global discussion. local perspectives.
As I was reading the thoughtful article by Carne Ross in Europe’s World on the need to re-think national diplomacy, I was struck by the parallels with discussions of the evolving role of public relations as a profession. For instance, he states, “For some reason, diplomats and governments have believed that somehow the message about the role of governments can be separated in the public’s mind from what they actually do.” You could easily substitute...
As our global public relations community intensifies its discussion and analysis of the storytelling approach to organizational communication, may I strongly suggest you make good use of this link to the just distributed issue of Warren Feek’s The Drum Beat newsletter, entirely dedicated to storytelling? As editor Kier Olsen DeVries writes in his introduction: This issue of The Drum Beat focuses on stories, asking: what do we mean by the use of oral history, or...
Some of my international friends and colleagues have been probing me in these weeks to try and rationalise, from a communicational perspective, what is going on in my country. A country which sees a priapist Premier, I wouldn’t say merrily… but certainly successfully, thrive through a national as well as global, ongoing now for months day-in-day-out reputational storm which has -yes!- turned him into the laughing stock of most global and national elites (including his...
As many of our visitors know, Bled is a small and lovely Slovenian town on the shores of a charming lake where, for 16 consecutive years, a trio of committed and intelligent public relations scholars: Dejan Vercic, Danny Moss and Jon White, successfully convene, every first weekend of July, la ‘crème de la crème’ of global public relations thinking to listen to and discuss papers presented by young, old and middle aged students, scholars and...
Nelly Benova is a forceful and highly proactive figure in Bulgarian Public Relations. She represents the Bulgarian PR Association in the Global Alliance, in Cerp and also manages the CIPR accreditation course in Sofia. This interview she had with me in Vienna a few days ago has just been posted and might stimulate some discussion also amongst our visitors here at PRC.
When used properly, statistics can be very informative. However, some statistics are meaningless, and some are dishonest. Interpreting statistics requires some technical knowledge, and most people do not have the basic training to know how to read statistics and to take them with a grain of salt. Statistics are particularly misleading with regard to the early days of any phenomenon because percentages are distorted by the small base: moving from 1 to 8 readers/users/etc. is an...
I wish to inform our global professional community that, directly from the horse’s mouth, we now also have a formal definition of Berlusconi’s public relations model: la politica del cucù (pronounced cucku)! The term comes, I presume, from a recent televised joke he exposed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel when he suddenly appeared in front of her, stepping out from hiding behind a huge statue with a great smile, his two waving hands next to...
Leaving aside a fastidious reiteration of usual buzzwords such as twitter and facebook, closely followed by obama and engagement, and the conceptual thinness of some of the cases which were presented, more focussed on numbers in relative context, rather than on the why..s of selected operational tools, this event (may I call it a space, also picking up from Richard’s presentation?) was truly an intensive, delightful, warm and fire cracking learning experience. Frankly more so...
With its roots in 1546, the wisdom underlying the John Heywood proverb ‘enough is enough‘ has been recognised by many. But when is enough truly enough? The churning over the recessionary pressures – real or otherwise – have, more so in recent months, led many to question the economic models we have used for so long. Unsurprising really, as they are models which, as I have mentioned here before, were created for another space and...
Social media are increasingly considered by the public relations community (scholars, educators, professionals) as a ‘separate thing’, different from mainstream. Is this really so? And, even if it is… do you think it is advisable for us, mostly educators, to nurture this ‘separation’?