Wednesday, July 30, 2008

PR

Every company needs public relation to stand out and speak for the company. A public relation person needs to have a well communication skill in order to represent a company in public. Another important role that a public relation playing is "solving problem" and "being responible for the company in front of public". Every industry has public relation to send out the message such as company or even government.
It is very difficult to communicate with public when the corporation is so huge. They need a specific person to speak out and deliver the message with a strong communication skill when they need to sell their products, grab attentions from the public or solve the problem. It is a seriuos responsibilties for public relation because it is not only representing indivisual, but a huge corporation which probably has over thousands of employee.
In public relation position, I found the most thing to deal with is "crisis management", public relation has to deal with the emergencies that the company causes and solve and explain to the public. If public relation doesn't do a good job, the company's goodwill will collapse.
The Tylenol case we learned in class was a successfull case of doing good public relation job. PR stand out at the first time to explain everything to the public, so make the public get clear of what happened in the case and make the effort of giving out coupon to make up the mistake they caused.
Another case shows us how bad the PR could be. Leaving out the problem instead of explain to the public.
Image to the public is important, once you break it and not repair it properly, the company will be in a bad position. PR has to be careful while dealing with public because it influences a company's incomes and employee. The good impression is very difficult to build, but breaking it down is very easy if PR doesn't do a good job.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Internet is a globalized information gathering center, but...

The technology had been growing fast. People used to read newspaper, listen to radio, or watch television to gather information or NEWS, but now, internet had became the trend, the main stream for diverse audience. Why Internet is so popular that "everyone" attract to it? And sometimes, it's an addiction. Internet is a huge technological convergence on different ways. People can watch NEWS, search information,chat, play games, and now we can even sell products or used items online. People can find almost everything just a few clicks on the keyboard. People have different demands on using internet, some of them like to do online shopping, and some like blogging.. etc. The most convenience I found is that we can find any kind of information online. Internet becomes so popular and it is so convenient, but it is also risky and sometimes unreliable.
Indeed, we have so much freedom in this fictitious world: internet. People can express their opinions or feelings like what we are doing right now. Moreover, people can share themselves such as blog, or photos. While people are sharing their lives, they forgot this "safe environment" that they assume could be also "dangerous". There are many smart computer users out there, and that's where hackers are starting from. Once we get to know everything, we want to know more. However, some people they keep some information private, so only their close friends can see what they are sharing. Most of the time, those hackers, they are out of curiousity. They can brake in people's account to see their sharing photos and stuff like that. For example, it was a serious NEWS back in my hometown Taiwan. A college girl who put up her "sexual picture" with her boyfriend on a online photo album and she locked that album, only people who knows the password can see it. However, the hacker crack her password and share her pictures on a very popular forum. That girl wasn't doing a smart move putting her private pictures online, but this shows us what risk privacy could face.
Sometimes I feel that Internet is playing with people's stupidness and sometimes people are just so easy to be played by it.

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Important role of photography

In today's society, people have different sources to get the information that they want to know, such as politics, sports, or celebrities. Printing media hace changed from books, newspapers, and to magazines. The trend of reading media have been changing too. In early centuries, people gather their information from newspaper. Newspaper was an important resource of getting different fields of information or current events. "Magazines were the last of print media to become popular", but they are more toward national and international business. Magazines have wilder range or audience because magazines contain more contents in different fields. The audeince starts from teenage or even younger to 50s or 60s. Magazines specialize in specific field based on their targets, so they can guarantee to keep the readers.

One of the reason that magazines became popular I believe it is because of the photography. Photography plays an important role in magazine industry. Images have huge impact on people's brain these days. Photography always catches people's eyes to start reading the articles. A successful image is necassary. We can especially see this phenomenon on women. In chapter 5, Rodman talks about how women start to compare thmeselves with the models displaying in the magazines. Magazine industries find the professional models to shoot the photography and put it in the magazine and show to the reader, and of course, most of the readers are women. Models' unrealistic perfect figures influence women. Women start thinking that are not perfect enough, so they start purchasing cosmetic, maybe from the ads in magazines. This is how magazines and sponsors' making money. They influence audience's minds with the perfect images in the pages. I'm thinking maybe, the magazine industry should be more realistic to the audeince instead of exagerating the "perfect images"? From this point, we can see how important the magazine is in the trends. They are popular because they know what audience what to see. The gossip of celebrity's life.

Magazines are important. They target the right audience and influence them. Sometimes the information and images are right like those newsmagazines, but sometimes some specific magazines can have a negative impact on people's thought such as "playboys" magazine. It is very difficult to define what magazine is good or bad. It's all depending on individual's behavior.