Is this deja vu?

Whoa, another 2-chapter week! Luckily, one of this week's chapters has already been covered in a previous week. eek 5, to be exact. ;D I'll refer to it from time to time, but I'll be concentrating more on the other chapter, which is chapter 9: strategies to proactively manage activity

Firstly, what is 'strategy'? Strategies identify what needs to be done to tackle problems and how to go about doing them in a way that the goals are met. Strategies are key in the effective functioning of an organisation, and PR practitioners have to come up with strategies that put their organisations or clients at an advantage over their competitiors.

One way to come up with a comprehensive strategy is to play "devil's advocate". By anticipting problems and critiqueing one's own strategy, a PR practitioner is able to work out the issues that an exisiting plan may face under scrutiny of the public and/or competitors. In doing this, a PR practitioner is able to ward off potential problems before said problems can affect the organisation.

Melanie James provides some simples steps to follow to create, implement, and evaluate a comprehensive strategic public relations plan in the course text.

Step 1: Research (I believe I've emphasized the importance of research in the public relations sphere in week 5)

Step 2: Analysis (Again, as part of the post-research practice, I must repeat how important it is to analyse the data gathered from one's research. How else will one determine if there is an issue that has to be faced?)

Step 3: Goal setting (How do you determine the success of the organisation and the strategies employed if there are no goals to measure it by?)

Step 4: Setting objectives (Objectives provide a neat framework that ensures that the goals can be met.)

Step 5: Identifying publics or audiences (By being able to focus on specific groups of people, one is able to construct a strategy that caters to the individuals within that group.)

Step 6: Developing strategies (Strategies put one's organisation within the space that is being contested, and a good strategy will put the organisation ahead of the competition.)

Step 7: Devising and implementing tactics (Tactics indicate how the strategies are to be implemented. There are tactics to interact on a more personal basis with fewer people or small clusters of people, and there are tactics to interact with largr groups of people.)

Step 8: Monitoring (Monitoring keeps PR practitioners in the loop, where they are able to act to change things if things seem to be progressing towards a negative outcome.)

Step 9: Evaluation (Evaluation allows one to see if the tactics and strategies have been effective, and if the objectives and goals set have been met. Analysis of the evaluation can also yield results that can indicate how one might improve on future strategies and tactics, and if certain goals or objectives are not realistic or too simple.