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Berlusconi has begun to rationalise and theorise his ‘cucku’ model of public relations

I wish to inform our global professional community that, directly from the horse’s mouth, we now also have a formal definition of Berlusconi’s public relations model: la politica del cucù (pronounced cucku)! The term comes, I presume, from a recent televised joke he exposed to German Chancellor Angela Merkel when he suddenly appeared in front of her, stepping out from hiding behind a huge statue with a great smile, his two waving hands next to...

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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...

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The ethical state, social communication and public relations…

How effective are social communication campaigns, specifically when they are enacted by public institutions and their aim is to con-vince publics to modify their day-to-day behaviours? The amount of literature is overwhelming and highly contradictory. Of course governments and other public agencies or institutions, normally advised by many of our colleagues who thrive on the trade and tickle the ego of these organization’s leaderships, tend to overlook and set aside the contradictory evidence. Yet recent...

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A peep through the Vatican’s public relations efforts. A major speech by Father Lombardi on social media

The relationship between the Vatican and Public Relations is, at the very least, as old as the Propaganda Fide (1622)… More recently…the first Masters program in Public Relations ever held in Italy was in 1960/61, organized for the Vatican by the Dominican Father Felix Morlion, head of the then Pro Deo University of Rome. (Today it is LUISS, a reputed Business School owned by the National Confederation of Industry.) Joaquim Navarro Vals, the Spanish lay...

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A RESET of our profession? Takeaways from Global PR directors of General Electric, Pfizer, Mastercard, Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, Swiss RE, Viacom

The day after Pfizer announced it would ensure free medicines to laid-off and non insured workers for one year, Ray Kerins, head of global pr for the big pharma company (‘we are 50 bl. dollar start up company’ he says…) told an attentive audience of colleagues representing agencies from all over the world, that the idea had not come from top management nor from him, but directly from employees who gathered around internal social networks.

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This is a call for help. What do we mean by Global Public Relations? And why is it important?

John Doorley is my academic director at NYU’s Master in Public Relations and Corporate Communication where I teach Global Relations and Intercultural Communication, and Helio Fred Garcia is one of that program’s most respected and cherished instructors teaching two courses: ethics and strategy. These two elightened scholars, but also and mostly, highly experienced professionals, edited and co-authored in 2006 with Routledge a Reputation Management book which has done very well, and is now being entirely...

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‘Enough is Enough’ – an economic model for Net-Work and Net-Worth?

With its roots in 1546, the wisdom underlying the John Heywood proverb ‘enough is enough‘ has been recognised by many. But when is enough truly enough? The churning over the recessionary pressures – real or otherwise – have, more so in recent months, led many to question the economic models we have used for so long. Unsurprising really, as they are models which, as I have mentioned here before, were created for another space and...

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Should you avoid ’sinking the boat’ or ‘missing the boat’? The New Yorker on advertising spent. Does it also apply to public relations?

Some of you, I am sure, have read The Wisdom of Crowds, a 2004 book by James Surowiecki, financial editor of The New Yorker. It is a very inspiring book and, although hardly citing public relations, it is for us what one might call a ‘professional book’, in the sense that it clearly illustrates how by listening carefully to a specific public, an organizational decision whose consequences relate to that public and/or vice versa will...

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Why Public Relations should celebrate the G20 meeting

As PR professionals we should celebrate the G20 meeting this week in London as an opportunity to demonstrate what public relations is all about.  Essentially, this “informal forum” seeks to promote “open and constructive discussion between industrial and emerging-market countries on key issues related to global economic stability”.   This would seem to reflect an approach to building relationships and two-way symmetric communications. At the core of G20, we have 20 global leaders holding one-to-one meetings,...