Giving a Successful Speech

Preparing your speech

There may be a time in your life when you are asked to give a speech in front of a large

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crowd of people. Whether it be at your best friend’s wedding, a work meeting, or a charitable event, there are important aspects that you should take into consideration. When preparing your speech, you should first talk to the person who initially asked you to speak, your best friend, boss, organization leader. Ask them what points they want you to touch on, ask about the audience, and a time limit that they have in mind. These are very important questions to ask before writing your speech because they allow you to really know what to write.

Why ask those questions?

Knowing if there are certain aspects they want you to touch on is important because you have to know what to talk about. At your best friend’s wedding, there might be things they don’t want you to touch on, at a work meeting, your boss will tell you what the meeting is regarding, and at a charity event they may have certain numbers they want you to talk about, such as the amount they raise last year and their goal for this year. Knowing the audience is also very important. If the audience is a very serious group, you don’t want to incorporate jokes into your speech that may offend their serious tone of the event, and if they are a fun group, you don’t want to ruin the light atmosphere with a very serious speech. Time limit is also important because if there are other speeches you don’t want  to drag on your speech for 10 minutes when they were planning on a minute long speech. Vise versa if they were planning for a 10 minute speech and you are completed in a minute.

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Time to talk

When the time has come to actually give your speech try not to panic. If you’re like me, you hate talking infront of people. Have your cards if needed, but I’ve found it helpful to not write out every word, just the bullet points. This way it keeps you on track, but you don’t focus on every word and panic if you miss a word. You know what to talk about, but it is not exact. Read the room while you’re up there, you can always skip or add points depending on the rooms reactions. Click here for more tips on what to do right before a speech to help relieve stress.

The Importance of Community Relations

What is community relations?

Community relations is defined here as “a firm’s interactions with the people constituting the environment it operates in and draws resources from, to foster mutual understanding, trust, and support”. It’s very important for a business to be involved with their community because it not only raises awareness that the business is there, but it also creates a bond with the community that will lead to higher sales and a better reputation for the business.

Picture borrowed from here.

How community relations benefits the business.

Let use two pizza places as an example on why community relations is beneficial. Pizza place one has good pizza, decent prices and has been in the community for a couple years, they don’t really get too involved with anything in the community. Pizza place two, much like Pizza place one, has good pizza, decent prices, and has been around for a couple years, but they are very involved in the community. They provide pizza for the local high school football games, do fundraisers to help many different community organizations, and the owners are always present at community get together’s handing out coupons and free samples. Pizza place two will have a stronger bond with their community, which in turn causes more people to purchase their pizza from that business. Seeing the business name all over school functions, community fundraisers, etc. will remind the community of the business, and getting a chance to get to know the owners personally will create loyalty to the pizza business. With Pizza place one, many in the community may even forget it’s there, because they are always reminded of Pizza place two.

How community relations benefits the community.

Not only does community relations benefit the business, but it also benefits the community. Like in the Pizza place example, the community is benefited better from Pizza place two because they are providing them pizza for football games, helping them raise money for good causes, and giving them coupons to help save money. They also benefit from feeling strong as a community and feeling as though the business and the community have their back because when the community comes together it always makes for a positive reinforcement.

Blog 4

The Newspaper

The History of the Newspaper

When first created, newspapers were the main way the majority of people found out what was going on in the world around them. Every Sunday they would read the paper to find out what was happening in their local community, the state, the USA, and even the world. It was their main connection to most things news related. Check out more on the history of newspapers here.

Today’s “Newspaper”

With the advances in technology, we now have all the news we could possibly want to know right at the touch of our finger, and within hours of the occurrence. Instead of having to wait until the Sunday newspaper is released, we can simply go on the Internet and discover details on big stores as the information is discovered. With social media, some news sites live tweet information as soon as they are given any new details. Click here to view WXYZ Detroit’s twitter for examples of their live tweets. Most newspapers today even offer their news articles online, for free, as soon as they are posted. See pictures below for an example of the Detroit Free Press website. Viewers can go on at any time and read their articles, free of charge. 

Can Businesses still Benefit from being in the Newspaper

Although the newspaper is a dying outlet for news, some businesses may still benefit from being in the local newspaper. This depends on many aspects of the business, one major factor being their target market. If their target market is a younger generation, then chances are they will not be beneficial from the advertisements. Many millennials have never actually purchased a newspaper before. If their target market is an elder generation, then they may somewhat benefit from the newspaper ads. I know many people who are included in an elder generation that still enjoys reading their Sunday newspaper while enjoying a morning cup of coffee. Each business individually needs to determine if a newspaper ad would still be beneficial to them, but should keep it mind that the newspaper may not be around forever.

