29. The biggest benefit to Kraft from their social media “cheesepoalypse” campaign was ______.
a. identifying Velveeta “superconsumers”
b. selling more Velveeta during basketball season
c. making people more aware of using Velveeta to make queso dip
d. 20 percent increases in sales of Velveeta
True/False
1. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense could be seen as a very early example of public
relations.
2. The Keurig 2.0 case study of consumers complaining about being forced to use nothing but
official company coffee pods in the coffeemaker demonstrates that if a company ignores
complaints on social media they will eventually go away. Responding to the critics would have
just prolonged the problem.
3. Telephone companies and electric utilities were among the last businesses to start actively
using public relations.
4. Before the 1920s press agents mostly just worked at getting publicity for their clients as
opposed to creating an image.
5. Ivy Lee made “spin control” a popular term as early as 1910.
6. Today, the central notion of public relations is the model of two-way interaction between an
institution and its publics.
7. Public relations is mostly about talking and meeting with people.
8. During the Super Bowl, Breathe Right used the PR process to promote the fact that
professional athletes used their nasal strips to enhance their on-field performance in a way that
they could not do through advertising.
9. The ROPES public relations process includes research, objectives, programming, evaluation,
and stewardship.
10. The oil company BP had a clear public relations plan in place on what to do when the
Deepwater Horizon drilling platform exploded and sank.
11. Domino’s Pizza had its reputation damaged by a prank YouTube video posted by two
employees.
12. Very little of the news originates with public relations practitioners.
13. A basic rule for being an effective political spokesperson is to “Tell the truth, tell it all, tell it
early, tell it yourself.”
14. As of 2013, the Center for Responsive politics estimates there were more than 10,000
lobbyists registered to work in Washington, D.C.
15. Public relations works only for the rich and powerful. It is ineffective in helping the poor and
working classes.
16. Political activists make use of public relations techniques to draw attention to their causes.
17. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. worked at making sure that when civil rights protestors were
arrested for civil disobedience, the arrests would be covered by the press.
18. Companies should view social media as a way of interacting with their publics rather than
just as a channel for transmitting marketing messages.
19. Videos displaying employee misconduct at a pizza shop created enough bad publicity that the
shop eventually had to close.
Essay
1. Name the two key figures in the founding of professional public relations.
2. What did Edward Bernays mean by “engineering consent”?
3. What distinguishes modern public relations from press agentry?
4. According to Edward Bernays, public relations has these three functions: informing,
_________, and integrating.
5. What are the five steps in the ROPES public relations model?
6. Define and give an example of an internal public.
7. Define and give an example of an external public.
8. Name the five principles of crisis communication.
9. Name two things Johnson & Johnson did right in the Tylenol crisis.
10. Name a way in which the Internet makes public relations more difficult.
11. In a brief essay, discuss the differences PR professional Chris Martin describes between an
issue and a crisis. How does your response to the two differ? Provide an example of each.
12. In a brief essay, you are to explain how a local cable television and Internet provider could
make use of social media. What should their goals for using social media be? How can they use
social media to improve their public relations?
13. In a brief essay, discuss how and why Exxon has had a long-running PR crisis ever since the
Exxon Valdez oil spill.
14. In a brief essay, discuss what is meant by the term spin control. Then describe how it is used
to manage political or corporate news. Illustrate your answer with an example.
15. In a brief essay, discuss how the University of Missouri could have better handled the firing
of a communication professor following her inflammatory comments at a protest on campus.
Please remember that this is not about the merits of her firing but rather about how the
administration handled communication about the firing.