global discussion. local perspectives.
The history of public relations began with PT Barnum parading elephants through small town America in the 1800s - with the famed huckster the cause of the ongoing misunderstanding of the profession. That's the simplistic narrative found in the majority of PR text-book
Before this blog changes format, look and prime authors (I will now continue to post occasionally, but only as a contributor and no longer as coordinator), I would like to report on the very intense and (so far) highly rewarding experience of the Stockholm Accords process that has involved me directly in these last few months, and which will presumably occupy more of my time when the Accords will begin to be implemented, following their...
If a subject to be trusted is ‘one who does what he says….walk the talk and, when useful, talk the walk…' then we must discipline ourselves to think, speak privately and publicly as if our thoughts and words were to appear on the front page of the New York Times.
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'
Open any public relations textbook and the section on crisis management will include examples of how organisations have demonstrated "best" or "worst" practice. And, it's not just the textbooks, as recent incidents have seen plenty of advice from PR "experts" through online and social media.
Public administrations have a reputation for inertia, so it's always refreshing to see innovative counterexamples. The French Office national d'information sur les enseignements et les professions (ONISEP) is tasked by the Ministry of Education to help students, parents and educators to learn about existing professions and various opportunities for training or further studies.
You might have read these last few days of the serious social crisis developed in the southern Italian city of Rosarno in the region of Calabria, where an exasperated local community took to the streets and violently attacked the growing community of African migrants, leaving many wounded.
I have just concluded my course on global relations and intercultural communication at NYU in New York. The intense interaction with 10 highly committed graduate students –two Russian, three American, one Brazilian, one Colombian, one British, one Singaporean– allowed me the opportunity to review some of my less resilient stereotypes and learn much more from them than each of them individually from me. That is the beauty of communication -even in the non symmetric environment...