Posted on Current PR Conversations PR Motion PR Vision

Career ambitions beyond strategic communications

It is nearly fifty years since Broom and Smith first published their studies into professional role development in public relations. This established career ambitions of advancement through a hierarchy of aspiration from delivering technical services to attaining an expert manager position. This simple structure has been critiqued for reflecting a traditional favouring of a linear male mobility. Early research found that women in public relations tended to remain in technical positions, while men dominated management...

Posted on Current PR Conversations PR Mediums

A mindful approach to using social media as professional communicators

Over the past decade or so, public relations has been in a rollercoaster relationship with social media. Nervous initially to jump onboard, since then we’ve been up the hype cycle with several peaks of inflated expectations followed by swoops down into the trough of disillusionment. Are we currently in a valley of despair following all the shenanigans of ‘fake news’ and ‘data scandals’? Or on an upwards slope of hope driven by artificial intelligence (AI)...

Posted on Current PR Conversations PR Motion

Fit for the 21st and digital century: PR should abandon its managerial dreams and focus more on achieving its promises

Is it time for public relations practice to abandon its managerial dreams? Prompted by the previous PR Conversations post (Professional PR Development. Why bother?), Dr Ana Adi and Thomas Stoeckle consider the legacy of Grunig’s Model of Excellence and a need to adjust to a contemporary digital environment. Ana Adi With all the recent focus on the rapid technological changes, I have found myself confronted more often, both in my courses at Quadriga University of Applied Sciences...

Posted on Current PR Conversations PR Axis

Relations with customers and prospects

In serialising chapters from the 1948 book Your Public Relations since October 2013, I have been struck by the relevance of the authors’ thinking and practice, often in total contrast to arguments that PR today is more strategic than in the past. The ten chapters featured so far seem to counter the progressive perspective of PR’s history. The next chapter, discussed in this post, however, is different and feels remarkably old-fashioned in many respects. Its...

Posted on PR Motion

Calculating your worth in public relations

A basic calculation of what you are worth as a PR practitioner comes by dividing your annual income by the number of hours that you work. Not the number that you are employed for, but how many hours you work. Often in PR we ‘over-service’ – not only if we work as a consultant but within in-house roles too. It has become ingrained in practice that clocking up hours, and getting the job done is...

Posted on PR Mediums

Popping candy politics prioritises publicity over policies

With the date of the UK general election set as 7 May 2015 – and dissolution of Parliament therefore already determined as 30 March, we’re in a period of what I’m calling ‘popping candy politics’ that prioritises publicity over policies. As an example, last week brought us hashtag #pinkbus as the Labour party chose a pink minibus for a tour of the country that was intended to connect with female voters. The result was a focus...

Posted on PR Axis

Winning better relations with the community

One of the notable developments of scholarship in public relations in recent years has been an increased focus on its role in society. A socio-cultural turn was noted by Lee Edwards and Carrie Hodges in their 2011 book: Public Relations, Society & Culture, which presented PR as a “cultural intermediary occupation…central to economic and cultural life due to the power and influence it commands”. In noting how the lifestyles of those involved in such occupations...

Posted on PR Techster

Six social media and digital communications trends for 2015

One of the most enjoyable hybrid academic-practitioner experiences I have had this year has been as course leader of the PR Academy Digital Communications Certificate course. The reason is that we have been able to incorporate a lot of contemporary thinking around ways of learning as well as the emerging field of digital communications and social media. This includes blended approaches to online and offline learning (with Stuart Bruce leading a face-to-face session, alongside my...

Posted on PR Axis

How to build better relations with employees

The first chapter in Part III of Your Public Relations, the 1948 book we are serialising at PR Conversations, is authored by Kirk Earnshaw, industrial relations editor of Modern Industry Magazine, said to have been “a foremost authority” in the field of labour relations who offered “sound public relations procedures to industrial relations”. Alongside sharing insight from Earnshaw’s chapter, this post offers a review of the newly published book, Internal Communications: A manual for practitioners...

Posted on PR Mediums

Sharing Toni Muzi Falconi's biased memoirs

We have always been proud to have the support of Toni Muzi Falconi whose original blog became PR Conversations, and he then passed the editorship to Judy Gombita, Markus Pirchner and myself. Toni has now published his ‘biased memoirs’ entitled glow worms – which can be downloaded free as an ebook from the Biased Memoirs site, with a request to donate to the Cordoba Initiative – or as a paperback via Lulu. Toni  decided to...