1st Lesson

The roles that play by PR practitioners amazed me after I have attended the first lecture of Intro to PR theory and practices.

What I thought of PR practitioners at first was manage good social relationships in both the public and the company by using media communications. Surprisingly, PR practitioners do more than what we expect, they need to plan and arrange everything when there are activities or events. They handle all sorts of incident like crisis management, fund raising, sponsorship, press agentry and etc.

I think the key points to remember from this week readings are that public relations cover wide range of work as communication is vital nowadays. Besides that, public relations does not only involves in communication, but it has its own methods or theory to apply in practical

The theory is Grunig and Hunts’s four models which includes press agentry, public information, two-way asymmetric and two-way symmetric.

The theory of press agentry is to get attention and to pressure the public to accept the messages. For public information, they simply aim to broadcast the information to the public. The two-way asymmetrical theory aims to reach a target market where they provide the information about the products and services by organizing campaign and events .Lastly, the two-way symmetrical theory concentrates on public view and comments.

The readings made me think more about public relations theory and practice in that public relations and marketing can be quite similar in some ways. People might mix up if they don’t know the definition of public relations.The differences between public relations and marketing are public relations aim to reach the objectives by passing message with sevices unlike marketing aims to reach target sales by promoting.

This module makes me want to understand deeply about the theory and practice in PR. I am happy that I have found something that I am interested to study =)