We’ve started a series profiling the amazing practitioners we have on our PR discipline advisory committee here at USQ.  The discipline advisory committee identifies PR trends and guides us on what to teach.

Heather Smith is one of our local practitioner members and a Golden Target Award winner (PRIA). Heather is a skilled and trusted public relations practitioner with 15 years experience working with a variety of organisations.

“My favourite type of work is managing creative communication projects from concept to completion. Currently, I am producing a children’s story book for a client to help raise awareness about people with a disability. I involved 16 school students to help write and illustrate the hard-cover book that will be launched during National Disability Action Week next month. I’ve also recently achieved a government grant on behalf of a client to implement a public awareness campaign that will focus on senior citizens in our community.

I enjoy working as a consultant in my own business because I can choose and ultimately design the types of projects I work on. I also enjoy the autonomy and freedom of being self-employed despite the long hours, hard work and income changeability.

Working in public relations is a privilege. People trust you to do the best you can by their business or brand. The tools we have available are constantly changing. It is amazing to reflect on how I ‘did PR’ five or 10 years ago in relation to how and why I do things today. Technology, culture and trends are always evolving and your practice needs to reflect that too.

I joined the Advisory Committee because I wanted to give back to USQ and the public relations team. Both have played an important role in my development as a practitioner. I believe it is important and necessary to contribute to the institutions who are producing the next generation of public relations professionals.”

Understanding communication and how people process messages is any public relations practitioner’s job – but Dr Chris Kossen has taken this understanding to another level with a new book on just that in Communicating for Success, a book he wrote with co-authors Eleanor Kiernan (Senior Lecturer USQ)  and Professor Jill Lawrence (USQ), published in January 2018.

“In this book we aim to help everyone understand what effect communication has on every aspect of our lives,” Chris says.

“We can think of communication as anything that involves a transaction of meaning as a result of messages being sent and received between people. These messages include both intentional and unintentional messages, for example, your yawn at the breakfast table may be unintentional, but it communicates a message, most probably that you are tired.”

Dr Chris Kossen teaches first, second and third year public relations and organisational communication at USQ.

“For public relations students, understanding all the aspects of communication that affect behaviour is critical for them to be successful in their field, and my job teaching PR students was one of the real drivers for me to write this book with my USQ Colleagues.

“We’ve all had the experience of saying or doing something and then being surprised to find that someone else interprets what we have said or done in a way that we never intended. The importance of managing risk in communication holds particularly true today in our world of social media.

“Communication is a complex process with many opportunities for mistakes and misunderstandings to occur, so we hope we can help students, and anyone else interested in communication, avoid and manage these problems.”

“The more effectively we communicate the better we can are able to function across a wide range of areas critical to success.  This includes our ability to manage relationships, to coordinate people, achieve goals and advance one’s career including university studies.”

Dr Chris Kossen is a Senior Lecturer in Public Relations at USQ.  He is currently conducting research into the experiences of backpackers in the casual horticultural labour market in Australia.

Catching employers’ attention and getting a job

RSVP by Monday: barbara.ryan@unisq.edu.au

Featuring:

Ms Yasmine Gray, Principal, Red Agency

Mr Mike Thomason, Career Development Practitioner, USQ

Ms Rebecca Boddington, Senior Career Development Officer, USQ

Date:       Wednesday 28 June 2017

Time:       1pm – 2pm

Location:   Toowoomba campus, G314A and Zoom (Zoom link: https://usq.zoom.us/j/952398731)

RSVP:      Monday June 26 2017 | barbara.ryan@unisq.edu.au  |  07 4631 1042

Yasmine Gray is Principal of Red Agency in Brisbane – Red Agency is Australia’s most awarded PR agency, and is currently PR Week Asia, CommsCon and PRIA Agency of the Year. Yasmine will tell you what employers look for in an intern, and what gets an intern a job with a firm.

Mike Thomason is an experienced career development adviser with special insights into how LinkedIn can not only get you in front of potential employers, but alert you to job opportunities as soon as they come up.  Clever use of LinkedIn can also provide constant professional development that is critical to your progress in the field of PR.

Rebecca Boddington is senior career development officer at USQ who has extensive experience in human resources and graduate recruitment.  Rebecca will discuss what can give you an edge over other PR graduates and win you the interview.

The session will be recorded and posted on the Public Relations @ USQ Facebook page.

