hey hey hey! Assignments lah!

Lecturer: Baby Anusha Nur bte Mohamed Thaheer

Subject : New Media Technologies for Public Relations (PRO622)

Phone   : 03-55211742 / 012-2879182

Email    : anusharin81@gmail.com

1. Group project (40%)

• Each group will consist of 4 members
• Your task is you need to establish a website for transnational organization.
• A made-up company. You can create a new company or you could use the existing ones and change the name and some of the information to make it to your made-up company.
• The introduction should start as ‘This Website is part of the requirements for PRO 622 course. Company A is a make-believe company and is used only for the purpose of this course.
• Then you can continue with the introduction of the company. You can include pictures, charts etc. you need to include you company’s name, logo, vision and mission, products and services offered, a bit of the staff backgrounds or an organization chart if you can.
• You also need to describe the company’s employee relations, community relations, financial relations, media relations activities
• Also equip the website with a feedback channel

·         Your second task is to create your CEO’S blog

• The blog needs to be linked to the company’s website
• The blog is by the CEO of the company

o   The first entry of the blog

§  Introduce yourself(CEO) and tell your publics why are you writing this blog

§  Create a topic to just get the blog going

o   The second entry

o   A customer has decided to use the blog as a grievance channel. He /she complained that your product/ services are faulty (think of a fault related to your product/ services) and that has resulted in her/his dissatisfaction. Reply back using the blog to this complaint.

o   The third entry

o   A journalist has decided to use the blog as a way to get inside information. He / she have asked you as to why your staff do not comprise of people from different ethnicity. Please provide an answer to that question.

o   The fourth entry

o   A non-profit organization’s representative decided to use the blog to garner your support for the cause they are advocating (please pick a cause). They might be asking for resources or donation. Please answer the question

o   The fifth entry

o   Create a videoblog to reflect a scenario that you feel words would just not do. You can provide a video-blog in connection to a crisis or issues, employee relations activities, a speech for the new fiscal year by the CEO etc. please create the video by yourselves.

o   The six entry

o   Your friends will get the chance to post a questions / statement that would require you to answer

o   The seven entry

o   Please describe your group members

o   Please upload a photo of all your group members

·         All the grievance, questions and statements made in entry 2 – 6, you need to get your group members to post before you can answer.

·         The websites and the blogs are due on the presentation day

·         All websites and blogs need to be linked to the PRO622 blog (your class blog)

·         The presentation day: 7^th APRIL 2011

 *this is also the individual assignment. yes another website! but the 2, 3 and 4 th entries are excluded. thanks! ^^

the TRUTH about LIFE

:)

Friendship is not always easily described. The Eskimos, they say they have a hundred different words for snow. Unfortunately, the English or even Malays language is not quite as innovative though it has vast opportunities to differentiate meaning.  

Love is one of those opportunities and so too is Friendship. :) Instead of different words however, we are stuck with just some simple adjectives. Close friend, bestfriend, childhood friend, intimate friend, trusted friend or beloved friend. But whether you use adjectives or different words, few could deny the nearly infinite meaning in such a simple word.  

Friends are special people. We can not pick our family and we're sorely limited in the number of them at any rate. Society and often our own conscience dictate we select a single mate. But our friends can be as diverse and infinite as the adjectives we choose.  

Our friends in a very real sense reflect the choices we make in life.

hanim: netpoets.com

Journal Review 4: Blogs Becoming a Growing Bazaar for PR

by: Nur Syairah Mohd Akir

They were started a few years ago by political observers who made their running commentaries available online, but have recently emerged as a potent media force for pr execs; blogs. These days, blogs go well beyond the political scene, with diverse sites offering all kind of news by the day, hour and minutes. Indeed, a recent survey by Perseus Development Corp. predicts the top blog-hosting services will be home top to 10 million blog by the ends of 2004.

Pr nowadays used new media as their tools to sells their brand such as blogs, pitching blogs to spread a story or spread awareness of their company. This has been prove by PR manager at security software firm secure computing, David Burt who spends about 5% of his time trying to get bloggers to mention his company. Besides that, other PR execs have been able to make inroads through pitching blogs. In the summer 2003, Brian D. Johnson, PR director for Centerbeam, a network management outsources, has sent a press release to Jeremy Wagstaff, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, who covers technologies in “Loose Wire” column on a journal website, nd also run a daily blog of the same name.

PR practitioner use blog as one of the medium is because blogs offer a new opportunity to craft that kind of pinpoint pitch. It help PR practitioner to understand deeply into journalist awareness. It will give opportunity and obligation to understand how that person operates and how to appeal to them. Moreover as stated by Matthew Bailey, Web marketing director for The Karcher Group. Pr Execs who spend time learning a certain blogger’s style can score more than one shot deal. They can take advantages by becoming a source of information for the blog author, rather than simply asking the author to report on them what they are doing.

