By Aznan Mat Piah
In the outcome of the 13th general elections, the role of the government public relations machinery becomes more prominent as the public needs to be convinced of policies and programmes that would bring about continued development and progress for the country and the people.
Certainly there’s the need to bring in new strategies to win the hearts and minds of the people, particularly among young people, towards what have been done by the present government. They need to be reminded what the government had achieved and what they have benefited, and what would they stand to benefit in the next years to come, especially with regard to transformational programmes currently embarked by the government.
Despite efforts been carried out to promote the image of the government and to maintain good relationship with the public, many people still have not understood the real meaning of public relations. Critics are saying that public relations is an act of lies and manipulation or an attempt to spin. Public relations people are often called “spin doctors”.
But I would say that practitioners too are partly to be blamed if they allow themselves to be misunderstood or misjudged by the public or to indulge in a situation where they appear ignorant of certain developments and policies.
Public relations is about managing image and perception. It is about ethical practice, credibility, openness and transparency. It is about giving the right perspective, taking into considerations the public opinion and feedback from the audience. It concerns building trust and confidence. This could only come about through constant monitoring of the environment and by being sensitive to public response in ensuring survival of organizations, in this case the government agencies. It involves engaging the public.
It would mean that public relations people in government agencies have to work extra hard to prove their worth and to put the present government in positive light. There’s so much the government have done over the past years and these are track records for people to see and to judge for themselves. The facts and details must be made available for the public to see. Public relations people must be able to rationalize and not to spin the facts when they are approached by the public. They should not just paint the positive picture but must attempt to be balanced so that the public would be able to judge for themselves the progress that have been brought about by the government.
There is the need to do an audience study. The present audiences, particularly the younger generation, may not understand fully the history of the country and may not recognize their identity. Where we are today does not come out of the blues from some where but rather as a result of hard work of the past generation of leaders. There is a lot of education process that the public must be engaged and issues misunderstood to be addressed.
Apart from that the messages to the different target groups need to be well crafted and well thought out. Public relations practitioners now have to address the audience who are more affluent and educated who are aware of their rights. The government public relations machinery therefore cannot operate on the basis of approaches or strategies carried out in the past which is already obsolete. Instead, they need to embrace the new technology, use more of the new media, and the officers or the practitioners too must embark on more aggressive strategies to penetrate audience who are equally aggressive and demanding. The media too ought to be balanced in their reporting and assessment.
There are now far bigger challenges for the government public relations to deal with the current issues which are being manipulated by so many elements which are opposed to what the government is doing.
Public attitudes and behaviors towards government public relations must be changed. The public should be made to understand that they should not think whatever that comes from government officials are of propaganda nature or simply mouthpiece of the government. Instead, the people must be convinced that these are real efforts to explain the benefits the public would gain following implementation of social and economic transformation policies to bring about progress and development. The rest would be left to the people to decide.
Public relations efforts therefore must be interpreted and implemented wisely with credibility in mind.