At Google, areas of interest include their intensive sustainability commitment to promote eco-friendly buildings and energy efficiency, the company's approach to managing the Chinese government relationship and messaging, and the torrent of new applications they produce. In conclusion, the organizations I'd seek out to work for after graduation would have brands that were global and could use my skill set of globally-based coordination and intercultural collaboration while also being highly creative with a pace that made programs challenging yet attainable.
Upload a 300-500-word persuasive essay that describes what you understand to be the fundamental role of public relations in society. Illustrate your commentary by citing a recent example (good or bad) of strategic public relations at work from an area of the field that is of particular interest to you.
At its most strategic, public relations seeks to unify the messaging and communications across a company while ensuring accuracy, authenticity and transparency to the public and to its own employees. For companies to set the foundation of trust in all their relationships with stakeholders, public relations must be the coordinating catalyst. To accomplish this, strategic public relations must ensure all messaging and communications contribute to the corporate mission, values and strategic objectives. The most exceptional examples of strategic public relations have all of these elements synchronized with each other, each supporting the other, and the result is an exceptional clarity, precision and persuasion in their communications strategies. For public relations at the tactical or strategic level to be effective, there must be a high degree of collaboration between and within departments, awareness of the audiences' and customer segment needs, and knowledge of unmet needs and preferences as well. Studies also indicate the more strategic the public relations, the more critical the role of the CEO is in supporting, even championing their execution and fulfillment. When all of these factors are taken into account and when they are in coordination with each other, strategic public relations can earn what literally billions of dollars spent on advertising and promotion cannot, and that is the trust of customers and stakeholders.
The best performing companies who have strategic public relations...
They also have specific qualitative measures of performance the continually evaluate their efforts against.
An illustration of these concepts and practices of strategic public relations can be seen in Google's attempts to manage the Chinese government's requirements of censorship of their content. Clearly relying on common-law-based precedents from the American legal system would have left Google being shut out of the Chinese market completely. Paradoxically however Google had to consider just how much of their reputation as defined by their mission statement "do no evil" would be compromised by capitulating to the Chinese government (James, O'Rourke, Harris, Ogilvy, 2007). The issue of questionable practices that the Chinese government requests Google to make in exchange for granting them access to their country is shown in the following figure, which is taken from an analysis of this situation. What the following figure graphically illustrates is how dependent strategic public relations are on intensive collaboration across global departments, in this case with Google's government affairs and legal teams, the Chinese Government and the U.S. Department of Commerce. The intent of this essay is to not define the path for Google in this paradoxical situation; it is to show how critical strategic public relations are for the long-term growth of the company. The following graphic, Figure 1, indicates that there are a myriad of strategies and directions the company could take. Emerging from this dilemma with trust intact, the company's reputation untarnished and the Chinese market successfully entered all is dependent on the successful execution of strategic public relations strategies.
Figure 1:
The Challenging Strategic Public Relations Decisions for Google in China
Source: (Hamilton, Knouse, Hill, 2009)
References
Hamilton, J., Knouse, S., & Hill, V. (2009). Google in China: A Manager-Friendly Heuristic Model for Resolving Cross-Cultural Ethical Conflicts. Journal of Business Ethics, 86(2), 143-157.
James S. O'Rourke IV, Brynn Harris, & Allison Ogilvy. (2007). Google in China: government censorship and corporate reputation. The Journal of Business Strategy, 28(3), 12-22.
