Posted on Seasoned Posts

The Business of Business is… Responsible Business: where public relations becomes relevant, in the form of stakeholder relationship management

1. The perspective of this new-year note on ‘the business of business is responsible business’ is that the current economic crisis is only one of the consequences of a historic discontinuity (see here) in which we all find ourselves immersed since the end of the twentieth century. A discontinuity originated by the radical subversion of the way we think of space and time induced by communication technologies and their impact on the acceleration of the...

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Putting the Public Back in Public Relations

“Social Media and the Future of PR” is the theme of Euroblog2008, currently underway in Brussels (presented by EUPRERA, Edelman, IHECS and Département de communication, Université catholique du Louvain). I participated on a panel on chaired by Toni Muzi Falconi (who leads the Institute’s Commission on Global Public Relations Research). This gave me the opportunity to talk about two important research projects connected to the Institute. • “New Media, New Influencers and Implications for the...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Public, private, community, individual

I received a friendship request today on a social networking platform for communicators.  I have no idea who this person is, and I suspect that he is a consultant randomly inviting other people to be his friend in order to expand his prospect list. His message basically just says hello and provides no info on why he wants to be my friend (and after looking at his profile, I still have no idea).  In the...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Reinventing diplomacy

I sometimes think that we get a little obsessed with what PR is and isn’t, and I am not always sure that these conversations do anything more than keep us busy navel gazing. What I’d like to think about is what PR is becoming…and that’s everything. My personal belief is that formalized communications evolved because it was the only way to manage as organizations grew in size. What is happening today, in my opinion, is...

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What is ‘the public interest’?

A run on the Northern Rock bank in the UK this week got me thinking about ‘the public interest’ again, especially after Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England told a House of Commons select committee that he would have preferred to give covert aid to Northern Rock, without the public being aware of the Bank’s intervention, but that would be illegal.

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How can public relations improve the quality of decisions and accelerate their implementation?

If I had ten savvy CEO’s from the private, public and social sectors of the economy around a table and, at a certain point of our conversation, I asked them: ‘amongst the following three challenges you face today, which -in your opinion-is the one which deserves your priority attention?’ ……and the three challenges were: °identify, attract, retain and capitalize talent; °improve the quality of management decisions and accelerate their time of implementation; °effectively integrate the...

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Blogging from Vilnius on black pr. A really freezing shower for all of us!

The only thing that I regret is not having been able to understand (because of the lack of an english translation) of three and one half presentations (out of nine!) which unfortunately were in the Russian language (the Russian one of course, Belarus, Polish and half of the Latvian one). However the ones I was able to understand (English, Italian, Lithuanian, Ukrainan and German one) were well worth it.