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Reputation lost, reputation won: Lessons from Aristotle and Barack Obama. Ronel Rensburg on Rhetoric and Public Relations. A South African Perspective.

by Ronel Rensburg While watching the acceptance speech (“This is your victory”) by Barack Obama upon winning the presidential race in Chicago, I experienced a long-forgotten feeling of excitement towards political rhetoric as well as a stirring of new-found hope for the USA and the rest of the world. In the presence of hundreds of thousands of people in awe, history was made and lessons were learnt of how communication and public speaking ought to...

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Retaining Professionals Who Thrive on Challenge

This post appeared original on the Institute for Public Relations blog, written by Pamela Blum and Vanessa Tremaro. In any service based industry, client retention and employee retention are inextricably linked. In public relations consultancies, a firm’s success hinges on its employees and the level of service they provide. Their creativity, diligence and intelligence are firms’ most valuable resources. We conducted a study that evaluated and analyzed the factors that contribute to employee disengagement and...

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Live at the Inauguration with 3000 “Friends” per Minute

I had a new experience yesterday that helped me understand the “social” in social media a little better. I use Facebook to maintain with far-distant friends and to get back in touch. So, contrary  to today’s teens who chat with each other online, I am more likely to talk to my current, nearby friends on the phone and in person and to use Facebook to interact with people who are not in my immediate circle. But...

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How cognitive dissonance is impacting this growing universal habit of blaming the media for the worsening of the crisis.

Some 77% of american public opinion (if such an animal ever existed) is reported to consider media reports largely responsible for the worsening of the global economic crisis. What is however even more relevant and scary, is that many governmental and corporate leaders vociferously adopt the same argument, to the point were repetition inevitably ends up digging into collective opinions. For example in my country (Italy) Prime Minister Berlusconi has repeatedly abused the media (his...

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Starving for Context and Translation: Lessons from the 2008 Food Crisis

The first half of 2008 was a blur for me. When the global food crisis hit, the fertilizer industry went from obscurity to centre stage in the blink of an eye. There was little or no time to build up resources, so all of the communicators I know in the sector went into overdrive. While I think we collectively handled the situation pretty competently, I also learned a lot from the situation. Here are some...

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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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2009 – a year for PR career planning

What does the year ahead hold for PR practitioners?  Is the emerging global recession an opportunity or threat to our industry?  Here are my predictions for 2009, a year when, I believe, proactive PR career planning will prove vital in helping the strongest to survive and indeed flourish.

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Will our ‘golden goose’ inadvertently become a blessing for the public relations profession?

A recent Security Exchange Commission investigation on an insider trading scam, innocently involving a Brunswick New York manager, spurs calls for the regulation of the public relations profession. Nina Devlin, an experienced pr professional specialised in acquisition and new listing activities on behalf of clients of the highly reputed Brunswick firm, has been temporarily suspended without pay by her employer when an investigation by the SEC accused her husband Mathew (a trader for Lehman Brothers)...

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Growing professionalism in Portugal, still to be accomplished the shift for the social media / relationship management paradigm

I asked a couple of friends to share their thoughts about the year 2008 for Portuguese PR. The sector is growing firmly despite of the economic context. Important steps towards professionalism have been given with new courses being offered at the post graduate level, and the recent publication of the Code of Professional Conduct by the Portuguese Association of Business Communication is a landmark.