“It has to be said that good public relations are important for eminent companies as much as they are for emerging ones. It is necessary to integrate communication and in an equally skillful manner use and combine PR and marketing tools. Companies need this at the moment of their breaking through the next professional limitation, said Gordan Turković, CTA komunikacije agency CEO and co-owner during a panel held at the conference Komunikacijska izvrsnoST organised by Split Tech City.
The association gathering Split’s IT experts dedicated the month of April to public relations, by gathering some of the most familiar names of the national PR scene.
Luka Šipić, Vrh komunikacije agency’s owner presented what to take into account when a company or an organisation start an active communication, summing up PR’s basic principles with his lecture called Public relations for beginners. He was followed by the Komunikacijski laboratorij’s owner Manuela Šola who discussed women’s position in entrepreneurship and offered her first-hand experience gained through a socially responsible project Rukoplastika.
Socially responsible campaigns can encourage positive changes
Even if socially responsible projects always have a positive connotation with the public, the profession of public relations does not. That being the case is a well-known fact to Mario Aunedi Medek, Croatian Public Relations Association’s president and owner of Media Val agency, Jerko Trogrlić, CEO of the company VAJT, and Gordan Turković. Guided by the moderator Pinija Poljaković, WWF Adria’s communication expert, they demistified their profession in the panel called Bez kvalitetne komunikacije nema dobre akcije? / Can you get a good action without good communication?
With their examples of socially responsible campaigns, they proved that not only can PR initiate actions and encourage positive changes; it is even more important that it actively does! Gordan Turković mentioned the campaign Nešto zbilja važno / This truly matters, that he conducted in 2019 with his team, and which succeeded in amending the law in favour of Brački pupoljci, thus granting children with disabilities from all Croatian islands free ferry transport and unhindered access to their therapies on land.
People get attached to company values
This mini-PR conference particularly underlined those segments of PR that can help technological companies and projects develop their business, but it also pointed out the power of employer branding by stating that real power lies in people, who are the true brand of each company, because they jointly create the company’s values.
“Companies must project values. People get more attached to that than to anything else. In the past a bean bag in a google office would have been a huge deal, but now the employees get attached to the values these companies give and offer“, underlined Turković.
It is clear that people are creators of ideas pushing the industry forward, but they also have to be the “glue” pushing forward even the most vulnerable society groups, thus not keeping the knowledge to themselves, but sharing it. This is exactly what the selfless lecturers did, they shared their knowledge in one-hour final session called Shoot me if you can where the audience had the opportunity to pose them questions, which can be seen at the following Youtube link.
