Institute for Public Relations

Winner of the 2011 Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award for excellence in research, measurement and evaluation, this study applied predictive analytics in an action-oriented and cost-effective model to show how corporate reputation can be directly predicted by document sentiment. The award was presented at the 2011 North American Summit on PR Measurement. The video and presentation are available below: Video Presentation

2002 – The survival of an organization’s reputation during a crisis depends on its internal culture, strength of its communications and integrity of its leadership. Despite the urgency of all management and communications efforts in a crisis, today’s technologies make it possible to effectively monitor public impact and reaction virtually in real time, and to adjust strategy and tactics accordingly. This paper describes the possibilities for public relations practitioners.

This research paper highlights the 10 principles of relationship management that an international chemical manufacturing company, with production ties in Germany and the United States, had employed for close to 10 years to establish and maintain two-way symmetrical relationships built on trust and accommodation with key publics in the community in which it operated.

Despite growing attention to understanding those dynamics in strategic management of crises, little research has been conducted on health-related crises using the contingency theory. This study seeks to shed more light on the application of contingency theory in health-related crises by analyzing the recent crisis of salmonella=tainted tomatoes, which was the largest food-borne illness outbreak in the past 10 years.

An experiment has been designed to test the effects of photographs on crisis perceptions with the following hypothesis: Participants in the victim photograph (vs. neutral or no visual) condition will attribute greater responsibility, report a lower reputation score, report greater anger, and be more willing to engage in negativie word-of-mouth. The paper elaborates on the rationale and design of the study

The present study attempts to explore how multiple competitive organizations cope with the same crisis and how an organization’s crisis management influenced the others’ crisis stances and strategies. By using qualitative case study of modified framing analysis, this study analyzed 15 contextually important news stories which were selected from the Korean Integrated News Database System

This paper analyzes how key opinion leaders, PR practitioners, and educators are attempting to reach many internal and external audiences, including media and the community. Using K-12 schools as a focal point of case studies, the authors use a modified standard model for public relations and communications assessment – the RACE (Research, Action, Communication, Evaluation) framework – to expand theory development.

Extending current theories in crisis communication, the authors have developed a new model called the Integrated Crisis Mapping model (ICM) aimed at understanding the diverse and varied emotions likely to be experienced by the key stakeholders in crises. Dominant emotions in the ICM model are extrapolated on two continua, the publics’ coping strategy and the level of organizational engagement.

The audience-interaction family crisis model was developed for handling family crises communication that can help the public relations professionals that deal with similar critical situations. The author(s) believe that this is an important model that will help forward public relations theory and practice as it applies to crisis communication involving families in the media focus

This essay focuses on crisis cases in which the media has acted effectively as a first responder. The examples provide context for the argument for media to be seen as partners, not as adversaries in the crisis response. Specifically, public relations practitioners should work with the media as an information resource, resource manager, public safety official and public advocate.