Posted on PR Mediums

An accidental ebook: exploring the future of business blogging

Ketchum Europe director and CIPR president shares insights from a co-creation project exploring the benefits of professional blogging By Stephen Waddington Blogging is 20 years old this year. By now it was predicted blogging would threaten mainstream media and become the dominant form of media in its own right. It clearly hasn’t but it hasn’t gone away, either. During the early weeks in February 2014, I sought out the opinion of respected and long-time bloggers...

Posted on PR Axis

Qualifications for Public Relations Management

Pendleton Dudley established a PR agency in New York in 1909, reportedly after a suggestion by Ivy Lee who felt competition would be good for the fledgling industry. By the time of authoring the following chapter in Your Public Relations in 1948, his company was known as Dudley-Anderson-Yutzy (D-A-Y). When sold to Ogilvy Mather in 1983, D-A-Y was the world’s oldest continuously operating PR firm; the name disappearing in 1988. Described by Scott Cutlip (in...

Posted on PR Axis

Public Relations for Small Business

J.T. Lewis, Jr., president of Lewis Welding & Engineering Corporation was the author of the third chapter in the 1948 US book, edited by Glenn and Denny Griswold, Your Public Relations (being serialised here with monthly posts). It is interesting that the focus on PR for small business has such a prominent place in the book. The argument put forward by Mr Lewis who operated a small plant in Bedford, Ohio, employing 261 workers, was...

Posted on PR Vision

Getting serious about PR crisis case studies

Whenever an organisation experiences a ‘crisis’ (or more commonly an incident of lesser magnitude), it is invariably jumped upon as a PR disaster by the online PR pundits who cannot resist the opportunity to criticise how the situation was handled. The view is almost always: “I wouldn’t have done it like that”, accompanied by a list of rules which, in the opinion of the supposed PR expert, should have been followed. Rarely is any research...

Posted on PR Axis

Management's Stake in Public Relations

Harry A. Bullis, chairman of the board of General Mills Inc, was a champion of “the importance of public relations as a basic policy-making function’ according to Glenn and Denny Griswold, editors of the 1948 US book, Your Public Relations, which I’m reproducing as a series of monthly blog posts. Bullis is stated as believing “public relations is good business and that it deserves a position in management thinking alongside production, distribution and finance.” The...

Posted on PR Motion

Nurturing public relations talent

Nurturing the upcoming generation of leaders in public relations is something that should be of concern to all current PR practitioners and educators. Finding and developing bright young talent is one of the biggest challenges according to senior in-house and consultancy managers that I speak with. The industry has a good record of employability for those graduating with PR degrees – and with a couple of years’ experience on top, there are plenty of exciting...

Posted on PR Axis

Your Public Relations – a blog post from 1948

In 1948, Glenn and Denny Griswold, PR consultants and publisher/co-editors of Public Relations News, drew together thirty-four “outstanding experts” in the book Your Public Relations.  These contributors shared their wide variety of experience and authority as “a working manual for management executives, public relations directors and counsel, career aspirants, teachers and students, and all those interested in fitting themselves into the modern pattern of human relationships”. Looking back over 65 years, these contributions continue to...

Posted on PR Sense

Dissent and protest – new directions for public relations

It has never been easier for people to protest or express dissent. But there’s actually a long tradition of public action, supported by organised campaigns. Rather than positioning such activities as dissent or protest public relations within the “field’s fuzzy and continually gerrymandered boundaries” (to cite Cropp and Pincus 2001), they have generally been viewed as threats or challenges to those working within or for organisations, and counter to the dominant viewpoint that public relations...

Posted on PR Motion

Action learning – NYU students develop opening address

PR Conversations contributor, the Italian professional and scholar, Toni Muzi Falconi, has just presented his latest thinking and processes in an opening session of a two day workshop in Brazil (August 27/28), under the title:’Towards an effective infrastructure for global stakeholder relationships governance’ (click for the presentation and notes). Toni involved six students in preparing his presentation – and in this post, we share their thoughts on the experience, along with their future expectations from...

Posted on PR Techster

An idiot's guide to PR – lessons for SEO and digital marketing

It can be difficult to define public relations, particularly as there are different perspectives regarding what it is. However, it is much easier to give guidance on what it is not. Indeed, subscribing to the view that ‘PR is what PR does‘, the following offers an idiot’s guide to what PR is not, and what is does not do, especially for those who work in SEO and digital marketing. Rule 1: PR is not free....