The First Week - Part Two

Chapter 2 has brought to light how much the society matters to the organisation.

Organisations do not exist as individuals surviving by themselves on this planet with little need to respond to society and the community. This goes to show that the twenty-first century public relations has to take a critical role in proactively engage with society and the community. Public relations professionals of today have an ethical obligation to act responsibly because of their influence on society.

The expectations for these professionals are that they are to be timely, effective, and have creative programs who work hard to meet the requirements of project management and scheduling multiple PR activities while also acting ethically and responsibly. Talk about pressure.

"The most important stakeholder is society itself." (Stark Kruckeberg, 2003)

Talking about campaigns in my previous post, this is further discussed on chapter 2.

We are all part of an international communication network, the mass media. Talking about the anti-smoking campaigns that took part in Singapore, Australia and Canada, we are part of a wider network of public relations professionals managing a similar issue in many countries. Each of the campaigns reflected what was relevant to each country at the time of the launch. The aims of the PR campaign launches were similar as they intend to reduce smoking, but their goals and target groups were different.

This goes to show that different countries have different cultures and perspectives. To target different target markets and have different goals, it is important to understand about international – global perspectives.

“International is ‘a way of referring to communication activities that are performed in nations and multinational regions ‘suggests that international is ‘not the same as global’ as a global concept is broad and all encompassing and it includes myriad cultures and many different ethnic groups.” (Stephen Banks, 2000)

It is so that many multinational companies today that have spread through many regions, embracing many cultures find that they represent ‘multinational corporations at home’ and that they help ‘bridge the communication gap that inevitably exists between foreign operations and top management in the world headquarters.