Nine General Principles to Excellent PR Practice

Introduction

Every organization, no matter how big or small, in the final analysis, depends on its reputation for survival and success. Clients, suppliers, employees, investors, journalists and regulators can have a great impact. Everyone has an opinion about which organizations come in contact with - good or bad, right or wrong. This knowledge will guide their decisions as to whether they want to work, shop and support these organizations.

In today's competitive marketplace, reputation can be the biggest good of the company - that makes you stand out from the crowd and gives you a competitive edge. Effective PR can help manage reputation through communication and building good relationships with all stakeholders in the organization. (Seitel, 2007).

Public relations is more about the reputations and ethics; it implies that it is the outcome of what one says and do, it entails what is said about you and what others hold given you. Public relations is the discipline that treats reputation to gain understanding and support and influence opinion and behavior. And "the expected and the effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organization and its sustained public.

Another definition of Public Relations (PR) is the getting activities of practice together to manage information dissemination as well as distribution among the staff and organizations (such as a business organization, government agency or not-for-profit organization) and the public. PR may entail an individual or organization to getting the necessary exposure to their audience on issues of public interest as well as news that do not require the audience to pay directly. It, however, differs from advertising as a form of marketing communication. Public relations also entail the notion of creating coverage for customers for free, instead of advertising or marketing. Take, for instance; good public relations generate an article submitting a customer, rather than paying for the customer to be announced next article.

The primary role of public relations is to offer information to the public, employees, potential investors, partners, customers as well as other stakeholders, and eventually to encourage them to uphold a certain image of the organization, its products or its leaders. Public relations professionals usually work for public relations and marketing companies, companies and businesses, government, government agencies and public servants, such as non-profit organizations. Works installation to include public relations coordinator account, account manager, account supervisor and relationship manager with the media. (Phillips, 2006)

The purpose of this paper is to examine how perfect is the PR of LMM General Trading, doing an analysis of the nine general principles to excellent PR practice.

LMM General TradingLMM General Trading is a Dubai-based medical distributor. They work with a mission for positive impact on the market in UAE and abroad. They work with a focus on all their stakeholders, who can be customers, suppliers, employees or partners. They seek to reach the potential and to achieve the mission of all of them.

LMM General Trading is a distributor of imported products, matching the needs of their customers, and the clients of the UAE-based firms, increasing the productivity and enriching the lives of the citizens of United Arab Emirates.

LMM General Trading is working with different kind of products from exceptional partners, some of the most important partners they work with are Asanus, Grena, Prosan, Regulat, and X1R. LMM is working with these leading products from these partners to meet the needs of the customers. (The official site of LMM, Retrieved 2017)

The role of PR management

In the modern days, PR profession is viewed as sophisticated, and it is practiced by hundreds of thousands of people across the globe. In many cases, these professionals work for one organization, but others tend to prefer working for more than one organizations as well as many clients.

It is quite apparent that public relations professionals have a broad scope of fields and sectors to work in. They work for governmental agencies, large business firm, nonprofits organizations, learning institutions, health centers and hospitals, hotels, airports authorities just to mention but a few. It is worth noting that many of these professionals work in their local countries while others prefer to work elsewhere in the world far from home. Those who work away from home sometimes may have their reasons for doing so but quite often than not they indicate better pay as well as better opportunities.

In the recent times, many professionals have come to embrace the fact that the media is an important tool and people have comprehensive control over it. It also implies that the control for the media is rather much focused on its particular use in such professions and that the media does not necessarily control human behavior.

Moreover, there is a concern where the non-professional public relations and media establishing relevant impressions which are termed as images. These images create a lasting impact more than one could imagine. They are mostly utilized to generate and build a solid thought which consequently results in an organization. It is in this regard that public relations professionals are considered more probable to assist organizations as well as the public establish an appealing image of the entity, especially when laying strategies to sustain a great public image.

So to note, sophisticated public relations expertise have a duty to comprehend and implement the strategies to serving the public who are being served by the organization and also focus on serving the interest of the firm that uses the same.

