Results of European wide survey: corporate pr to overcome marketing pr; social media relations to catch up with mainstream

5 Replies to “Results of European wide survey: corporate pr to overcome marketing pr; social media relations to catch up with mainstream”

1. Okay, they sent out 20.000 personal invitations via email, but obviously that’s only a (small) part of the profession. And if I did my maths right, that’s 5.5% responding, which is good but not overwhelming. But enough of number-crunching.
   Toni is pointing to a much more relevant aspect – general agreement on indicators -, which from a european perspective asks for an intensified involvement of EUPRERA. And I might add, that we’d need enhanced “logistic” means (humanpower, budgets), which could be provided by CERP members (i.e. national pr associations). Or in short: joint effort of EUPRERA and CERP. (And on a global scale???)

2. Brian, the arguments you submit to question the validity of these regional surveys are certainly sound, inasmuch as even in one country (or city, for that matter) there are many differences, as what you receive from a satellite approach are generic indicators.
   However generic indicators are often useful as a reference point. For example if, say in Italy (or in Rome), I run a similar survey whose results indicate serious deviances from the regional ones, I can fairly well decide to act accordingly: I would be doing no harm, but probably doing something useful.
   The representativeness of the survey, as Markus points out, is another weakness, but I am not aware of other surveys at a european level which have involved more than 20 thousand professionals with more than 1000 active participants. Any research company would be very happy with such a result and some would even dare to say it is representative of the universe (which the authors of this survey never say, of course).
   However, it would be, in my view, extremely useful if we found a general agreement on which indicators need to go to form what would be considered an emerging, emerged, semideveloped, developed and sophisticated public relations market.
   As you know I also teach global relations and intercultural communication and this is one of the core elements of my course and I would certainly welcome suggestions.
   Is it the number of professionals; is it the professional dislocation of these (private, public, social organizations; inhouse and consultancies); is it the number of students in under, graduate and post graduate; is it the distribution of roles interpreted by these professionals; is it the development of the media system; the presence of civil society; the level of democracy; the level of competition in the economy….etc…etc..
   There are many many different variables which will probably differ more between Albuquerque and New York than between Germany and Greece….
   In a preceding post I argued the need to develop a model of a public relations infrastructure of a given territory, to monitor the variables in order to be able to improve the effectiveness of public relations practice.
   Suggestions anyone?

3. Brian,

   re: trust
   Never attribute to ignorance what can equally be explained by sloppyness
   :-))

4. The survey is very interesting, no doubt. But as far as the figures are concerned we should not forget that – as the research teams points out – the results are NOT representative. How could they? The sample consists of approx. 1100 respondents from 22 european countries. That’s an average of 50. That wouldn’t even be representative for a small country as Austria.
   And there is a second aspect to take into consideration: the significant differences in PR “culture” in those countries. Again, from an Austrian pov I don’t see e.g. that social media are of any significant concern among PR experts (both in theory and in practice). Yet.
   And I don’t share their interpretation that “PR professionals are also hooked on evaluating corporate reputation, though this overall indicator can hardly be used to set goals and optimize communication management”. I guess that the survey is referring to the Reputation Index, and insofar the interpretation may be correct, but there are other means to evaluate reputation, which in fact CAN be used to set goals etc. One of this systems being the Reputation Management System developed by Prof. Dr. Diana Ingenhoff from the University of Fribourg (CH), a very complex tool that allows to draw very practical conclusions for communication management. Telekom Austria, which has introduced this RMS 2 years ago has been awarded with the German PR Award 2007.
   Hopefully I’ll be able to write in more detail about the Reputation Management System soon.

5. Looking at Europe from across the ocean, but doing ti often accompanied by a woman who left a communist country at nine years of age in order to get somewhere free, leaves me with lots of questions.

   Over here, a writer / researcher / smart guy named Ian Adams has written a couple of books comparing Canada and the USA, One, Fire and ICe, subdivides each country into various areas, and then compares them. All of Canada is more similar to all of Canada, buy far, than the USA is to the USA. Texas, Ian finds, is very diffrent from the state of Washington (Seattle, Spokane, mountains, ocean) Florida is differennt from New England.

   Canada is more like the US north east than most of the USA is like the US north east.

   So when I red about Europe, I wonder how importanmt it is to understand differences between countries, now that Europe is one big happy family.

   France, Germany, and the UK have, as far as I can tell, resonably advanced PR operations at various levels, across various industries, but I wonder about Poland and Portugal and Latvia. Spain?

   So, how necessary is it in a study like this to start sorting things out by whether a country is ex-communist, is a branch-plant country or a head office country, is heavily immigrant-packed, and so on.

   Most often when I read Canadian marketing or PR or similar research studies, they seem to ignore reporting on the attitudes of the non-English (some at leat include French-speaking Quebeckers who “live” in that language). But when we read demographic studies, we find Canada’s becoming Chinese-Indian – assorted South Asian. We have no idea of how they have responded to various communications-related surveys, although BMW and Mercedes recognize the market — both keep running ads showign their top sales reps,a nd many of these are visible minorities (by Canadian standards, although pretty soon white wil be the visible minority if three big cities.

   Also of interest to me in the study was the paragraphs above and below a blue chart on page three; one talked about maintaining trust and one talked about building trust.

   Well, which is it?

   Designing a PR program to keep on keeping on is vastly different from doing a turnaround.

   BAK

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