Posted on Seasoned Posts

From Paul Seaman: defending public relations against social media hype…

Recently, I’ve been involved in a lot of debate and chatter about the implications of social media. As a consequence, Toni Muzi Falconi asked me whether I’d like to draw some lessons for PR Conversations. Thanks, Toni, and here goes: It is often said that we are witnessing the birth of a media revolution which amounts to a social, economic and political transformation. I don’t agree. I’m almost sorry what follows isn’t a bold settled...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

From Paul Seaman: defending public relations against social media hype

Recently, I’ve been involved in a lot of debate and chatter about the implications of social media. As a consequence, Toni Muzi Falconi asked me whether I’d like to draw some lessons for PR Conversations. Thanks, Toni, and here goes: It is often said that we are witnessing the birth of a media revolution which amounts to a social, economic and political transformation. I don’t agree. I’m almost sorry what follows isn’t a bold settled...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

The two-faced god and our cusp catastrophe

News that celebutante Kim Kardashian is to produce a ‘reality’ show on public relations sent shivers of dread down my spine this week. More than anything else, it highlighted (for me) the fact that as a profession, we are in the midst of a cusp catastrophe that requires attention from us all. For several months now I have been pondering this phenomenon, evidenced by the multiplicity of practice ‘realities’ that surround us – of which...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Action diplomacy, just like action PR

As I was reading the thoughtful article by Carne Ross in Europe’s World on the need to re-think national diplomacy, I was struck by the parallels with discussions of the evolving role of public relations as a profession. For instance, he states, “For some reason, diplomats and governments have believed that somehow the message about the role of governments can be separated in the public’s mind from what they actually do.” You could easily substitute...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Really “strategic” communications!

In an analysis of the speech John Brennan delivered yesterday about the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism efforts, Steven R. Corman notes that one of the five elements seems to be “stop framing this as a  conflict of interests and start framing it as a pursuit of common interests.” In my view, this is exactly the point of public relations, and I find it interesting to see this principle so central to the administration’s new policy. Thanks...

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

Show me the money? A challenge for PR

For the last 50 or so years, advertising money has made the world go round.  Despite the fact that Viscount Leverhulme (or was it John Wanamaker – either way, both were early pioneers of advertising for their companies) is quoted as having said: I know that half of my advertising budget is wasted, but I’m not sure which half The fact that half of the spend was considered to be worthwhile was enough to compensate...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Cultural diversities [sic], isn’t it implicit?

As early as my teenage years, I claimed that every family is a kingdom with its own culture and language.  It only took the annual debates over which grandmother’s stuffing recipe should be used for the Thanksgiving turkey to convince me. For this reason, I’ve always thought that intercultural relationships have one important, yet terribly underestimated, thing going for them. When two people from the “same” culture fall in love, they assume that the other...

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 Seasoned Posts

Who should be dealing with the sponsoring of online conversations?

A sponsored online conversation is loosely defined as ‘the practice of paying a blogger to post about your brand’. This is how Bateman Group’s Bill Bourdon begins a post in which he argues with what appear to me to be solid arguments that, while it is true that this practice should be considered as paid media and therefore fall in the territory of advertising agencies, it is also true, Bourdon adds, that quote yet, how...