Guest Lecture: Learning Research in Public Relations with Dr. Tham Jen Sern from Universiti Putra Malaysia
On the 6th of May 2021, the communication program held received, Dr. Jen Sern Tham a senior lecturer at the University Putra Malaysia as a guest lecturer for the public relation class. The topic of the lecture that Dr. Tham talked about was “Public Relations Planning and Research”.
The lecture started with a brief introduction regarding Dr. Tham. After the brief introduction Dr. Tham shared to the class of the learning outcomes he hoped the students will get as well as giving a quick and brief explanations about Public Relations and its many definitions. The keywords for Public Relations according to Dr. Tham is Deliberate, Planned, Performance, Public Interest, Two-way Communication, and Management Function.
After talking about the keywords of Public Relations Dr. Tham explains that Public Relations is a process (R. A. C. E). Where Research = What is the problem? Action (program planning) = What is going to be done about it? Communication (execution) = How will the public be told? And Evaluation = Was the audience reached and what was the effect.
So what is research? What Dr. Tham explains is that research is an essential tool for fact and opinion gathering. An effort aimed at discovering, confirming and/or understanding through facts or opinion regarding the subject at hand. Basically it is an attempt to discover something and it is a collection and interpretation of information. Research in PR is used to achieve credibility with management, to measure success, to monitor, to formulate strategy, etc.
Towards the end of the session Dr. Tham talks about “How to Measure”. Measuring in PR talks about the Multipliers which is PR value. Measuring the effectiveness of any PR campaign can be done using what is known as the “Media Relations Rating Point (MR2P)” which is a 10 point rating system.
Contributor: Evan Jonathan Setyabudi (06/05/2021)
Editor: Lily El Ferawati, PhD.