RESEARCH IN PUBLIC RELATIONS

Research in Public Relations primarily involves four activities:

(i)                Media Monitoring

As the name suggests, this involves monitoring the media coverage given to your client. This involves maintaining media dockets, which are books containing cut-outs of articles in newspaper articles and magazines pertaining to your client. These cut-outs are analyzed and the researcher tries to find out the percentage of articles which are written about the client positively, and percentage which are written neutrally, and the percentage which are written negatively. 

Research can track whether the percentage of positive articles has been increasing with time or not. Similarly, news on television, radio and the internet can also be analyzed, to understand the image of the client that is being projected by the media.

(ii)             Communication Audit

A communication audit is a snapshot of a company/organization’s communication culture. While the company’s relations with the external public such as customers and shareholders are important, their relation with its internal public, which includes its employees, is equally important. The communication audit tries to evaluate the communication between the management (owners) and the employees of a company.

                                                                        

Things that a Communication Audit tries to understand:

Ø Whether the employees are being listened to

Ø Whether the management communicates its messages effectively

Ø Do the employees understand the organization’s strategic goals

Ø Which communication styles and vehicles are most effective in conveying messages

Methods of Communication Audit

A communication audit can be carried out through the following methods:

Ø Interviewing the company’s top executives

Ø Self-observation : Asking employees and the management to systematically observe the company’s and their own communication patterns

Ø Conducting a survey among the company’s employees

Ø Using focus groups of employees to discuss the company’s communication culture

                   (iii)Social Audit

A social audit tries to understand the state of an organization’s ‘intangible’ assets (assets not pertaining to money or profits and which cannot be counted).  These include customer loyalty, social image and goodwill among citizens. It tries to understand whether a company is actually living up to its social goals. If the organization is fulfilling its social goals, it will enjoy a good deal of goodwill in society.

Methods to conduct a social audit

-         Survey – Conduct a survey among the people in the community to ascertain the image of the organization.

- Book-keeping – is a common activity in social audit, where observations pertaining to the company’s image are constantly recorded in a book, and an annual report is prepared based on the contents prepared.

-         Case Study – One case of Corporate Social Responsibility (it may be a fund raiser, the building of a school, a program to promote awareness etc.) is studied in detail. The challenges, benefits and drawbacks of the program are studied.

-         Ethnography – In place of formal surveys, an informal method, where in a researcher blends into a community and uses various informal techniques such as conversations to understand an organization’s image is also acceptable.

                  (iv)Public Relations Audit

Public Relations Audit tries to understand whether the strategies adopted by a particular PR agency are effective or not.  Among other things, it tries to understand whether the target audience that the PR agency currently targets needs to be expanded or decreased. It also tries to understand whether the media and messages employed by the PR agency are optimum and need to be replaced.