PR & Lawyers

Love hate relationship

Although it may be a love hate relationship, both lawyers and public relation professionals (PR) want what’s best for the company. They both love that the other is trying to benefit their client (the business) but they hate that they don’t always see eye to eye on many issues. In her blog, Oliver Sweeney, an attorney, states that she went to a presentation where it was said that many PR believe that attorneys can “kill” their communication drafts – read her whole blog here. This is because a PR may have spent hours re-wording their news article to ensure the company maintains a positive reputation in the public’s eyes, but when the attorney sees it, they go strictly into legal mode and can deny the whole thing. They are looking at what the judge and the court room will read and consider, while the PR is solely focused on the opinion of the public. Makes sense right?

Why it’s  important to keep the peace

No matter how many drafts need to be prepared, or how frustrated the PR gets with the lawyer, or the lawyer with the PR, they should still do whatever they can to try to maintain a good relationship. They do both have the same end goal after all. Geri Ann S. Baptista wrote a blog stating why PR and lawyers should be friends, and how to create and maintain the friendship. Some important key tips were: trust, meeting often, having everything prepared before meeting, and letting each other in (for more tips view the full blog here). These are important because if the PR and lawyer work together as a team to ensure the end result is successful, the relationship will have less tension and both parties will have less stress. If both the PR and lawyer take the stress of working together off their shoulders, they have more time to focus on what is important, making sure the client is taken care of.

Public Opinion

Image from: http://www.rand.org/health/projects/heath-reform-opinion.html

What is a public opinion?

A public opinion is how the majority of people feel on an issue, problem, situation, etc., and acts as a guide to action they may take regarding the issue, problem, situation, etc. This means that a person may develop certain opinion/feeling on a public issue that may be formed based on information that is fed to them by the media, their peers, public relations, etc. An example of a current event that has created many public opinions is the election that just happened. Many people formed their opinions based on what the media, or their peers, where saying about the candidates. Whether that information was true or false, it still created an opinion that the public gained. The opinion may also be gained by the person doing their own research and their findings.

How to successfully change a public opinion?

There are many different factors that can influence the public opinion. The public relations, peers, and research are the main ways to influence a public opinion. But how do they do it successfully? As we saw in the election there are a couple different ways to attempt to influence the public opinion. One way is to focus on all the negative aspects of your opponent, or turn their positive aspects into negative ones. This creates a place of doubt in the public’s mind about your opponent and makes them second think your side. Another way is to really focus on your benefits. This allows the public to view your positive aspects and think about how they would benefit from it.

What happens after the public forms an opinion?

Once you influence the public to a positive view, you give them a call to action. With the example of the election, once the candidates influenced the public’s opinion on them, they told them to vote for them for president. Once the public has made up their opinion based on what they’ve heard, others thoughts, and research they preformed on their own, they will decide if they want to go through with the action. By determining if the public went through with the call to action or not is how you can truly measure if your efforts to change the public opinion was successful or not.

First blog post

Patrick Jackson’s Five-Step Behavioral Process of Public Relations

Who is Patrick Jackson?

Patrick Jackson, often known as the “public relations counselor’s counsel”, was one of the most well known and most respected PR experts in the 20th Century. He not only taught the public about his understanding and knowledge of public relations, but he also provided other experts with information from his teachings. Through the years, he visited 48 states and 7 Canadian provinces to speak at seminars.

Image from: patrickjacksonpr.com

Five-Step Behavioral Process of Public Relations

In Chapter 3 of our text by F. Seitel titled The Practice of Public Relations, Jackson’s Public Relations Model that focuses on behavioral change is discussed. This five-step process focuses on behavioral change. The steps are as followed:

1. Building awareness: Jackson uses this as his first step because it’s necessary for the information to be available as public knowledge.
2. Developing a latent readiness: This is when a person has knowledge of the issue and they begin to form an opinion on how their feel regarding said issue. Once their opinion is formed, they must be at the stage where they are ready to act on their opinion.
3. Triggering event:  This stage is when an event happens that pushes the people who formed strong opinions to actually act on those opinions. Jackson adds that this can be a planned or a natural, unplanned event.
4. Intermediate behaviors: These are small steps a person may take in regarding to their opinion on the issue. They are starting to take action, but are doing it slowly, such as learning more, doing free trials, etc. People are taking small steps towards the desired changed action.
5. Behavior change: This final step is after the people are taking their small steps, they are persuaded to make the desired behavior change, which then causes the PR to reach their ultimate goal.

My thoughts

I think Jackson definitely had a great process of how behavior change can be established by PR. An example that follows these steps are purchasing new technology, as smarter and better devices are introduced quite frequently.

Photo from: http://iphonesev.blogspot.com/2015/05/iphone-ad.html

Above is a great example of Apple creating awareness of a new iPhone. It not only creates awareness of the new phone, but also shows potential customers the features of the phone as well, which creates them to form an opinion of the phone (step 2). They form their opinion but may not jump right into spending the large amount of money on the phone, so they learn more about the phone, find the differences and figure out the benefits of the phone. They may explore a friends new iPhone to see if it is something they would really enjoy (step 3). Apple may then put out a discount on the new phone, you can get one for half off if you sign a contract with AT&T (step 4)! The potential client jumps on the deal and purchases the phone, becoming a new iPhone user (step 5) and meets the goal of the PR.