global discussion. local perspectives.
I’m concerned about public relations. In the way that the Texas mother who created the Ignore No More app was concerned by her son ignoring her mobile phone calls. PR – why are you ignoring all the good advice that’s around you? Even more concerning, why are PR practitioners ignorant of the weakness of a discipline that relies on anecdote, criticism and personal opinion, rather than robust evidence, substantiated thinking and considered arguments? We see...
How should you use Twitter for public relations events? This is a topic we’ve pondered among the PR Conversations team (Judy Gombita, Markus Pirchner and Heather Yaxley). Twitter offers potential for conferences, launches, announcements, stunts and many other PR events – and we’ve seen it used well, and badly. We’ve used Twitter at events, and participated remotely in real world activities and those that only exist online. So we thought it would be worthwhile sharing...
That seems to be the message from Philip Young who, with David Phillips, is editing a special edition of the online journal, PRism on the topic: Beyond Online Public Relations (to be published early in 2012). Philip claims that “Today ALL PR is Online PR” and is interested in papers that support or challenge the view that it is no longer meaningful to discuss ‘online PR’ (abstracts of up to 500 words to be emailed...
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...
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...
Innovation in public relations thinking and practice continues to come from all over the world. Interestingly, in most cases the contributions are not from a single local source but from either regional or global perspectives. Here are two very recent cases
….And it’s true, my friend, we can even do miracles, create a legend; turn a fairy-tale into reality, transform a fly into an elephant, a donkey – into a camel, and throw the negative into the dust of a street…
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?’.
Last night, at New York’s Yale Club, I participated in the Institute for Public Relations’ Annual Distinguished Lecture and Awards event. The lecture was by Jon Iwata, IBM’s Senior Vice President, who heads the marketing, communication and citizenship organization departments of that company. A full house, jammed with many of America’s most senior and reputed public relators. On my side, a lot of curiosity for Iwata. I have always admired IBM and, as he’s been...
Business as UnUsual as the reset for organizational thinking and Changing Mindsets by focussing on the consequences and not the concept of climate change for the public debate. These are my major takeaways from last Friday’s closed door sherpa meeting of global experts, leaders and thinkers of sustainability convened in Rome by Enel. Basically this amounts to what I would call, mostly a stakeholder rleationships agenda. Period. On one hand, the Business as UnUsual concept...