varied as well as sophisticated and subtle. They include media relations kits containing video and
audio news releases, referred to in the industry as VNRs and ANRs, which are often carefully
produced to emulate the signature style of a particular network news or current affairs program.
These products are then delivered to networks and run as regular program content, with or without
source acknowledgment, thereby saving the network tens of thousands of dollars in production
costs and delivering for the client of the PR firm an extremely effective and subtle method of managing
public opinion. Crisis and issues management campaigns often utilize VNRs and ANRs in their
efforts to manage information pertaining to threats to client reputation or profit. Astroturfing, or
creating front groups designed to appear as genuine grass roots movements, has proven to be a
very effective method of opinion management because people are less suspicious and critical of
“ordinary people voices their concerns” than they are of representatives of corporations or
governments. Buzz generation, or buzz marketing is another powerful and subversive form of PR
in which people are paid to create a “buzz” amongst their peers by exposing them to products or
opinions in a manner that appears not to be deliberate marketing or opinion management. Most PR
campaigns use many or all of these “communication” techniques and a great many more in creative
ways that deliver practical results in marketing or public opinion management.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. ....... says “public relations is concerned with or devoted to creating mutual understanding
among groups and institutions.
2. A press kit, also known as ...... .

14.2 Targeting Publics

A fundamental technique used in public relations is to identify the target audience, and to tailor
every message to appeal to that audience. It can be a general, nationwide or worldwide audience,
but it is more often a segment of a population. A good elevator pitch can help tailor messaging to
each target audience. Marketers often refer to socio-economically driven “demographics”, such as
“black males 18-49”. However, in public relations an audience is more fluid, being whoever someone
wants to reach. Or, in the new paradigm of value based networked social groups, the values based
social segment could be a trending audience. For example, recent political audiences seduce such
buzzword monikers as “soccer moms” and “NASCAR dads.”
An alternative and less flexible, more simplistic, approach uses stakeholders theory to identify people
who have a stake in a given institution or issue. All audiences are stakeholders (or presumptive
stakeholders), but not all stakeholders are audiences. For example, if a charity commissions a public
relations agency to create an advertising campaign to raise money to find a cure for a disease, the
charity and the people with the disease are stakeholders, but the audience is anyone who is likely to
donate money.

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