global discussion. local perspectives.
As community consultation and stakeholder engagement practices continue to grow… I believe negotiating, conflict and dispute resolution skills are going to be as important… if not more important… than media relations and crisis communications skills.
At the ICCO Global Conference in Delhi of a few days ago, Lou Capozzi, chairman of the Publicis PR Group, and Paul Taffe, chairman of Hill&Knowlton, challenged pr firms to step up to the opportunities created by what Lou called “The New Conversation Age.” The panelists documented the changes and outlined the skills needed in this emerging new environment — skills possessed by PR practitioners more than any other discipline.
Two previous posts in this blog were dedicated, directly on indirectly, to the issue of regulation and /or licensing of public relations professionals. Following three recent important events (Richard Edelman’s call for licensing and his subsequent withdrawal from the Council of Pr Firms; PRSA’s decision, after twenty years of silence and resistance to public discussion, to make public on its website and in a recent issue of its monthly Tactics, some of the contents of...
In his keynote speech today 1005burson_speech_text.htm at New Delhi’s ICCO annual conference (Icco is the international association of national associations of public relations consultancies), Harold Burson surprised everyone by taking a strong stance on an issue which until only a few weeks ago was considered blasphemy in the US public relations community.
Is it enough for us to simply ‘accept’ that practitioners do not get involved in formative and evaluative research (a sort of ‘research-phobia’) because of lack of time and its prohibitive costs? For researches and academics, these are only outright excuses as low and even no-cost evaluation methods are widely available. Instead they cite practitioner lack of interest, commitment and knowledge, as the real underlying reason….
I receive mixed reactions from my interlocutors when I argue that, while it is fair to consider, as a great many do, the UK model of practice in public relations more similar to the US than to the Continental European one, there however remains today one fundamental difference related to the attitude of a growing number of practitioners toward relationships with the media.
What a grand Summit! One hundred highly privileged senior representatives of major corporations, public relations agencies, universities and research companies met in Portsmouth (New Hampshire) this week for the Institute for Public Relations’ Summit on Measurement, which IPR’s Ceo Frank Ovaitt proudly described as ‘the annual meeting of the best and brightest minds in public relations measurement, evaluation and research’! Don’t really know how true this is….but the Summit certainly exceed, at least, my expectations!…
I imagine that of the many tools we currently adopt to ‘listen’ to stakeholders (focus groups, participatory observation, network analysis, quali/quantitative research, opinion polls, meetings….) the one which, in many countries, appears more widely used today, is telephone eavesdropping.
I already mentioned in one of my first posts that the European Commission has opened a wide public consultation process amongst its citizens on a White Paper for Communication, which is intended as the first step to the implementation of Plan D, a detailed five year public relations plan.
Next Thursday and Friday (September 28-29) in Portsmouth (New Hampshire,USA) the Institute for Public Relations will be holding its annual Measurement Summit. The program sounds highly engaging and this is very good news for us, as we are all very much aware of the importance of this issue for the future of our profession…..