New tools don’t make New PR

I probably don’t come to this in the best frame of mind, having just listened to several hours of rant about how social media is ‘The New PR’. I am a little jaded by this, as it has become something of an ‘old story’, particularly if you have been involved with the ongoing application of online communications tools.

Catherine Arrow comments on more than one recent post and talks to us about our optical illusions and cultural tribes in public relations…

Dear Toni,This comment really bounces across several of your recent posts as there are certain threads of thought which criss-cross and intersect. I don’t know if you have come across a fascinating article by Greg Leichty,(2003, Journal of Public Relations Research 15 (4), 277–304), which looks at the cultural tribes of public relations….

Again on one-company-one-voice: is it feasable? is it desirable? And how does one cope with social media?

A friend sends me the following: Your recent post on the idea of the one-company, one-voice concept becoming more obsolete as a result of diversity and social media is very interesting. In a recent conversation my big boss portended that the very idea behind the definition of corporate communication is that a company must be able to project itself with one voice. If I understand her point, then the “one voice” concept is practiced in...

And now to Vilnius, to discuss Lithuania at the crossroad of ethical and “black” public relations..

While preparing for last winter’s ‘Global Relations and Intercultural Communication’ course for the students of NYU’s Master of Science in Public Relations and Corporate Communication, one of the most surprising evidences I discovered in reviewing the existing literature, was the scarcity of research and conceptualization of the ‘personal influence’ model (save for the Indian scholar Sriramesh Krishnamurthy) and, in parallel, the over abundance of evidence from the many existing descriptions of practices in many areas...

Is the idea of immaterial (intangibile?) infrastructure only an oxymoron? Or could it also be part of the foundation materials for PR 2.0?

You might remember that only a short time ago it was generally accepted that the Dutch or British ways to integration via a multicultural approach (i.e. stimulating different identities to be maintained and preserved by fostering and enabling dialogue and conversation) had produced effective results; while the traditional US based approach to integration via the ‘melting pot’ had exploded in the early eighties with the eruption of traditional American societal values.

When two in an organization share the same opinion, one is too many? Is the one-company-one voice paradigm obsolete because of diversity and social media??

May we still claim that public relations is effective when an organization is able to perform the traditional and consolidated one company-one voice paradigm? Or has the growing convergence between the concepts of diversity and social media shattered this widely held stereotype in our professional community? I tried to raise this issue in my last post, but stimulated no reactions.

Pangloss and Cassandra from Istanbul. What’s ahead? What impact onPublic Relations Associations?

Thanks to Margaretha Sjoberg’s leadership, current Chair of Cerp (the Confederation of European public relations associations, today a substantial and active part of the Global Alliance); and to the warm and friendly hospitality of our colleagues and friends from the Turkish PR Association, the Cerp Board held the other day in Istanbul a lively discussion on where the profession might be in five years time and what associations should therefore be doing today to accelerate...