Posted on PR Sense

Lies and Secrets: the currency of public relations

You don’t have to dig too far to find criticisms of public relations as involving lying and other less than ethical practices. The normal response from the industry is denial, citation of codes of conduct and finger pointing at isolated ‘others’. But is lying really an absolute ‘do or don’t do’ matter? In reality, doesn’t everyone tell lies to some extent on a regular basis? So as professional communicators, doesn’t that mean PR practitioners trade...

Posted on PR Sense Seasoned Posts

PR is what PR does – a question of ethics

Not surprisingly there’s been a great deal of discussion of ethics in relation to the News Corp phone-hacking scandal.  Although journalism and corporate governance are facing the real ethical questions, public relations has been brought into the mix by many commentators.  Indeed, the Vancouver Sun attributes any ethical lapses in journalism to the practice of PR, whilst the UK’s Guardian newspaper drags out the lazy PR disaster label. We’ve also seen the usual implications that...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Difference between King III and King II Reports on Governance

The King Report on Governance for South Africa 2009 and the King Code of Governance Principles (King III) plus the Practice Notes that support it, were released at the beginning of September. According to Toni Muzi Falconi, “it constitutes a dramatic acceleration of the growth of our profession. Can we now prove to be up to the challenge?”  In March this year, just after the draft King III Report was published for comment, I invited...

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

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

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

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...