global discussion. local perspectives.
Next Thursday and Friday (September 28-29) in Portsmouth (New Hampshire,USA) the Institute for Public Relations will be holding its annual Measurement Summit. The program sounds highly engaging and this is very good news for us, as we are all very much aware of the importance of this issue for the future of our profession…..
The September issue of Italian monthly media and journalism monthly Prima Comunicazione , which has just hit the newstands, has a four page interview I did with Harold Burson in view of his forthcoming visit to Italy scheduled for October 12 and 13. Some may recall that I had already posted the interview with harold burson on this post some days ago only to remove it when I realised that I was not doing the monthly magazine a...
At WPP, we have never seen responsible corporate behaviour as a coat of public relations varnish… From Sir Martin Sorrell’s opening letter of the 2005 WPP Corporate Social Responsibility Report So, the CEO of world’s largest communication conglomerate, which incorporates ‘la crème de la crème’ of public relations consultancies around the world, describes his opinion of our profession: varnish. No words…. Maybe it would be useful if the CEO’s of the many H&K’s and B-M’s...
Xprl stands for ‘extensible mark up public relations language‘ and for two years has been the focus of an international grass roots project based in London operating also in the US and in Italy, initially supported by the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management -the umbrella organization of 65 national public relations professional associations representing some 160 thousand professionals….
The principle that public relations in any organization (private, public or social) needs to be involved in the decision making process before decisions are taken…and this…. assuming that the truly strategic role of our profession is of a ‘reflexive’ nature, which implies a careful listening, understanding and interpreting of stakeholder groups in order to improve the quality of that process and to accelerate the implementation of its decisions, will be featured as the core content...
Ever since Edward Bernays proposed Public Relations as an attempt, by information or persuasion, to engineer public support for an activity, a cause, a movement or an institution, the practice definitely moved towards a publicity-propaganda style…..
Old models of public relations practice were framed around the hierarchical organisational structures created in the 19th and 20th Century. Business and organisational models have changed dramatically in the last five years, with new-born organisations/businesses increasingly adopting community-based, value-driven principles upon which to found their commercial or altruistic relationships….
Richard Edelman’s recent decision to withdraw his company from the US Council of Pr Firms on the grounds that ‘we disagree with the Council on a few fundamental points’… as well as the unexpected reactivation of a public debate in the US public relations community on licensing, after many years since Eddie Bernays in the early nineties lost his attempt to convince his peers to adopt it, have provoked plenty of interest in various professional...
All hell broke loose in our community these last few days following the British media stampede on the news that Blair’s government had trebled its public relations expenses in the last ten years. Read this sample from the Daily Telegraph.
The other day, Italian Premier Romano Prodi, in saluting his young compatriots sailing off to Lebanon to form the larger part of the UN military peacekeeping force, unabashedly called this ‘an historic event’. For the first time in many years, under strong pressure from the Italian government and with a grudgingly active support from Jacques Chirac, the EU gained its first explicit leadership of a major peacekeeping effort. Many critical observers, in Italy and elsewhere,...