Experiences in Experiments

Human nature creates an obsession within PR practitioners to be in control of their surrounding environments. Especially when the practitioners job and paycheck relies on the success of the national campaign they are about to produce. Luckily, with the implementation of experimentalism research, PR professionals can play the role of scientists and conduct research of increased validity.  Last week, I showed ways to help professionals collect this data and form a hypothesis for their campaigns accurately and efficiently with the help of digital programs. But other ways are also as equally as proficient.

            Kaylen’s Blog, PR in Spain, provides commentary on the ways in which businesses internationally are becoming more professional by conducting more experiments.  One experiment in particular Kaylen notes is how the opinions of different countries abroad were studied by interpretation of their respectable newspaper’s articles. As quasi-semi experiment by nature, the study discussed the countries changes over time, allowing the PR businesses in Spain to discover how one can change the images of how these nations are viewed in the media and across the globe. I found this research very helpful to my blog, for information about media perception of certain geographical areas is pertinent to the success or failure of a national PR campaign. This information collected in the study that Kaylen highlighted also serves as a way to know how to alter a campaign to obtain “newsworthiness” seeing as one could know what aspects of the culture the media often highlights and play up on these aspects for increase user attention/awareness.

            Likewise, bringing attention to a campaign globally could also be obtained through what BDaunno explains as “flash mobs”. What once started as an email asking 40 friends to attend founder Bob’s show, flash mobs now take place all over the world. In Daunno’s blog Media Snapshot, I found it highly intriguing to read about these PR stunts that involve "a large group of people whom assemble suddenly into a public place to perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, and then quickly disperse”. In other words, flash mobs are conducted to raise awareness about something by causing such a huge scene. Thus, flash mobs benefit PR campaigns nationally as they can be used virtually at the same time in different countries to create a wide-spread awareness of a product/person, etc. Flash mobs also have no language barriers seeing as it is a stunt involving physical body language not all on speaking which provides an advantage for using flash mobs inside international campaigns. Additionally, the “word-of-mouth” nature helps to increase awareness as more and more people attend, the practitioner can virtually see how viral the message is, and how far the message reaches into different countries. Flash mobs therefore are a powerful national campaign tool, at virtually no cost.