Common Public Relations Techniques

Throughout history, there have been examples of successful public relations campaigns. The following strategies and tactics are common to all effective campaigns:

Public Relations Strategies

• News pegs
• Audience interest
• Positive appeals (love, patriotism, etc.)
• Negative appeals (fear, guilt, bigotry)
• Personalizing and humanizing issues
• Audience segmentation
• Activist organizations
• Organizing group
• Orchestration of messages
• Single-minded (often extremist) presentation of the central message
• Leaks to media
• Third-party endorsement & use of opinion leaders
• Sustained campaigns
• Slogans
• Songs
• Symbols
• Themes

Public Relations Tactics

• Planned and staged events
• News media
• Essays & commentaries
• Multimedia saturation
• Petitions
• Serial publications
• Stand-alone publications
• Speeches
• Meetings

Class Activity: Identify a contemporary social movement, and discuss how it uses these examples of typical public relations strategies and tactics.

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Modern History of Public Relations

Based on their research and theory, James Grunig and Todd Hunt presented four models of public relations corresponding to four periods in the modern development of public relations (Grunig & Hunt, 1984. Managing Public Relations. Holt/Rinehart/Winston). These models and eras are:

• Publicity (or Press Agentry model, in Grunig & Hunt's terms)
• Information (Public Information model)
• Advocacy (Asymmetrical model)
• Relationship (Symmetrical model)

Following is a historical development of contemporary public relations based on the Grunig and Hunt models.

Publicity Era (1800s)

• Focus: Dissemination and attention-getting
• Nature of Communication: One-way
• Research: Little
• Current Use: Entertainment, Sports, Marketing

In the 1820s,Amos Kendall, a Kentucky newspaper editor, became essentially the first presidential press secretary. He worked in support of Andrew Jackson during Jackson's election campaign and his term as president. Kendall conducted polls; wrote speeches, news releases, pamphlets; distributed reprints of other favorable articles reprints; and advised Jackson on image and strategy.

The opening of American West provided many opportunities for public relations messages to influence people living along the Atlantic coast to migrate west. Many of these messages were exaggerated, such as the legend of Daniel Boone, so important to the settlement of Kentucky, and later the stories of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wyatt Earp and Calamity Jane that induced settlers to the territories west of the Mississippi.

Social reform in the second half of the 19th century also relied heavily on classic public relations techniques. The movement to abolish slavery included strategies such as personalizing the issue, as Harriet Beecher Stowe(right) did so well with her novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. It also used the strategy of social activism, such as Harriet Tubman (left) who lead midnight escapes of slaves and then spoke about it in the North). The abolition movement involved other strategies: third-party endorsement, appeal to justice and moral authority, etc. It employed tactics such as publications, public speaking, rallies and so on.

The temperance movement to abolish liquor and the suffrage movement to gain women the right to vote were other successful social reform movements that employed similar public relations strategies and tactics.

The Bryan-McKinley presidential campaign of 1896 was the first to mount an all-out effort of public opinion. It used posters, pamphlets and news releases; it used public meetings and speeches at whistle-stop train visits throughout the country.