Saturday, October 3, 2009

Public relations practitioners as Connectors, Mavens and Salesman


According to Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point, the world revolves around three types of people; connectors, mavens and salesman. Connectors are people with large social networks who span different fringes of society and being people together. Maven's are people who collect information and knowledge about the marketplace, then relate and connect it to others so that many can benefit from the information as well. Salesmen, according to Gladwell, are the charismatic persuaders skilled in making others agree with them. Successful public relations practitioners encompass all three of Gladwell's variables of people.

Public relations practitioners commonly use research to connect organizations with their target publics. As connectors, they enhance and strengthen organizational relationships both internally and externally.

Informing publics about opportunities is a public relations practitioner’s main responsibility. As mavens, public relations practitioners are not only beneficial to consumers and target publics by informing them of valuable resources their client can offer but they also benefit the clients themselves by getting their message out into the world.

Public relations practitioners are skilled in the powers of persuasion. As salesman, public relations practitioners know how to target and influence their publics to change their attitudes, awareness and behaviors. To be successful in public relations the practitioner's ability to sway opinion in others is necessary.

In case study 4-2 (Hendrix, Hayes, 102), the public relations practitioners working for Dean Foods overcame difficult changes and obstacles to create a fast and barrier-free transition externally while maintaining a shared mind-set within the organization to make the internal transition easy.

The public relations practitioners for Deans Food acted as connectors, mavens and salesman. They connected employees to the new accounting and finance function of the organization by establishing a coalition of employees to help with the changes.

At Dean Foods, public relations practitioners acted as mavens by increasing employee access to information about the project in a timely and consistent way.

As salesman, the practitioners sold the idea of change to employees and persuaded them to join the program.

The role of public relations practitioners is based on the ability to bring publics together, inform them of necessary information and sell them the idea. Without this skills and personality traits of public relations practitioners as connectors, mavens and salesman, the role of public relations would be altered dramatically and might not exist at all.

Hyperlinks

http://www.answers.com/topic/public-relations

http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html

http://orrinwoodward.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/1/16/3467862.html

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/know-your-strength-for-more-success-are-you-a-connector-a-maven-or-a-salesman.html

http://theformofmoney.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2008/2/6/3530012.html

Image courtesy of www.123rf.com

Sara Brubaker

October 3, 2009

2 comments:

  1. Nice approach to applying principles of the book to types of PR practitioners. What type do you think you will be?

    ReplyDelete