Week 4 Review & Week 6 Reading Guide

Hi, everyone. So uh thank you for your patience.

As I tried to get myself back on track in creating these review video,

review videos and as well as your reading guide

uh for the class. Um It was great to see some of you at the uh pr S A panel last Tuesday.

I was a stressful event for me, but um I, I think I managed to get it done.

I'm also looking forward to reading some of your annotations on

the uh Art Official Intelligence uh assigned readings for week five.

But for this video,

I wanted to sort of explain again or reiterate the importance of understanding

the term public relations where we study public

with situational theory of problem solving.

And we,

we are able to understand relations with the

relationship management that is assigned for week six.

So I'm gonna try to connect you back to why I assign these two sets of theory concepts.

Um

um And what the key purpose of that is

um to kind of spoil it here.

Um The key purpose of me assigning these two theories

concepts is to show you that pr as we um

expanded as an academic discipline as well as a professional discipline.

Uh We try to theorize the way that we can explain

the field. So, situational theory of problem solving

was a theory to explain publics, right?

That who becomes public now,

this is not the only theory uh that tries to understand and explain what public is.

Um There, I actually had a course,

a whole course that was focused on understanding what public opinion means,

uh who are the public and what are the opinions that they had?

Um when I was in graduate school and there was like a whole class,

just reading and studying about the different ways public is defined.

Um And we're not gonna do that,

but I did introduce you to apr

scholarship in understanding public relations theory.

And that's the situational theory of problem solving

the four elements according to Kim and Gruen

is that

people become public based on four

criteria, right?

If they recognize a problem, if they see a,

if they see there's not a whole lot that's constraining them from taking action,

if they also have a lot of involvement in the issue personally,

as well as if they have a referent criterion that somebody

that they compare to in terms of getting things done,

once they go through that they become motivated to

solve the problem and then they take actions,

communicative actions particularly

as a way to solve the problem, right? That's what the essence of Kim M grune

article is,

and that is a conceptual expansion from the situational theory of publics.

So what you need to understand here is that this is a theoretical explanation

in terms of who becomes not an audience, not a user, not a viewer, but a public, right?

And what are the actions that they can take?

Which in political science, they might talk about voting,

they might talk about mobilization and activism.

The key focus of the stops theory is that people will take communicative actions.

And these four c four criteria will motivate people to see it as a problem. And also

that will lead them to take different types of communicative action.

So that's kind of the focus here who becomes a public enough so

that they would take a communicative action on behalf of the organization,

as you have seen from the Starbucks case

that was selected for the discussion last week.

Some people took it upon themselves to say that I

am going to communicate about this in multiple different ways

so that I am speaking on behalf of the people that I care

about so that they can pressure Starbucks to take a certain action,

right?

That's the kind of group that in most cases

is when you're using situational theory of problem solving.

Those are the people who become advocate for your organization or your cause.

OK. So that's kind of the key focus here. Who are the people?

How are these people different from audience or viewers

and in the actions that they take,

we are mostly interested in the communicative action that they're taking.

Not voting, not mobilizing, not.

Um I don't know, putting yard signs in your, in your driveway.

No, not that like,

what are the communicative actions that they can take based on these four criteria?

That's the public behavior that we're interested in.

If you've read the Kim and Groen,

you will also see that there is a sort of a timeline in how it differs,

right? That the situational theory of problem solving shows that

there is a stage that there's an internal finding out about its stage,

an external finding out about its stage,

individual effectuating stage where individual starts

to find solutions about that problem

and the collective effectuating stage,

this is where through communicative action, again,

that through communication,

people will mobilize other people to join the cause to kind of join

in the situation or help advocate for the public that they're interested in.

OK. So again, a couple of things here, who are the public?

According to the situational theory of problem solving,

there are four criteria that drive people from

being a passive audience into being a public.

OK.

And that determines who becomes active and inactive,

the actions that they take.

Once we identify who the public is,

we think about the communicative actions that these people will take.

And that is of importance to public because we are focused on

spoiler here, the relationship management,

so that we don't want all the communicative messages

coming from the organization in one way direction.

We want to make sure that there is an equal pushback from the public

and that the organization will care about that, that pushback, right?

You see how this kind of connects with the excellence theory as a normative model.

That's kind of bridging um trickling down into these different theories. OK.

So identification of key public, what's the practical implication here?

