Posted on Seasoned Posts

#PRC2010 Trends impacting Public Relations world

This is the time of year when many of us are reflecting about the future, trying to figure out how our profession, our companies, our clients, our societies will be influenced by tendencies and trends. Often this happens because we’re preparing our plans for next year and want to seek opportunities generated by external context; but also because we want to anticipate what is going to impact on our profession. PR Conversations readers are invited...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Pink Gloves, Hashtags and Lost Opportunities

A few weeks ago on the Hobson and Holtz Report (For Immediate Release 493), Shel Holtz mentioned that participants at this year’s Blog World Expo had been requested to use the Twitter hashtag #fightcancer during the day in order to raise awareness for the fight against the disease. At the time, I remember thinking, “So what? What impact did it have?” Cancer is hardly an orphan disease for which basic awareness is required, so what...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Difference between King III and King II Reports on Governance

The King Report on Governance for South Africa 2009 and the King Code of Governance Principles (King III) plus the Practice Notes that support it, were released at the beginning of September. According to Toni Muzi Falconi, “it constitutes a dramatic acceleration of the growth of our profession. Can we now prove to be up to the challenge?”  In March this year, just after the draft King III Report was published for comment, I invited...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Storytelling, Public Relations and The Drum Beat… a wealth of suggestive cases from the world

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...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

On Berlusconi again: when advertising and information find a synthesis and fiction becomes the only reality

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...

Posted on Classic PR Conversations Seasoned Posts

Two ditsy thoughts and one good answer to the question: what now after Grunig? Online Public Relations by David Phillips and Philip Young

In these recent weeks, and in various encounters with professionals and scholars from around the world, I have stumbled more than once on to the question: ‘what now after Grunig?’… as if the Excellence Project happened to be the most recent development for our body of knowledge. I very much disagree with this interpretation, as much as I disagree with those late adopters who (on the other side?) tend to believe that nothing had happened...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Culture and Public Relations: a letter from Bled, Slovenia

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...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Bulgarian blog converses on integration difficulties of social media into public relations practice

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.

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Lies, Damn Lies and Twitter

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...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Freshly squeezed takeaways from the Edelman new media academic summit in DC…

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...