Shut Doors and Improve PR

Humans are bad at eliminating options, and it costs us dearly in job performance, relationships and effectiveness, says an article in today’s International Herald Tribune that reviews a book by Dan Ariely called Predictably Irrational. According to experiments carried out by Ariely, a professor of bahavioural economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), people will go [...]

Entertaining the “R” word. Will you embrace, spin or hide from that elephant in the room?

“Entertaining the ‘R’ word” is rather poetic, isn’t it? Would it surprise you to know that it was economist Derek Holt (assistant chief economist, RBC Economics Research) who came up with that phrase? Derek is providing the (opening keynote) Economic Update 2008 at my organization’s annual Controllers’ Congress, which begins on Thursday, February 21st. For [...]

US Office of Labour Statistics releases new definitions of public relations practice and new data on numbers of professionals and their average annual income.

The US Bureau of Labour Statistics has just released new and very interesting data on public relations practice in the US economy here and here.
The most startling element of this new report is the substantial difference from the 2007 one in the description of the function.

The germans launch an amazing web site for public relations knowledge. Take a good look!

May I attract your careful attention to a new site just developed by the German Public Relations Association in cooperation with the University of Leipzig? This is the link. Take a good look and comment. It is an amazing breakthrough for professional associations, for professionals and scholars alike and it certainly would benefit from your [...]

A USA Federal Court to decide if Public Relations is Racketeering! Smithfield against UFCW: for the NYT it is free speech, for us it is PR.

I will attempt to summarise, and supply links to the original documents wherever feasible, of what is possibly the most interesting case of a US Federal Court debating an organization’s public relations activities since the Nike/Kasky story… remember?

Public Relations and Social Media: impact sofar and what next? Look at this program for the Euprera-Edelman EuroAtlantic summit in Bruxelles from 13 to 15 of March and make sure you don’t miss it!

An EuroAtlantic summit of senior social media and public relations academics and practitioners will take place, as already indicated in this and other blogs (www.euroblog2008.org) , in Bruxelles from March 13 to 15.
The still preliminary, but almost definite, (I am a member of the organizing committee) seems to me rather juicy, as it [...]

Peer-to-peer roundtable discusses “How effective is corporate governance in Canada?”

On Tuesday, February 5th Direct Engagement Inc. is sponsoring a peer-to-peer roundtable discussion on corporate governance in Canada, “Capital markets in Canada compete globally for issuers and investors. Scandals in the US demonstrated their fragility. Statistics show Canadian regulators devote a smaller percentage of their total budget to enforcement than the US. Is the present [...]