Posted on PR Mediums

A mediated dissertation on crisis coverage

Traditional news vs. social media: what’s different? Guest post by Bob Conrad, PhD, APR Picking a dissertation topic is not for the faint of heart or the unprepared. Narrowing an issue into components and sub-components involves, first, picking a topic, then exploring what others have researched in that area and, finally, finding your own niche. Crisis communications, social media and higher-education leadership were my interest areas, and it literally took years to find a topic...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

A year end invitation to discuss the global public relations attack against Google

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...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

Action diplomacy, just like action PR

As I was reading the thoughtful article by Carne Ross in Europe’s World on the need to re-think national diplomacy, I was struck by the parallels with discussions of the evolving role of public relations as a profession. For instance, he states, “For some reason, diplomats and governments have believed that somehow the message about the role of governments can be separated in the public’s mind from what they actually do.” You could easily substitute...

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

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

Lies, Damn Lies and Twitter

When used properly, statistics can be very informative. However, some statistics are meaningless, and some are dishonest. Interpreting statistics requires some technical knowledge, and most people do not have the basic training to know how to read statistics and to take them with a grain of salt. Statistics are particularly misleading with regard to the early days of any phenomenon because percentages are distorted by the small base: moving from 1 to 8 readers/users/etc. is an...

Posted on Seasoned Posts

The ethical state, social communication and public relations…

How effective are social communication campaigns, specifically when they are enacted by public institutions and their aim is to con-vince publics to modify their day-to-day behaviours? The amount of literature is overwhelming and highly contradictory. Of course governments and other public agencies or institutions, normally advised by many of our colleagues who thrive on the trade and tickle the ego of these organization’s leaderships, tend to overlook and set aside the contradictory evidence. Yet recent...