'Balls' with holes

This Tuesday (04.10) we talked about how important are the raltionships between an organization and its stakeholders. Päivi explained communication between these two mentioned above rather figuratively, she showed us a tennis ball and a ball with many holes. First I think many of us were a bit confused what do these balls have to do with PR..but the balls represented an organization! Tennis ball doesn't have holes, so you can not see inside, but in the other gray ball with holes, we can see inside also from different perspectives, depending from which hole we are looking in.
In my previous post I talked about propaganda, well that tennis ball is something like propaganda, but the other ball represents an organization that should be in this day in our society to compete with the competitors. Everything is about trust - as in the article by Johansoozi says: for long-term relationship trust becomes even more important as there is higher level of investments involved.
Johansoozi also writes about organizaition transparency, which increases the level of trust between organization and its stakeholders, also it prevents from media to write 'bomb' news about some events/crisis.  Stakeholders need transparency to see if the organization is really doing what it says it is doing.

Kent and Taylor's (2002) concept of PR: one of the most ethical forms of communication and one of the central means separating true from false.

We also talked about crisis, where it is ALWAYS best to report about the situation, before the media. There was a good example brought up about H&M, where a civilian found big trashbags full of unused H&M clothings. After a while media picked the story up and asked for an answer from the up-mentioned company (why weren't the clothes donated to homeless/charity). H&M said 'no comments', which by the way is the worst answer one can give..and they did it many times in a row, until the news became big, they finally apologised and said they will find out who or what caused the clothes end up on a street.

If we think about managment relationship nowdays, it has had a huge growth from the 'propaganda era' until now. Since the stakeholders/customers and future customers know that they should have all the information available, there is a chance of misusage. Sometimes it even shows that stakeholders have too much power in their hands, for example in USA, the customers have every right to sue a company if they have misused their products, seen bad service etc. In some point it might get ridiculously unnecessary. It is a waste of time, money and reputation for nothing.
Every company wants to have a good reputation. Good reputation brings in the money and trust, trust itself brings more money and also a 'good light' in media. Nowdays good reputation is achieved (like said before) by communication with your customers, hearing out what their needs are and fulfilling these needs as much as possible. In our society, I think very important is Word Of Mouth (WOM). Everybody rather listens to their friend than acts like it says in a commercial. Also charismatic people give reputation, but this can be in some point dangerous - for some people charismatic may seem as interesting and attractive, but for others it might be frightning (specially in our quiet Estonian society).

LG reputation - I started to think about this companys reputation and I could not figure out if it has a good image or not. Since personally I think this company is big (meaning worldwide) and I have an opinion that they make high-quality products (I have never purchased LG). In the beginning of their time they were quite unknown to the world, I think because they just focused on home electronics. Now in the other hand I can see that they make also cell phones, smart phones, which have good quality and style. Also as I said before, probably because most of their interaction is in social media, they have become more popular among younger generation. Overall in my opinion they have raised from 'not so popular' to quite good reputation.