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...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Test of the Twitter Broadcasting System

One of the arguments of the proponents of social media is that the audience reigns, choosing which content it wants to consume. Broadcasting is bad, the logic goes, because it doesn’t target messages to specific audiences and doesn’t allow them to choose the desired content. On that basis, my admittedly limited experience with Twitter makes me feel like many of the people on the network are guilty of the same crime, except worse: at least...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Commodity blogging

In an article about Mommy Bloggers on her Greenbanana blog, Heather Yaxley evokes the law of supply and demand, noting that “there are too many motoring writers and too few outlets for their words”. She raises a key issue that I don’t think anyone has discussed yet. Will the much heralded rise of the citizen journalist be undermined by the commoditization of the citizen journalist? If so, it seems to me that for a PR...

Posted on Uncategorized

Authentic CEOs

I like the approach Marc Wright from Simply Communicate and Vice Chair of the IABC Europe and Middle East Region takes to discussing authenticity and corporate leadership. First he provides three sets of CEOs that he compares and contrasts (although it’s not always clear to me why those particular people are paired). And then he extracts a list of 10 pointers to help achieve a more authentic voice for the CEO.

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Information overload: a public relator’s risk, but also an opportunity….

In a report here from an Iabc conference last February in Lugano I suggested a thorough consultation of Martin Eppler and Jeanne Mengis ‘s research paper on informaton overload as the best presentation of that conference. I attached the paper, but was immediately warned by a Iabc Guardian that the paper was not for consultation by non Iabc members, and was kindly requested to take it down. I was then (and am today) happy to...

Posted on Classic PR Conversations Seasoned Posts

Two ditsy thoughts and one good answer to the question: what now after Grunig? Online Public Relations by David Phillips and Philip Young

In these recent weeks, and in various encounters with professionals and scholars from around the world, I have stumbled more than once on to the question: ‘what now after Grunig?’… as if the Excellence Project happened to be the most recent development for our body of knowledge. I very much disagree with this interpretation, as much as I disagree with those late adopters who (on the other side?) tend to believe that nothing had happened...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Culture and Public Relations: a letter from Bled, Slovenia

As many of our visitors know, Bled is a small and lovely Slovenian town on the shores of a charming lake where, for 16 consecutive years, a trio of committed and intelligent public relations scholars: Dejan Vercic, Danny Moss and Jon White, successfully convene, every first weekend of July, la ‘crème de la crème’ of global public relations thinking to listen to and discuss papers presented by young, old and middle aged students, scholars and...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Yes we camp. Where does creativity stand in public relations practice?

Yes we camp. Creativity here dramatically overrides any rational argument or concept. I am sure you saw/heard these three simple words during media coverage of the recent G8 in earthquaked Abbruzzo. Another example I vividly remember from Milano’s public walls in the early, highly creative, days of student revolt in the late sixties of the last century: Fascisti porci, domani prosciutti. i.e. ‘fascists pigs, tomorrow hams’. Entire books, millions of bytes would never have been...