Chapter 9

Chapter 9 discusses the different tactics public relations practitioners use. This chapter was very thorough in covering the basics for the several different traditional publics. The examples they gave at the end of the chapter were particularly interesting to me. Even though both of these campaigns happened relevantly recently, I do not remember either. That said, I was not the most observant teenager. After reading about them, I am really surprised I did not hear about them at all.
I also never realized how many different ways there are to communicate with a particular public. I also never realized how difficult it is to get a news release published and am now glad that I took a journalism class to improve my writing skills. Reading about the different tactics reminds me that there are so many ways to reach a certain public, you can always find the right one.
The three types of channels are special events, controlled media, and uncontrolled media. Each of these channels are important to understand for good public relations tactics. The idea of "pseudoevent" is very interesting and I think that I agree with the book when they say that whether or not it's a "real" event or just a publicity stunt, if it makes the news, who cares?
In the book, the authors mention the PR firm Edelman when discussing social media news releases. I decided to go to this site to see what the difference was between these and traditional news releases. This site is pretty great because not only to they have several social media news releases on their site, they also have the traditional news release so comparing the two was easy. It's obvious to me now the difference. While the examples on this website did not contain any videos, they were obviously shorter, giving only the most important information of the news story.
As someone who wants to get into nonprofit organizations, I found the section on public service announcements, the only section that specifically mentioned nonprofits, pretty interesting. I decided to go onto the Ad Council website and see what it was all about. When reading about them, I came across some of their most famous slogans, some that I never realized they came up with like "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk." The amount of famous slogans they have coined is truly impressive as many of these (including the one above) have been reused in society and other ad campaigns countless times. While this organization focuses on just one aspect of public relations, it is still impressive.