Public Relations Case Study

Wayne State’s PR institution overall agenda is to raise the stature of Wayne State University. And any public relations activity that they do is aimed towards always achieving that goal and is the actual mission statement of the marketing communications department. Within this institution, on the 3rd floor of the 5700 building on Cass Avenue, sit’s the office of Information Officer and Public relation professional Rasheda Williams. On May 24th at 12:00pm I was given the opportunity to sit down with her to learn what it is to be a PR professional within the working world. Her job description involves anything from writing stories for internal publication and media relations, to pitching to their experts for media stories, responding to

Party planning is just a small aspect of that; you have to be a photographer, graphic designer, blogger, publicist, marketing, journalist, etc. The best way that Rasheda describes what she does for a living (because many do not understand what creating strategies and strategizing tactics and tasks means) to strangers, friends and family is to have them think of a celebrity publicist; they coach a celebrity on what they should say and how they should position themselves to the public and media. That 's what she does for Wayne

Many events at WSU are academic based and some of the material can go over the public’s (and even the media) head—being that they are a high level academic events. The key is to unmask the human side of the material and explain “what’s the bottom-line” and “what are people going to get out of this?” The crisis situations are a lot of pressure. Trying to insure the peoples’ safety and trying to get the information out to people as quickly as possible, while trying to be accurate can be a difficult challenge. Finding the balance between accuracy and speed has been a difficult task for the campus and PR