global discussion. local perspectives.
To paraphrase that old saying about advertising, is it possible that organizations are wasting half their PR spend? In the face of plans by many governments - such as the UK and Italy - to cut their communications budget, how should the public relations industry respond? Here I share some of my thoughts - and a suggestion from Toni Muzi-Falconi.
Although primarily focused on changes to newspaper readership and engagement models, an underlying quest is answers to the challenges impacting public relations practitioners regarding audiences who are only prepared to read (and opine about) newspaper content found online and at no charge.
Open any public relations textbook and the section on crisis management will include examples of how organisations have demonstrated "best" or "worst" practice. And, it's not just the textbooks, as recent incidents have seen plenty of advice from PR "experts" through online and social media.
It seems that, during his first year in office, President Obama is progressively losing control of his narrative. It also seems that Italy’s Berlusconi is, instead, holding on to his narrative with success.
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
This is the time of year when many of us are reflecting about the future, trying to figure out how our profession, our companies, our clients, our societies will be influenced by tendencies and trends. Often this happens because we’re preparing our plans for next year and want to seek opportunities generated by external context; but also because we want to anticipate what is going to impact on our profession. PR Conversations readers are invited...
….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 weeks ago on the Hobson and Holtz Report (For Immediate Release 493), Shel Holtz mentioned that participants at this year’s Blog World Expo had been requested to use the Twitter hashtag #fightcancer during the day in order to raise awareness for the fight against the disease. At the time, I remember thinking, “So what? What impact did it have?” Cancer is hardly an orphan disease for which basic awareness is required, so what...
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?’.