基于沟通理论对合众国际社进行分析.doc

基于沟通理论对合众国际社进行分析
导读：合众国际社总部设在华盛顿市中心，在贝鲁特，香港，伦敦，圣地亚哥，汉城，东京设有办事处。该组织提供的公共和私营机构的内容，提供广泛的产品范围包括新闻简报和深入的分析。本论文由留学论文网留学美国中心留学生论文代写频道整理推荐。
INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this paper is to explain my internship experience as a Public Relations and Special Media Event Coordinator with United Press International. This report will cover my work at UPI and will incorporate general organizational communication and public relations theory relating to my experience with UPI. It will highlight my role and my experiences in the organization, my analysis of the organization's existing communication structure, and further suggest ways that communication can be improved in the diverse and interesting organization that is United Press International.

POSITION
While at UPI I worked all aspects of a multimedia newsmaker event called Our Water and engaged in several self-directed initiatives for the betterment of the organization. These initiatives included, reinvigorating UPI.com's Military Matters feature webpage, researching and providing a plan for engaging publics via social media websites, and pitching UPIU, UPI's online initiative for aspiring journalists, to appropriate, fruitful audiences. My supervisor was the organization president, who I answered to directly, in addition to the UPIU International Coordinator, who I assisted directly.

Our Water Event
Our Water was a multimedia newsmaker event on preventable water-related illnesses in developing countries hosted by UPI. The intent of this event was to bring journalists and water experts together to highlight the world water crisis. This was to be the first of many events that UPI planned to host with the goal of shedding light on an issue or problem and trying to provide solutions. I was responsible for all preparati ons, promotion, and logistical organization for this event. To prepare, I first had to diligently research the topic of preventable water-related illnesses and identify and contact organizations and experts involved in working to solve the global water crisis. I arranged the event participants and attendants, secured the venue location, arranged catering, designed the press packet, wrote and sent press releases and facilitated media coverage for the event. Moreover, I had an opportunity to work with video, online, and editing departments to construct a variety promotional materials, such as video advertisements. The event included a broad range of academics and government officials as moderators and panelists and approximately 80 attendees engaged in discussion. The event was a success.

After the Our Water event ended there was a lull at work. I took this as an opportunity to explore new ways to both learn and be beneficial to the organization. Investigating the varied facets of UPI, I identified three areas of interest that I believed could use some improvement: an outdated military feature webpage, an underutilized journalism learning tool UPIU.com, and UPI's ineffective application of social media.

U.S. Military Matters webpage
houses several webpages, called "features," off the homepage. The U.S. Military Matters feature webpage caught my attention because of my career and my interest in military public affairs. I was disappointed to see that the page was grossly outdated. Looking into this further, I discovered that page views had dropped 77% since January 2009. I brought this to the attention of my supervisor and several others in the office, but no one expressed concern or offered a reason why the page had not been maintained and allowed to slip into decay. Rather, my boss asked that I instead take a look at UPIU.com, another stagnant website, to see if I could come up with a solution to increase traffic to this site.

an online platform initiated for aspiring journalists. It's open to anyone with an interest in reporting and telling a story, whether that's through text, photo, video, or audio. UPIU.com has aspiring journalists posting from countries all over the world, many of them university students at journalism schools and schools of communication. All the work that gets posted to UPIU.com is reviewed by UPIU editorial staff and UPIU mentors, who offer feedback directly to the authors. In addition, work that meets UPI copy standards is often selected for publication (usually with some editorial tweaking first) to UPI's official news site, UPI.com, with a professional byline. Users benefit not only from exposure to the wide variety of international perspectives reflected in the stories that go up, but also from direct contact with industry professionals, the experience of posting to an online news platform, building an online portfolio, and possibly getting published to a news site that's currently averaging about 5 million page views a month.

After learning of these two areas of needed improvement, I proposed a combined solution. In order to keep the Military Matters webpage up to date and subsequently increase its traffic and draw users to UPIU, I felt the solution was for UPI to engage with the Defense Information School, a school for public affairs and visual information, about using UPIU as an additional teaching tool. The DINFOS' mission is to grow and sust ain a corps of professional organizational communicators to fulfill the public affairs and multimedia requirements of the Department of Defense and America's military services, to include the U.S. Coast Guard. These military public affairs practitioners, videographers and photographers could hypothetically submit their stories, videos and photographs to UPIU.com for feedback and possible publication on the U.S. Military Matters webpage. UPIU.com could be a valuable teaching tool, and this arrangement a win-win both UPI and DoD's public affairs community. Moreover, DINFOS instructors need not worry about losing control of submitted content. UPIU.com can be configured so that students' submissions are unable to be put forward without electronic approval from the instructors.

The president of UPI liked the idea and gave me permission to press. I pitched the idea to several DINFOS instructors and the director of training there, all of whom were interested in the concept. Though initially optimistic about the idea of this mutually beneficial partnership taking off, I was frankly not at UPI long enough to see this through to fruition. Both parties were interested, but I am afraid without me there as the link and striving to bridge the gap, this will be another potentially great idea that simply died on the vine. This is a shame, because I still strongly feel this would have been a great arrangement for UPI and DINFOS, and very valuable for DINFOS' students.

Social media
UPIU.com is a member of three social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. The explosion and relevance of this media cannot be overstated or underestimated. However, at the writing of this paper, none of these sites had been updated or posted to by a UPI employee in over 5 months. According to Holtz and Havens (2009), social networking sites provide "a unique paradigm to forge friendships and business connections in a context unlike any seen before" (p. 189). However, if an organization is merely a member of the s ite and not engaged in conversation, it can do more damage than good. Recalling this information from a communication consulting class I took last summer, I presented these facts, backed up by literature and a plan to engage on these social media sites. Being part of social media sites means UPI should be part of the conversations therein, and actively establishing relationships with others by engaging in dyadic communication. Social media experts say if you're going to blog or post you must be persistent and consistent otherwise you will lose potential audiences gained very quickly, and it is extremely difficult to get those people to come back (Holtz & Havens, 2009). Based on my research, I proposed that in order for UPIU to start the social media conversation, and keep it going that it was imperative to have a strategic plan. First and foremost, before engaging in conversation, UPIU employees should get to know the on-line community or fans of the UPIU membership on these sites. Holtz and Havens (2009) suggest "...visit pages and profiles for at least a couple of weeks before even commenting on others' pages..." (p. 190). Next, UPIU employees need to remember that an online community will be turned off by posts that sound like an advertisement or sales pitch. Employees should be sociable and authentic (Holtz & Havens, 2009). Lastly and probably most important, UPIU employees need to remain transparent (Holtz & Havens, 2009). By remaining transparent, the employee is honest in his or her posts and discussions and not pretending to be someone