“Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.” – John D. Rockefeller
Effective communication remains a powerful mantra that can cast effects beyond the obvious. In modern times, every brand, business, and industry has a duty to invest in communication mechanisms that transmit messages to recipients including suppliers, vendors, customers, stakeholders, observers, regulators, etc. Smooth communication based on facts is especially relevant in the domain of trade and commerce. In line with this, certain observers have gone on record to note, “Public Relations (PR) is one of the most effective ways to build on marketing strategies and create a solid online reputation. PR can build a company’s authority, help develop relationships with key people, manage corporate reputations. PR is (also) an area that can transform the future and profitability of a business.” Brands and businesses must work to develop contingency plans that generate public trust and empower companies to avoid PR blunders. Such plans, when designed through flowchart diagrams, offer clear visibility of communication goals and objectives; these plans also enable sponsors of a message to locate and frame the various moving parts that animate an effective public relations strategy.
A plethora of devices such as published articles on thought leadership, influencer connections, posts on social media handles, and networking strategies emerge as instruments of choice when organizations seek to broadcast coherent messages and avoid PR blunders. This stance ensures a constant flow of information based on facts that seek to project a valid and correct position in the public domain. The expanse of a flowchart can serve as the ideal bedrock that enables the design and propulsion of such strategy. Each constituent element can find a prominent position inside the flowchart and connects directly with the objective. Ancillary inputs comprise the periphery and allow a coherent mechanism to emerge from the diagram. This technique represents a critical part of corporate strategies that seek to avoid PR blunders and safeguard a corporate reputation.
The purely random remains a constant companion to the events that distinguish the flow of events in the public domain; this element, when adequately harnessed, allows organizations seek to craft a public image, and design and transmit focused messages. Such a stance can aid any organization to burnish and reinforce its public credentials and avoid PR blunders that could otherwise mar a fine position. A flowchart can help planners to visualize random events that bear potential to promote an image and offer context to, for instance, a product or service. In effect, the illustration offers organizations an opportunity to seize the proverbial moment and insert visuals and messages consistent with its standing in the public domain. Multiple instances of the random can form the nucleus around which specific PR strategies can coalesce, thereby enabling sponsors to avoid PR blunders.
The natural environment and its myriad aspects could emerge as a battlefield of contesting positions and attract heavy doses of public attention. Therefore, important players in such scenarios must avoid PR blunders and develop clear statements and information-rich narratives in a bid to reinforce their respective positions. For instance, nature lovers could clash with electric utility operators on the premise that high-voltage transmission lines pose a threat to avian species in localized areas. The situation could develop into an arena of claims and counter-claims, and therefore both sides must work to avoid PR blunders. The use of a flowchart can empower each party to develop cogent arguments that promote a certain course of action, thereby enriching the public discourse with intelligent ideas and strategies aimed at resolving conflict. The outcomes could include the discovery of middle ground that reduces the scope for conflict and helps preserve nature in its pristine image.
Digital technologies are a pervasive phenomenon in the modern world; however, these can modulated and deployed in service of the mission to avoid PR blunders. For instance, a set of informed, culturally diverse, prudent, and coherent strategies, when framed inside a flowchart illustration, demonstrate the outcome of efforts to frame a model code of conduct aimed at journalists. Corporate entities can endorse such an approach in a bid to limit repercussions and curtail potential damages that could follow a haphazard treatment of the press corps. The stages inside the illustration could include guidelines to frame email messages to professional media outlets, sending ideas for feature stories that promote an organization, generating scope for interviews with organizational members, the strict avoidance of spamming on social media platforms, informal exchanges with journalists on micro-blogging platforms, avoiding common pain points that tie to past interactions, etc. These inputs can assist in maneuvers that avoid PR blunders and steer organizations clear of the costs that attend damages.
Further to the above, brands and businesses must work to evolve intelligent policy designed specifically to avoid PR blunders in the domain of digital media. This assertion gains heft in light of the fact brands can attract millions of followers on social media platforms. For instance, a quick service restaurant brand must issue timely and courteous reactions to comments and concerns that issue from its customer base on digital media. In such a scenario, the brand must demonstrate its attitude to customer commitment through regular conversations with customers, an intent to create ongoing dialogue with fans and customers, a flexible approach to online criticism, reactions to customer comment based on facts packaged in civility, a customer-first approach to service, and design digital real estate to image-driven campaigns that spotlight new products. These elements of a digital public relations strategy, when etched inside a flowchart, help the business to reinforce its public image and to avoid PR blunders in the medium to long term.
Clear resonance between avowed business strategy and the internal workings of an organization represents a tested tactic that helps avoid PR blunders. For instance, a manufacturer of multiple lines of modern automobiles could adopt a conscious, inflexible, organization-wide stance to uphold probity in all corporate matters in the face of factors such as competitive pressures, market expectations, the imperative to adhere to regulatory diktats, the evolving norms of catering to different segments of customers, tectonic shifts in consumer preferences, the overarching profit motive, the interests of shareholders, among others. Such a stance can inform every level of corporate functioning and empower the organization to drive specific sets of strategy in pursuit of business objectives. However, variations could emerge and eventually drive certain levels of dissonance resulting in an emphatic breach in the stance to avoid PR blunders. Such commitments, scenarios, and possible variations – when developed inside a flowchart – allow said manufacturer to weigh the costs of strategy, thereby creating fresh grounds to reinforce the concept of (and unconditional adherence to) probity in modern enterprise.
The foregoing sketches and illustrations amply demonstrate the utility of deploying flowcharts in averting the consequences of public relations disasters. The inter-linked illustrations can project greater depth and meaning when designers input a range of scenarios mated to active measures that help avoid negative fallouts. However, PR remains an evolving domain that defies a formulaic approach. Brands and businesses must invest additional resources and greater effort in refining PR strategies and create outstanding instances of strategy. Such a stance empowers efforts to contain stray instances of the negative exposure in the contemporary public domain.
