1. Week 6: Internal PR and Intranets.
    1. Corporate communications and media
      1. A medium is any physical entity, including one’s own body, that carries information from one individual to another.
        1. All media are crafts requiring physical tools.
        2. Online media require high-tech tools and new forms of grammar.
      2. What media do
        1. Deliver messages that help an organization understand its environment. Send messages that support economic transactions and business survival and receive messages indicating whether a transmission was effective.
        2. Every medium is defined from two points of view – the message sender and message receiver.
        3. A corporate communication medium is a two-way link between persons with self-interest in the outcome of an economic transaction. A medium transmits a desire, or lack thereof, to complete an exchange. Online media, because they are individualistic, are excellent transmitters of individual preference.
        4. A manager uses any medium that best serves his or her purposes at a moment in time and abandons any medium that does not work. This includes online media.
      3. Choosing corporate communication media. Managers choose media that best express meaning to target individuals and persuade them to act in accordance with message content. Sometimes, for example, you do not want to be online. You want to deliver a message directly face to face.
      4. Types of Corporate Communication media:
        1. Primary: Multisensory communication among individuals with immediate feedback. Face-to-face.
        2. Secondary: Limited sensory communication among individuals with either immediate or delayed feedback. The benefit is reach and freqeuncy. Online media are among the most robust of secondary media because they are multimedia with enormous reach.
        3. Noise: For every advance in sensory transmission, there is an equal and simultaneous advance in noise.
      5. Integrating corporate communication media
        1. Ideal corporate communication is an integrated core of media and information databases. Online comes close to this integration.
        2. Media integration is a temporarily optimized mix of both personal and impersonal and verbal and nonverbal message delivery that is adjust for differences among message receivers, noise levels, transmission security and persuasive force.
        3. Ideally, managers integrate communication from the outset. Online presents an integration opportunity.
        4. A medium should fit the business function. Since the function of an effective message is to gain individual action, integrated media should fit both a targeted individual and the desired action. Because online media is direct and individualistic, it has a greater change of fitting both a business function and individual need.
    2. The Web and Internal communications
      1. An intranet is a private system built on TCP/IP and HTML standards that delivers distributed, cross-platform business applications and information to a secured network of computers.
      2. Why an intranet
        1. 80% of companies using intranet applications have seen an annual return on investment averaging 38% -- Meta Group.
        2. 34% of corporate executives report intranets give the greatest return on investment, even better than Extranets -- Simba research.
      3. What is an Extranet: An intranet extended beyond a firewall to reach partners and customers outside a company.
      4. Why PR does not control an Intranet. In a properly designed intranet, there is too much information on it that is not generated by or controlled by a PR department. An intranet becomes a backbone communications link to the entire company and carries the information of the entire company. PR is just one element of the intranet.
    3. Web design steps
      1. Research and specification
      2. Design
      3. Development and testing
      4. Release and marketing
      5. Operations and maintenance
      6. Renewal
    4. Web Site Research and Specification
      1. Justifying the expense
      2. Research
        1. Competition
        2. Examples for models
        3. Defining goals and objectives
        4. Defining audience
        5. Defining strategies and tactics
          1. Information your audience would care to share
          2. Communication facilitation
          3. Site as desired destination
        6. Site messages
        7. Content strategies to support messages
          1. News releases
          2. Fact sheets
          3. Graphics and photos
          4. Experts directory
          5. Product/service databases
          6. Threaded discussions
          7. Speeches and presentations
          8. Annual reports and fact books
          9. Announcements of events
          10. Policies
          11. Benefits
          12. Employee features
          13. Newsletters
          14. Catalogs
          15. Helpful how-tos
          16. FAQs
          17. Maps and directions
    5. Exercise: Students discuss recent issue of The Intranet Journal with emphasis on Intranet basics, content and management uses of Intranets.
    6. Assignment for next week: Analyzing an Intranet.
      1. Reading:
        1. Chapter 9 from Integrating Corporate Communication
        2. Appendices A, B and C of Public Relations on the Net
    7. Exercise: Analyze the Seton Hall web site according to guidelines handed to you.

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