Consequently, the comprehensive use of public relations services in the organizations has proven that PR is a fundamental tool for management. These organizations embrace the fact that public relations add value and morale to the organizations scope of work. It helps in the moderation of particular interests as well as the interests of the clients served by the same firm or those who have authority over operations of the company (Rubel, 2007).

Nine general principles of excellent PR practiceTo investigate the facets of an excellent public relation practice, it is fundamental to delve in the existent literature on the aspect of management excellence and also to ascertain its importance to the organization's needs and scope of practice. From the theory of organization, there is an element of the effectiveness of organizations goals attainment. This happens if the organization sets attainable goals that are within its scope of practice. Public relations professionals have discovered that there are many management matters that they can facilitate and also, in the long run, handle the crisis that occurs in communication channels and not necessarily as a monumental element of the general role of PR management.

The general activities for the normal public relations professionals are to carry out the standard programs, product advertisement as well as the media relations. They sometimes can engage in preparing advance to manage communication crisis which primarily puts emphasis on the logistics of communications in such circumstances of crises. This does not necessarily mean they focus on policy implementation that highlights how to handle the setbacks that are the cause of the issues at hand (Rhee, 2002).

The nine general principles that make one PR practice excellent are:

The PR is involved in strategic management

The PR has power/influence

The PR function is integrated

The PR is a separate management function

The PR department has a strategic comm. Manager

The PR department use the two-way symmetrical model to communicate with publics

The PR department has symmetrical internal communication

The PR department has professional and knowledge staff

The PR department has diversity

If some PR practice adhere to the mentioned general principles, the ultimate result is probably a great one for any organizations excellence.

ResearchIn order to analyze the excellence of the LMMs PR department, an interview with the employees was conducted. They were asked to answer five questions that will give me an overview of the PR department of the organization. These are the questions:

Does the PR department of your organization has communication strategy for communication with public?

Does the PR department have direct relation with senior department?

Does the PR department work on its own, or it is related with marketing or HR?

Which methods are used in communication with the public?

Who is part (the staff) of the PR department of your organization?

All these questions were answered, and with the further analysis of the answers, will try to give an answer to the question:

Do the PR department of LMM General Trading work with excellence?

AnalysisThe LMMs PR department do not have communication strategy for communication with the public, but they recognize the need for more structure behind their public interactions. A PR component is included in a proposed marketing plan on their table, but the internal will to adopt this as a coherent strategy and the ability for organizational alignment necessary for its execution is still not in line. Right now all the marketing communications they have done is ad-Hoc and emergent.

While their type of work activity and small company size doesn't justify having a dedicated specialized unit for PR, the incumbent of the role that includes PR responsibilities is a direct report to the senior most management at the company. In fact, PR is so central that their MD personally conceives and drives campaigns through the PR role holder. The PR role holder meets with the MD weekly and exchanges Slack messages daily with the MD.

Their marketing and PR activities are lumped into marketing communications (marcomms) which are entrusted to one, so there is an integrated view of these two fields given how existential marketing is to generate our sales lifeblood. While they have had past cases where PR was needed to notify newspapers of a fraudulent past employee who was terminated, they know that they need to also keep regarding PR as a strategic recruitment capability for attracting better talent to apply to their company for work.

Primarily LMM rely on below-the-line marketing collateral to communicate, for example, a Company Profile handout that can be given to prospective customers and journalists alike. Their website, LMM.ae, is another, which has temporary placeholder text about them while it undergoes a revamp. They'd be thrilled if they were invited onto a radio talk show; right now they are not yet perceived by the public as a thought leader to be asked on air so they would need to sponsor shows or ads. Traditional press releases they have never done or felt a need to given an apathy they have that nothing they have to say today could be so newsworthy it gets picked up for publication, but this can change. The big elephant in the room is social media. They are more of a B2B than a B2C company, so their target audiences aren't usually found on Facebook/Snapchat/Twitter/Insta. LMM use LinkedIn as a direct 1:1 marketing communications tool wherein they research prospective and initiate contact via InMails, and have done some LinkedIn text ads, though have not yet deepened this into regularly publishing LinkedIn content posts to the community and enhancing their profile to lure more followers. Because of their prominent MD's identification with royalty, the most efficient PR medium for them to date has been sending old fashioned official letters from them to the heads of other organiz...