However, the media seemed to blow things out of proportion. International students were receiving phone calls from parents across the world to see if they were OK. Each day, newspapers read higher and higher numbers of swine flu cases. However, if you look closely, you would have noticed Pullman only had a handful of confirmed swine flu cases. The rest were flu like symptoms.

It wasn’t long until Pullman was considered plagued by the swine flu.

This created huge PR issues for WSU. They had to step in with serious crisis management techniques to stop the bad publicity. Student Heath and Wellness Services handed out germ masks, flyers, information and hand sanitizer. They offered emergency walk-in times for students with flu-like symptoms and advised all students to stay home if they felt ill and not go to class.

It is interesting to see how it all played out… Since WSU was one of the first schools to start Fall Semester so early in the year, WSU received all the swine flu publicity. I’m sure many other schools would have experienced the same wrap if they had started earlier than late September.

Here’s a video about the swine flu outbreak in Pullman… just shows how blown out of proportion it became.

I am currently the account manager for a PR campaign we are doing for the WSU CEA in my PR 412 course. The WSU CEA wants to learn more about their alumni and donors and how to reach them. We are learning all about the importance of research in PR campaigns. After we complete all our focus groups, we are sending out a survey. The focus group provided a lot of very useful, in-depth, qualitative information to use in our PR campaign and research.

It’s all very exciting to finally get to put everything we’ve learned into action. I have taken countless PR, communication and research classes. Now I finally get to implement it all. It makes me that much more excited to get my PR degree and enter the PR field. I can’t wait to see where this PR campaign goes from here!