Week 3

I think the two key points to remember from this week's readings were the importance of strategy and attaining the effectiveness of planning.

Strategy is important because it serves as the basis of planning. Knowing what to do in order to achieve set goals, much time and costs can be significantly saved.

Although plans may change according to circumstances that arise, there would be minimum problems posed when there is a solid strategy. However, we should never neglect the need to plan effectively in order to avoid confusion when monitoring the delegated tasks.

The reading made me think more about public relations theory/practice in that it stresses on the mechanism of management in this field. A PR manager has to know how the leading tasks affect the follow-up ones and which of those can be carried out concurrently in order to save time and energy. Mintzberg and colleagues proposed that a PR practitioner must always bear in mind the five Ps when coming up with a strategy (Mintzberg et al. 1998; Mintzberg et al. 2003). Out of the five Ps, I find that perspective is the most prominent because without understanding the corporation's views, the publics will in turn not understand the aims of the corporation and just what it can do for them. Without understanding the publics' opinions of their environment, the corporation cannot relate to their interests. Thus, the PR manager is unable to mesh both cogs, the corporation and the publics, together which makes planning unnecessarily more tedious having to go back and forth for approval.

Week 2

I think the two key points to remember from this week's readings were misconceptions of the public towards the field of public relations and the frameworks in the practice of public relations.

Public relations, on the surface, may seem like a simple field of work. This is because there is not much exposure on it to garner positive views from the publics. The misconceptions are also caused by the "what you see is what you get" saying.

The frameworks are not to be used too rigidly because the practice of public relations require a lot of adaptability to circumstances which may be predicted or unforeseen. After all, the main idea of public relations is to act as the bridge betwwen the corporation and the public.

The readings made me think more about public relations theory/practice in that the amount of effort behind a produced media release, planned event, or even a prepared speech is often unnoticed. It is also undermined by the confusing nature of a public relations manager with an advertiser, marketer, etcetera. Consideration of the corporation's interests must be prioritised at all times but the interests of the public must not be neglected either. The public acts as one of the driving forces of the corporation therefore, there is a need to satisfy them in order to attract them as loyal patrons, attain their trust, and so on.