Posted on Seasoned Posts

Have More Walls Come Tumbling Down?

 Co-authored with Mike Klein In the later part of the year that ends today, much attention has been paid to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But another wall seems to have been definitively torn down this year with much less brouhaha: the distinctions between social, political, commercial and employee communication. The Public Relations model of defensive “representation” is thus beginning to give way to the political campaign model of proactive...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

A year end invitation to discuss the global public relations attack against Google

I have no personal gripe with Google If anything, as an intense yet only partial user of its many and increasing services, I am a satisfied consumer of Google. This however does not necessarily imply that I am an ally. You have surely realized over these recent weeks and months that Google is under an intense public relations attack globally driven by an explicit and implicit coalition of mainstream media and book publishers , of...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Public Relations, Capitalism and Democracy – Public Relations and Development: two provoKations from my excellent students

I have just concluded my course on global relations and intercultural communication at NYU in New York. The intense interaction with 10 highly committed graduate students –two Russian, three American, one Brazilian, one Colombian, one British, one Singaporean– allowed me the opportunity to review some of my less resilient stereotypes and learn much more from them than each of them individually from me. That is the beauty of communication -even in the non symmetric environment...

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#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...

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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

+10%! those increasingly muddy waters between evaluation/measurement and return on investment

A few days ago, I accompanied a few colleagues to an important pitch for a global public relations program on behalf of a prominent market leader on which we had been feverishly working for the three preceding weeks.. We went through the whole proposal and, at the very end, the Ceo asked: ‘ok, this is all very fine and dandy, but how would you estimate the impact of all this on our bottom line?’.

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Til Death Do Us Part? Models of Engagement

Last week I had the pleasure of discovering the Champagne Bar at St Pancras station in London in the company of Michael Klein, an excellent internal comms professional currently based in Brussels. The subject of engagement came up, and Mike got pretty passionate. He thinks that the term “engagement” is bandied about too lightly and that organizations haven’t really thought through what kind of engagement they mean or really want. While he has articulated his...