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Peter Lazar, author of ‘So you want to be in PR?’

Research at University of Southern Queensland a few years ago showed that only about 11% of our PR students had heard of the profession by the time they reached Year 12.

Knowledge of the profession and how it works is still abysmally low.

That’s why a new book by Australian PR pioneer Peter Lazar should be on the shelves of every career guidance counselor and PR undergraduate student.

So you want to be in PR? is a series of short, easy to read anecdotes of Peter’s experiences in the industry, from the early 1960s to 2015.

The range of case studies – 46 are presented here – give a comprehensive picture of what a job in PR would involve.  Just reading a few of them could give enough information for career decisions.

It gives terrific insight into the activities involved in good PR: creativity, a strong sense of what is right, detailed organizational skills and clever execution.

For instance, can you imagine using a giant dressmaker’s tape to measure up an elephant for some gargantuan cotton underpants?  Or the media coverage that would generate for the client, the Australian cotton industry?

What about convincing a traditionally reclusive client like the Freemasons to get into the limelight and be open about the organisation to successfully head off a storm created by Dan Brown’s book, The Lost Symbol?

And the logistics of launching a new sheep drench in the Sydney CBD complete with sheep, sheep dogs and very Australian shepherds?

Or, my favourites, the cases that describe him counseling organisations and industries to quit riding roughshod over stakeholders; to change their behaviour to silence media criticism rather than engage the firm to ‘spin’ them out of trouble.

Peter’s informal style and his obvious love for his job shows how rewarding and fun this industry is in ways that formal academic case studies and award entries do not.

He gets sidetracked sometimes, and there are a few annoying in-joke moments, but if you are in PR and struggle to explain your job to family, friends and school-leaver mates who have asked you about it – buy them or lend them this book.

Funny, insightful, and heartening for those of us in PR who believe in the social value of our job.

Barbara Ryan is a senior lecturer in public relations at the University of Southern Queensland and believes that PR really is The Best Job in the World.

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They don’t watch free to air or pay TV, they get their news from Facebook, and they listen to streaming services instead of radio stations.

How do we reach these high-speed Millennials in a crisis or disaster?

According to a new Swedish study, it’s via Facebook (no surprise there) – but the secret to cutting through to them is how you frame the story. Ulrika Sjöberg discovered there are six ways to frame story to best establish a connection with young people aged 10 -16.

Network “I” framing – where personal digital network provides a platform for decision-making based on the influence of certain people within that network and likes and dislikes posted material might have.  Sjöberg says that becoming part of the logic of sharing is a crucial issue for any agency in building relationships with teens before or during a crisis. Finding out which social media they use and the credibility they assign each is also important.

Celebrity framing – celebrities are opinion leaders where legitimacy is not gained through credibility, but by the volume of followings and they way the young person identifies with the celebrity. The pre-established relationship of trust could provide agencies with avenues of contact with Millennials. For Swedish girls it is bloggers their own age, for boys, gamers and YouTubers, particularly comedians.

Proximity framing – relevant not just to location, but details on how the crisis could affect the individual.  Sjöberg stresses the importance of knowing what young people will want to know, the issues they feel are relevant.  This information needs to be presented on demand and updated constantly.

Easy access framing – “We can’t just sit and wait…it has to happen now.” Visuals will remain important because they facilitate the high speed absorption of information. Simplicity of language and lack of jargon is also critical.

Interactivity and gaming framing – collaboration and data sharing is extending the sensemaking period before action.  Gamification and entertainment can reduce this sensemaking process – but highlights the importance of developing a relationship before a crisis threatens.

Suspicion framing – the plethora of sources on the web has reduced the ability of children to know which one to trust.  Agencies must compete in this environment and should not assume that status as a government department makes them automatically the most trusted source with the final say on what’s happening.  The good news is that to determine what to believe, the Swedish children studied turned to mainstream media online, which were regarded as reliable editorial gatekeepers.

There is much overlap between framing approaches, which shows the complexity of entering this relationship space. Sjöberg calls this the App Generation – and suggests that games and apps are the way to make the connection.

It’s heartening to find that conventional media is still in the mix for young people – if this study is anything to go by.

Barbara Ryan is a disaster information seeking researcher and recently completed a Ph.D on how people look for information in a disaster. She teaches into USQ’s Graduate Certificate of Business (Emergency and Disaster Communication).

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