global discussion. local perspectives.
In a nutshell: the world gets more complicated, communication as a dialogue function is increasingly demanding, all stakeholders claim a legitimate interest in a corporate and “pull” what they need, while the communication professional reminds me of the young Dutch boy trying to halt the water bursting through the dam by putting his little fingers in the cracks.
The most stimulating came from Betteke Van Rule: never has public relations been more public! she said from the floor. Which led me to think that, yes!, public relations is definitely about relationships with publics, as many of us have always claimed.
"Over the past years, we’ve seen very smart people make mistakes because they didn’t understand the context in which they were operating" - this sentence is extracted from an interesting op-ed column of last Friday’s NYT under the title 'the power elite'
The communicative organization acts on the insights that relationships have real value, that reputation is shaped through relationships, and that the organization’s own values must be lived in constant dialogue within as well as with its customers, partners and other stakeholders.
This morning's edition of the New York Times carries on it's front page an enligthening article by Alissa Rubin on the Taliban's public relations campaign in Afhganistan, casting a well informed and brilliantly reported portrait of how the Taliban's are increasing in their effort to gain the support of the people.
The story concerning the man who joked on Twitter and subsequently found himself under arrest caught my eye yesterday, particularly after the story a couple of months ago involving the US police officer who ordered a showbiz agent to send a tweet.
My good friend Warren Feek, from the Communication Initiative, has sent the following message...very relevant in general, but even more specifically for our professional community. Please read and, where possible, participate. Thank you.
Read the paper? Nah - that's old news. Watched the broadcast? No need, we were there when it happened. Tracked Twitter trends to spot what's unfolding? Didn't bother, we saw it coming because we know and work directly with the community. How did you tell people? We operated a Living Story.
Co-authored with Mike Klein In the later part of the year that ends today, much attention has been paid to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But another wall seems to have been definitively torn down this year with much less brouhaha: the distinctions between social, political, commercial and employee communication. The Public Relations model of defensive “representation” is thus beginning to give way to the political campaign model of proactive...
Business as UnUsual as the reset for organizational thinking and Changing Mindsets by focussing on the consequences and not the concept of climate change for the public debate. These are my major takeaways from last Friday’s closed door sherpa meeting of global experts, leaders and thinkers of sustainability convened in Rome by Enel. Basically this amounts to what I would call, mostly a stakeholder rleationships agenda. Period. On one hand, the Business as UnUsual concept...