Posted on Classic PR Conversations PR Vision

Declaring piffle on those "traditional PR" publicity arguments

Recently I visited Black Creek Pioneer Village, a rather unique “recreated” village (it is described as an “outdoor living history museum”) harkening back to the 1860s, which has grown both in density and its rich “relating” of history in the approximately 50 years since its inception. As someone who holds a double-specialist undergraduate degree in English and History—and, more recently, as a proponent of the “organizational narrative“—it should be obvious why I have an affinity...

Posted on PR Mediums

Pondering public relations as project management

Update: Embedding public relations with clarity, candour and no-pants humour has now published in the Journal of Professional Communication, Volume 3, Issue 1 (2013). Later in November 2013, my submission for The Journal of Professional Communication (JPC) publishes, which is an “ideas” review of Scott Berkun’s fifth book, The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work. Scott Berkun describes his 21 months of working at Automattic as “participatory journalism.” My JPC take is...

Posted on PR Sense

Online public relations is not that different—crowdsourcing isn’t a feasible strategy

There’s an old adage that decisions by committee really aren’t that effective, particularly as the eventual outputs and outcomes tend to be second rate. Plus no one is truly accountable or assumes an authoritative role and voice. This tends to be an internal problem, perhaps reflective of a corporate culture lacking in vision and leadership. Something similar that’s perplexed me for awhile is this nascent concept about recruiting “friends” to assist in online corporate—or, more...

Posted on PR Axis

Constructing the Organizational Narrative: PR definition in the making

There’s an insidious, four-letter word that continues to haunt and largely define the public relations industry (at least in the public’s estimation): Spin. We know this. We fight it. But a big part of the problem is that the average person still does not know what it is we do. For that matter, some practitioners appear confused, limiting PR to media relations and/or publicity. Perhaps even more dangerous, the remit of PR is restricted to...

Posted on PR Nexus

Tiny bites of differentiation, feeding the business body and soul

Cross-posted from Ellen (Elli) St. George Godfrey’s Ability, Success Growth blog, this is the “framing” post for this week’s #kaizenblog chat (where I’m joining regular host, Elli, as the guest moderator). This is not a typical PR Conversations post, but it does fall within the areas of “reflect a wide variety of voices” (i.e., including boundary spanning beyond traditional public relations) and “bring a sense of fun and excitement into debate” as per Our Vision...