What’s the World Saying About Community Relations?

As my final assignment for my professional blog, I was assigned to research other blogs about my blog topic and report on my findings. Through my research, I have found that most knowledgable blogs on public relations and community relations topics, agree with what I have been mentioning in my own blog over the past few weeks. However, they do bring up some interesting points that I didn’t.

First off, I came across Paul Barsch’s blog titled “The Long-Term Value of Community Relations”. He states that community relations sets a company up for long-term success.  He also says that true community relations is when a company accepts its civic duty and acts for the well-being of its community. This turns into long-term benefits such as community support, loyalty, and goodwill. He also adds that community relations has nothing to do with a company making its quarterly numbers. I completely agree with Barsch’s statements and have even mentioned those long-term benefits myself. I found his point about meeting quarterly numbers refreshing. It shows that company’s with true community relations is selfless enough to actually look out for its community, not be money hungry, and reap the benefits in the long run rather than instant gratification. Companies need to understand this in order to be viewed as genuine to the community.

Next I came across Laurel Papworth’s blog titled “Public Relations Becomes Community Relations- Social Media”. She makes the point that public relations is all about creating multiple publics and that once you’ve created a relationship with the community, it’s tough for them to leave you for a competitor. I have also mentioned the importance of this point. Once you build a community for your company and establish a trusting, two-way relationship, they will ultimately become your customer as well. This is a part of branding. Once they become loyal to your company brand, they won’t want to go to a competing company who hasn’t spent the time and energy to build a relationship with them.

I hope that from reading my blog, you have come to an understanding of the importance of community relations, tactics in which to build a relationship with the community, and how other people and companies are already implementing these tactics. If you want to stay ahead of the game as a public relations professional, begin a community relationship quickly and retain long-term benefits!

How to Build the Relationship

Public relations is all about the relationships. This is true even when communicating with your company’s communities. It is essential to build an honest, mutually beneficial, two-way relationship between a company and it’s communities. As I’ve said before, the benefits of this relationship are endless. A few benefits include: the purchases and uses of your company’s products and or services, forgiveness and understanding in a crisis, and brand building.

Now that you understand this importance, you may be wondering, “How can I go about creating this relationship from scratch?”  Building a real trusting relationship can take time, but any company can do it. Here are my top three tactics used in creating a community-company relationship:

• I’d first recommend talking to the CEO or President about becoming apart of local organizations. For an example, becoming part of your local Chamber of Commerce. By joining your local Chamber of Commerce, your company will network with other local businesses, potential customers, and the community. Your company will be informed of any upcoming events within the community, of which your company may want to be apart of.
• Next, participate in local philanthropies. By becoming a doner, sponsor, or volunteer for local charities, your company will put out the image of being commuity oriented and a helper. Your company won’t come across as greedy or money hungry. On the charities’ websites, they will usually have a page with sponsors logos, which may even link to your company’s website. This will get your company recognized within the community.
• Last, get online! In today’s society, the internet and social networking are everywhere and your company must participate or get lost. As I’ve mentioned before, you not only have your local community, but also an online community, which consists of the local community and others. Building an online presence is the best way to create that two-way communication. Create a company Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Blog, LinkedIn, etc. Make your social networking interesting and of use to your communities. Give them information they want to know, provide fast news, create contests, and make giveaways. All are incentives for the community to follow your social media outlets and engage in communication with your company.

These are my favorite concepts in building relationships with communities, though there are many more. Beginning with these three tactics will be of great use and success for you.

Why is Community Relations Important?

In nearly every defintion of public relations, the word ‘community‘ or ‘publics‘ is included. The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) defines public relations at http://www.prsa.org/AboutPRSA/PublicRelationsDefined/ . PRSA states that “Public relations helps an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other.”

Public relations is all about the mutually beneficial relationship between an organization and its publics. In every organization in the world, the community is included as a public. Because of this, organizations and the public relations professionals who represent these companies, must identify, establish, and maintain a strong, trusting relationship with their communities.

Building a relationship with the community will create positive results in the reactions to your company’s promotions. The community will become a supporter and user of your company’s products and/or services. This relationship will also come in handy in times of a company crisis. If you’ve already established a valid, two-way, trusting relationship with your communities then they’re are more likely to be understanding and forgiving when your company makes mistakes (as all companies do from time to time).

A very good example of bad community relations causing a problem for a company is the Gulf Coast BP oil spill. If BP had taken the time to get to know their community that was affected (who they are, what they do for a living, and what they needed from BP as a result from this crisis) then they would have been more easily forgiven and recoved faster. Instead they used a spokesperson/CEO who was from another country and new nothing of the Gulf Coast community, who spoke of his own needs and opinions instead of the community. BP still is far from recovering.

The biggest community relations change that has occured over the years is within social media. Before, communication with the public tended to be a one way communication where the PR spokesperson gave promotional messages to the community after researching them. Now, we can talk to the communities of companies in real time, two way communication via Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, etc. Instead of just building your community based on geographics, you can now build online communities for your company and reach even more people, therefore gaining even more supporters.

You can visit http://mashable.com/2008/11/10/twitter-community/ to learn how to build online communities for your organizations. However I will go into more details on how to build community relations in a later blog.

Welcome!

Welcome! My name is Alyssa Hamilton. I am currently a student at the University of West Florida, Majoring in Public Relations and minoring in Marketing. This is my final semester of college and my main objective is to make it through the next two and a half months ALIVE!

My special interests in the field of Public Relations include community relations, entertainment and travel, and crisis communications.

I am writing this blog as an assignment in one of my final Public Relations classes, Current Issues and Trends. When my instructor, Mrs. Perrigo, asked my fellow collegues and I to pick a topic relevant to Public Relations that had great meaning to us, the first thing that came to my mind was the community.

I decided to write my blog about the importance of community relations in the Public Relations profession. Community relations is vital to each and every organization in the world, and no organization could survive for long without this important factor of Public Relations. This topic first became prevelant to me last semester while interning in a health care marketing department because we ran programs that specialized in community involvement.

Therefore, over the course of the next five weeks I will be going into detail of the importance of community relations and the many different ways you can learn about community relations and the endless amounts of tactics you can use as a Public Relations professional to build involvement and a two way trust between your company and its communities.