In this journal also stated that, to win bloggers heart, do approach them nontraditional way, loose the pitch. Comment on their stories, and give them feedback, and then as they get to know you, and they come to respect the value of your feedback, then you start to become a resources. 

source: Pr News. Potomac: Mar 22, 2004. Vol. 60, Iss. 12; pg.1

Journal Review 3: Blog power: Examining the effects of practitioner blog use on power in public relations

by: Nurshayyidah Syuhadaa bt Che Harun ( 2008334269)

First, before the blog is considered as an effective tool of public relations, public relations practitioners use blogs to increase the strength of the organization, usually in a survey online and also examined the relationship between the powers of the blog for the organization. In this study, there are a few factors about the use of blogs among practitioners that will be discussed later. This study will show how there is a distinction based on the power of blogs; between users and non-users, practitioners and non practitioners and non-owner and the owner of a blog.

In this research, online survey was used to explore the relationship between blog use among practitioners of public relations by Porter and Salot power and also the use of web item. Blog credibility is measured by two questions which have been previously used to assess the credibility of the media. Public relations practitioners who took part as participants in this survey were identified through the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). Survey results in line with national figures use blogs in the U.S. during the research work as below:

 9.8% of the respondents reported writing and maintaining blogs while 45.5% of the bloggers indicated that thye discuss public relations on their blogs, 23.1% were blogging as a part of their job, and 76.9% bloggers maintained their personal blogs.

Results of this study show that the hypothesis (H1) that public relations practitioners often use the blog to see the power structure they are larger than public relations practitioner is rarely used blog is not supported. (H2) The findings also do not support that public relations practitioners who use blogs more often see a greater power in their organizations than practitioners who often use blogs for information is usually routine and study factors. Therefore, this study did not find any blog as a factor for interactive communication. H3 also not supported that public relations practitioners who use the blog to see greater prestige power in their organizations compared to public relations practitioners who use blogs less frequently. Owner-practitioners will use blogs more frequently than practitioners who are not owners. Owner-practitioners used blogs more than non-owners for the interactive blog communication factor and for the issues identification factor.

However, this study was to answer RQ as follows:

RQ1:              Will practitioners who write or maintain a blog have more power than those who do not blog?

                        This study found that public relations practitioners who write and maintain a blog with more prestige and expertise than a public relations practitioner who does not blog.

RQ2:               How does PR practitioners’ blog use relate to gender, age, professional tenure, race, education, and income?

                        This study found that practitioners who use blogs for routine information and research have been working in public relations significantly longer. They also found that practitioners who use blogs for issues identification are significantly older, and have been working significantly longer in public relations and Males were marginally significantly more likely than females practitioner to use blogs for issues identification.

RQ3:               Do public relations practitioners of different affiliations use blogs differently?

                      This study found that the public relations practitioners of different affiliation use blogs differently for routine information and researches.

RQ4               : Do public relations practitioners’ levels of blog use affect amount of time they spend analyzing issues?

                        This analysis found that public relations practitioners who use blogs for information routine and research, they believe that it affected by helping them to analyze the issues much more quickly rather than practitioners who did not.

RQ5                : Does public relations practitioners’ blog use for revenue generation relate to overall blog use?

                        This study indicated that practitioners who use blogs more for issues identification believed that blogs generated additional revenue for their clients.

RQ6                : Is there a relationship between blog use and the credibility public relations practitioners assign to blogs?

                        The study resulted that the practitioners who were high users of blogs for routine information and research, believed that blogs were more credible than practitioners who used blogs less for routine.

Conclusion

The data obtained showed that the blog is not used as standard public relations tool, but this study clearly shows the importance of blogs on public relations practitioner. This survey data shows the difference between public relations practitioners who use the blog or not to be seen from the use of blogs and blogging on them. Those who write and maintain blogs are those who see improvement in their prestige as a result of the blog.

Scholar: Lance V. Porter, Kaye D. Sweetser Trammell, Deborah Chung and Eunseong Kim.

source: kayesweetser

Journal Review 2: How Does the Creative Work in PR?

by: Fariez Abd Wahab

Being creative about PR means having some dynamic idea of what works and what doesn't. Either way, in PR, creativity needs to be applied wall to wall. Reaching out for new media is one creative action; evaluating the mix of print, broadcast, and online media is another. Creation and production of video news releases usually bring out creative PR agency resources, but what about targeting online streaming audio? IMG2, for example, has "The Webmaster Show," a nationally syndicated radio show that broadcasts to between four and five million people every week via streaming Internet radio. Or, how about a creative day picking through the current crop of e-zines or studying writers' beats?

This is an easy area in which to be uncreative. Sorting through email, fax, phone, and hand-delivered distribution options, we often make the knee-jerk choice. Here's a case where I blew it through uncreative, in-the-box thinking.You have to be on the receiving end to realize how pathetic press releases really are. The odds that any basic product release will fall into the editorial schedule of an editor or writer is about the same as those faced by a lowly spermatozoon swimming hostile waters north to the ovum.

Even knowing this, under severe time pressure, I shelled out more than $1,000 to distribute a release through one of the two major news distribution services. It bombed. Totally! All pickups of the story were a result of personal contact, direct emails, and heavy phone work. Sure, there are specific reasons to use news-release distribution services, but general distribution of a product release is not one of them. The writers, the readers, and the media have all changed. It just doesn't work like this anymore.