I always try to suggest situational theory of problem solving to professionals

as a way to think about who they think they should communicate to

that we're not casting a wide net.

What are the ways that we can differentiate our message so that

different types of publics can take different types of communicative actions.

So if we have people in the low realm, right, the inactive public stage,

what are the messages that we can communicate to them so

that they can take communicative action on behalf of the organization?

Right?

So that's kind of the key focus that I try to emphasize

to my students that each message that especially if you're thinking about

the key public that you're trying to reach out to the people

who would take a communicative action on behalf of your organization.

What are the ways that we can differ the message depending on these four criteria?

What about the people with the low problem recognition?

What are the way that we can communicate to them.

What are the people who see this as a big problem?

But they feel like they have nothing they can do

to solve the problem. What are the ways that we can craft that message?

So this is all boiling down to the different ways

in which you can craft the message or deliver,

communicate the message to your key public so

that they can take different types of communication,

communicative action

on behalf of your organization. OK,

which leads me to the reading guide for week six. OK.

So like I said,

we're dissecting the term public relations and we

first look at what are the theoretical explanation.

What are the theoretical explanations that explain who

the public is and who becomes a public?

Now, we're gonna talk a little bit about what's the relations? This is the outcome.

And whenever I ask somebody, whenever somebody asks me to define public relations,

I always tell them it's in the name that

we're interested in reaching out to the public.

And we're more interested in developing a relationship with that key public.

So the

uh key concept here is obviously

the relationship.

You will read three articles this week where letting him is the first scholar

who initiated and tried to explicate the term relationship in the context of pr

and he borrows a lot of interpersonal communication

literature to explain what the organization and

public relationship needs to look like.

As if that the relationship that any organization can have

with their public can resemble an interpersonal communication relationship.

OK.

Coz

in holiday, you'll read a more recent sort of, uh,

scholarly job on the original concept of relationship

whereby he argues is this really possible?

Right?

Is this really similar to what we understand as an interpersonal relationship?

Can an organization and a public have

a quote unquote relationship that is measurable?

Ok. Because again,

uh I've, I didn't assign it as a annotation assignment,

but you will notice that I've attached a PDF file of Han and Groen

whereby they create

a guideline in terms of how professionals

can measure the strength of relationship.

OK.

And co

and holiday article is,

is that really possible between organization and

the public to have a satisfaction,

trust,

a communal relationship

um existing

when the purpose of an organization

versus a public is extremely different.

The last article you read is gonna be a more recent take on this relationship.

The O pr uh we use that uh acronym a lot to explain the measured way of relationship,

the organization, public relationship.

Um And that last article by Dagan

Moorehouse is going to take that concept of

O PR and apply it to interestingly enough,

a government setting, can a government as an organization

have a strong or weak type of O pr with its key public?

And in this case, if we're talking about the government,

we can likely expect that the key public will be the voters, right?

So that's kind of where things are going. This week that we

after week four,

we're trying to dissect and understand what exactly a relationship is.

And if you read or browse through the Hahn and Gruen

guideline, that was created as a white paper by PR S A,

you will note that these are the elements, the text that you see right here.

These are the ways in which that we will measure

the strength of relationship that any people will

have toward a certain type of organization.

I'm not gonna show you all the scale

items because this is usually measured via a survey

or as an outcome in an experiment

or I've seen students use this scale to uh evaluate a website, right?

Does this website

um foster control mutuality scale from 1 to 5?

Does this website elicit commitment from the organization scale 1 to 5?

Right?

And the reason why I have added that and Gruening

article is hint guys,

this concept of relationship is one of the most popular theoretical angle

from the students in 61 40 when they're writing their final paper.

OK?

Because exactly because that we have a paper that tells us how we

can measure the strength of relationship between organization and pe and a public,

right?

So that's another hint if you're looking at some of the organizations in

a way in which that they are trying to foster the relationship with

their key public situational theory of

problem solving and relationship management are going

to be a really cool theoretical tool for you guys to consider.

OK.

So I hope this helps if you have any questions. Please let me know.

Uh I will also be available during my office hours this week.

Um If you have any questions,

just please feel free to email me and we can talk through some of your

um ideas as well.

I am going to um send back a track changes, word document.

For those, for those of you who sent me their final paper ideas.

I'll try to get that done by the end of this week

so that you'll have to have time to start working on it.

Week 4 Review & Week 6 Reading Guide

Audio TranscriptAuto-generated