Advanced PR Strategies (PRAV1-CE)

Social media offers brands and organizations unlimited opportunities to interact with the public, to harness influencers, and to strengthen their public perception. PR and marketing professionals must be able to identify and to activate key brand ambassadors. In addition, they must be able to tailor content through a variety of mediums in order to provoke consumer action, to reveal measurable impact of efforts in the social space, and to support goals that will positively affect the organization’s bottom line. Learn to capture and activate an audience by crafting strong, concise brand messaging and content to reach consumers on your preferred social media platform. Gain invaluable hands-on experience utilizing current tools and technologies to measure engagement—and apply these metrics to strengthen a brand or an organization’s PR presence.

This course focuses on the business decisions, management processes, and leadership skills necessary to anticipate, plan for, manage through, communicate about, and recover from crises affecting corporations and other complex organizations. Learn how to manage an organization’s identity and reputation as assets so that, over the long term, they contribute to its growth and viability. Explore how to identify and influence the ways that organizations represent themselves to various constituencies, and determine how an identity is influenced by interactions with these groups.

<p>Learn to design more effective and efficient PR campaigns by measuring, analyzing, and implementing big data into your day-to-day strategies. Utilize data-driven PR techniques to understand your audience, to develop persuasive and customized messaging, to select the best communication channels for your message, and ultimately, to achieve optimal results. Case studies provide further insights. By the end of the course, students will&nbsp;complete a final project that implements these messages in a campaign.</p>

It's not difficult to figure out how to market a product, but how do you promote a management consulting firm, law practice, or medical office? Marketing a professional service can be a challenging yet exciting project. Whether you are at an agency, new to a marketing department at a professional service firm, or marketing your own company, this course teaches you how press relations, cross-selling endeavors, seminars, and brochures can be used to promote your organization. Learn practical tips to put programs into place immediately.

Mother Teresa famously commented that facing the press is more difficult than bathing a leper. This course helps students understand how the media works and how to get positive results from their press contacts. Topics include effective interviewing in print, broadcast, and over the phone; how journalists use sources; giving quotes for news stories; how to control the dissemination and interpretation of facts; and how to field questions at press conferences.

Develop effective publicity campaigns and explore promotional strategies for the arts, entertainment business, and other cultural products and organizations. Examine the promotional opportunities and perils for a product when the brand is a person. Discover how to navigate the competitive and rapidly evolving media landscape, and craft public relations strategies that combine traditional, online, and social media to maximize publicity for music, film, video, fashion, and live events. Learn how to identify and target media, analyze market trends, improve pitching skills, and evaluate competition in the field. In-class assignments include conceptualizing, planning, writing, and evaluating public relations campaigns and marketing programs from start to finish.

This seminar for senior practitioners focuses on the difficult choices that confront public relations people in their interactions with clients, the press, government agencies, customers, and employees. Case studies are used to illustrate the challenges that PR professionals face in maintaining credibility, resolving conflict, and managing the interests of many parties. The seminar covers general principles of communications ethics, including truth telling and propaganda, conflicts of interest, confidentiality, corruption of channels of communications, and the guaranteeing of results beyond the PR person&rsquo;s control. Guest speakers and role-playing are featured.

<p>This seminar enhances PR certificate offerings by identifying, analyzing, and applying advanced emerging topics that are pertinent to the public relations sphere. The specific titles and content of each seminar change each semester to reflect the emerging areas of interest, which only can be determined at the time of offering. The Spring 2015 course topic is <em>Corporate Communications Exposed: Developing Social Media Strategies for Public, Customer, and Employee Relations in a Community-Driven Marketplace. </em>Learn how companies are evolving corporate communications structures and practices to better respond to communities that rely upon social media. Discover how the ease and immediacy of interaction among a company, the general public, employees, customers, and earned media is changing the role and rules of internal communications. Examine how publicly traded companies meet the challenges and opportunities of social relationship building and reputation management with both internal and external audiences. This course includes an exploration of current practices in regulated industries, large corporations, and fast growing start-ups, as well as a hands-on workshop with case studies and guest presentations.</p>

What does corporate social responsibility (CSR) mean to the public relations professional? CSR often is integrated into an organization&#8217;s strategic planning process, affording the company the opportunity to build its reputation among key audiences. CSR covers the gamut from green communications to cause-related programs. Get exposure to the critical elements of CSR and their potential effects on business. Examine CSR from all angles, including human resources, risk management, brand differentiation, social awareness and education, and crises. Using recent high-profile case analyses, learn to develop an integrated CSR communications strategy and to measure the effectiveness of CSR efforts.