These are obvious areas for creative work: headlines, subheads, leads, and email subject lines. In fact, though, the dead hand of tradition rules here with a blue pencil. What you generally see are boring releases filled with gobbledygook, boilerplate, and quotes nobody this side of election debates would ever actually utter.

When it comes to production, there is a crying need for creative input. Should we use HTML or plain text, or should we email full PR releases or link to web pages? What about photos, color, themes, jokes, dark humor, or stark seriousness? At one time or another, all work.

Maybe the most important thing a PR group really does is help a company nail down its positioning: what this company is in the world and how its product stands apart from others in the field. The few words expressing the corporate essence are at the heart of strategic creativity.

Source : www.clickZ.com

Journal Review 1: How To Manage Media Relations When The “Journalist” Is A Blogger

by: Nur Syairah Mohd Akir

This journal is discussing about how can companies or its PR team manages, or even track, its reputation in a media world, when medium that PR used to use has shift from traditional media to the new media. In this journal, the researcher stated that nowadays, most of journalists have their own blogs. The crossover traditional to new media is bringing many old school journalists to the web. According to according to blog search engine Technorati more than 60 million blog exists, with an additional 175,000 new blog being created every day. Among bloggers, about34% identifies themselves as journalists, and 36% American read blogs regularly.

In this journal also, the researcher stated that there are few ways for companies or PR team to manage or to track back their reputation to journalists such as build bridges, damage control, and how to keep transparent between your companies and journalists.

Build bridges

Building relationship as well as monitoring your space, even if your client decides not to blog, said Hall in her blogosphere. As a PR we need to monitor the bloggers who blog about your client, so you can respond in timely manner to the chatter’s out there. It is important for us to monitor rumor as it can turn to wildfire very rapidly.

Bloggers sometimes have an ample time to installing a new operating system on an existing computer that can create software havoc, destroying any chance of giving a reviewer and accurate read on a new product. PR practitioners must understand the important to monitoring company blog to avoid rumors.

Damage control

As stated by researcher, it is quiet hard to avoid such unfortunate incidents, but if you are a good PR you can avoid or even limit it if you can spot it earlier. Bloggers are well informed, savvy and opportunistic they are passionate about their topics but still very willing to listen. They got their opinion but they are also open to listening to arguments, even sometimes they don’t agree but still PR can start a conversation.

Bloggers love to seek for information especially information that no one else know, an exclusive information. It is good to offer things like that to bloggers, especially ones with a big audience base. They are so viral so PR needs to build good relations with bloggers. It is worth it to have a good relation as they can help us to disseminate good info about company or a product.

While building those relationships, it’s worth nothing a few variations on journalists theme. For example, although many bloggers aren’t averse to phone calls once they know you, many prefer the initial contact to come via e-mail, or through their blog. In addition, sending an old school press release can be turn-off, instead of that, the researcher stated that, try sending them a link to the information, where they can find all the answer for themselves including some graphic. Hall also noted that if you approach a blogger in what is perceived to be inappropriate manner, it could hurt you.

Keep it transparent.

Transparency is the most critical part, as stated by researcher. PR should concern about what people would think. If you as a PR do something to approach bloggers in a wrong way such as fake blogs or flogs, it will hurt you back. If you offering products, be very open about how you are and your expectations are. Clearly communicating the process, so your work be much more easier.

After checking all the way, as a PR you need to has some basics of monitoring your space. Sometimes many companies and PR agencies wonder how to locate the blog that affect them or their client. To identify the blog in your space in meantime, the researcher advices you to start looking down your traditional media lists and go through Google to find journalist and which people from you media lists is blogging. Besides that, check blog rolls, which lists favorites blog read or referenced daily. Once you located a journalists or blogs that cover your area online, read the blog and see who is reading and what the reading is all about.

In this journal, the researcher stated that as a PR, we need to be very sensitive to the era of technologies nowadays or a new era of new media that effect relationship among PR teams, journalists and customers.

source: Proquest

Public Relations : Techniques of Public Relations

link shared by Khairunnisa Abd Aziz

- The Free Press -

To get the bad customs of a country to changed and new ones, though better, introduced, it is necessary first to remove the prejudices of the people, enlighten their ignorance, and convince them that their interests will be promoted by the proposed changes and this is not the work of a day.

Benjamin Franklin (1781)

and my friends, this is 'team work!' :)

We Write Because We Want To Be READ !

Heyy-oo friends !

Today, we are launching our first blog for Interpersonalists part5 students. Basically this is part of the assessment that our class need to do. Surely there's a pearl somewhere in this class that might somehow help someone or at least serve as a source of amusement during someone's superboring day. :p The main concern was that probably our marks, of course. heh heh. This indicates how we need to struggle with bunch of depression on our final year. We expect that this blog will take a more defined shape as we go along, as blogs often do. But for now, just consider it as a part of new-class blog and part everything-else blog. Hope you enjoy it !

*It is scary if someone is reading your blog like crazy. But, if you think about it ... isn't that kind of the point? :p

We write because we want to be READ

~enough for now~