Week 10: Advertising, Public Relations, & Media Advocacy

The class this week was interesting in a “weird” way. I guess I never really thought of public relations as part of health promotion, but I can see how this tool can be a powerful one in promoting health. The guest speaker actually used some techniques that I am using right for my Health Promotion Planning and Assessment class (PH666) with Dr. Koslow. She talked about developing goals that realistic, specific, measurable, tractable and time bound. Also, she mentioned community outreach, community involvement, and networking. Familiarizing ourselves with media….we need to be “media hounds”. As we have learned throughout this semester, if we use media as a tool to get our message out, we need to know the stories, know what interests them in order to successfully utilize this tool. As in “know thy self”, but instead “know thy tools”. However, I don’t know everyone else in class, but dealing with reporters or the media is a very unfamiliar territory for me and a little bit scary/intimidating. It’s a great tool to use as we have learned in class last week, but getting a few hours of lecture in class doesn’t really make me confident that I will able to navigate the world of PR and media. But as Dr. Engelberg stated in class PR and Media is just another tool we can use to spread the word of our health promotion campaigns.