Online Lecture: The Importance of Writing Skills for Public Relations

TANGERANG – Writing skills are something that is always related to the world of Public Relations (PR). Writing skills in PR or PR Writing is a tactic in planning to build relationships between organizations and their stakeholders. This was conveyed by the Communication Science Lecturer at the London School of Public Relations (LSPR) Jakarta, Sophia Bernadette, in a guest lecture at Multimedia Nusantara University Digital Learning (UDL) on Tuesday (30/05) online.

Sophia Bernadette, who is familiarly called Detty, explained that PR writing refers to publicity, which is an activity to introduce the company to the broader community through mass media. In general, publicity is considered more effective than marketing activities. The forms can be in the form of press releases, social media, product placement, partnerships, and others. 

“Publicity is more cost-efficient than marketing activities such as advertising, because companies do not need to pay fees to the media. Information presented through publicity is also more trusted because it is presented in the form of news and does not contain messages that sell products and services,” Detty explained.

Furthermore, several things must be considered by PR in its writing, namely objectives, audience, and channel. “PR must determine the purpose of the writing, who the audience is, what the characteristics of the key message are, then determine what to write; press releases, features articles, or others. Then what channel to distribute it through,” Detty explained.

PR should also avoid mistakes in writing, such as incorrect spelling, repetition of words, too many words, bias, hyperbole, stereotypes, and others. “In writing PR content, the concept of 5Ws (Who, What, Where, When, Why) and 1H (How) is the benchmark,” Detty added.

Responding to this, one of the UMN Digital Learning students, Nicholas Marthin Taihuttu, asked how to find a company’s publicity.

Detty said that publicity can be measured by doing media monitoring. “After the written content is distributed, for example PR distributes it to media partners or uploads it to the company’s website and social media, do monitoring. See how much news about our company, read whether the news is positive, negative, or neutral. PR can also conduct social media monitoring to see how netizens respond, comment, and tweet about our company. PR can make a report from the monitoring results as evaluation material,” said Detty. 

On the same occasion, UMN Digital Learning Lecturer Chininta Rizka Angelia said that the discussion in this guest lecture could encourage students interested in entering the PR world to continue honing their writing skills. In addition, this guest lecture is also an implementation of the collaboration between UDL and LSPR. 

“UDL collaborates with LSPR to implement today’s guest lecture. There was a positive response from both guest lecturers and UDL students. In addition, we present guest lecturers also as a learning refresher for students by discussing actual and practical case studies,” concluded Chininta.

Well, that’s a snippet of lecture activities at UDL that you should know! Isn’t it fun to study online?

For more information about UDL, please click on the udl.umn.ac.id website or follow the Instagram account @digitallearning.umn.

By UMN Digital Learning Team

English translation by Levina Chrestella Theodora

Kuliah di Jakarta untuk jurusan program studi Informatika| Sistem Informasi | Teknik Komputer | Teknik Elektro | Teknik Fisika | Akuntansi | Manajemen| Komunikasi Strategis | Jurnalistik | Desain Komunikasi Visual | Film dan Animasi | Arsitektur | D3 Perhotelan , di Universitas Multimedia Nusantara. www.umn.ac.id