USE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES IN PR MAKES COMMON SENSE

Sometimes, when you think of a Ph.D. at work, you associate it with "navel gazing."

To some degree, the academics have earned this bad reputation. Many research topics are trivial to begin with. And the academic publishing world demands that no matter how arcane your predecessors' work is, you have to build on it in order to be published.

As a result, you have some "failed disciplines" just as you have "failed states." In a failed state, the evidence is usually poverty and corruption. In a failed discipline, the measurement is triviality and irrelevance. Just try to read some scholarly literary criticism and you'll see what I mean.

The tragedy is that the social sciences have much to contribute to the communication professions: PR, advertising, corporate communications, crisis prevention and management, governmental relations, investor relations, employee relations, community relations, etc.

It was my privilege to be asked, at a major electric utility, to devise a systematic, social science-based issues management system to power the work of a 35-person corporate communications department. We first discovered that no-one out there had solved this problem, so we couldn't build on much that had gone before. However, we also found many previously unapplied technologies in the social sciences that we could use.

We structured a system, put it work powering the work of 35 people, and the results amazed us. In two years, we more than doubled positive and positive-leaning customer perceptions. This was during a rate case (an attempt to raise rates).

Our research firms attributed our success to the power and coherence of our communications. Using some content analysis and classification techniques from my socio-linguistic studies at the University of Pennsylvania, we were able to mount a communication effort that was more highly coordinated than our previous efforts. Equally important, social science-based analysis techniques enabled us to understand more completely what our stakeholder groups were saying, and what their needs were, on an ongoing basis. An unexpected side benefit was that by asking better questions of our stakeholder groups, we made friends and allies of potential enemies.

Through the years, I have been able to apply these social science-based techniques to a variety of marketing and communications situations, always with success.

Today, my firm is developing vertical market-targeted versions of the issues and content management systems that have worked so well. Soon, we will introduce versions of the system specifically geared to health-care, pharma, telecom, manufacturing, education and nonprofits.

Has anyone had experience with such a systems approach to PR, marketing and corporate communications? If so, please post your experience. Also, please feel free to post any questions you have for the "PR Ph.D."