Michael O'Connor Clarke is proud to be a card-carrying flack. Currently based in Toronto, Michael has spent almost 20 years in corporate communications and marketing roles. He started blogging at almost the same time as he first moved into PR - over five years ago. Now he's trying to figure out how to combine these two areas of expertise for the benefit of clue-seeking clients. In his time, Michael has pitched people, products, processes and pop-tarts, but he has a congenital inability to peddle fluff.
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2006 Report of the Commission on Public Relations Education
I've barely had time to skim the Executive Summary of this so far, but will read it properly and come back with some comments soon. In the meantime, here's a link to the complete 2006 report, subtitled "Public Relations Education for the 21st Century".
I hope that, if nothing else, the report emphasizes the importance of encouraging PR students to read. I'm still astonished, every time I speak with a group of young PR students, to find how few of them make a habit of reading daily newspapers. Surely a prerequisite of being in this business should be a natural fascination for the process by which news is made...?
More on this once I've had a chance to read the whole thing.
Comments are temporarily b0rked. I'm sorry. No idea why. Highly-trained primates are scampering through the tubes even as we speak, attempting to unscrew the inscrutable. In the meantime, there's always email.
NewsNosh is billed as "a a searchable, user-contributed directory of online business news sources of all types: blogs, podcasts, news sites and newsletters... designed to help fellow PR folks and other communicators follow industries and identify media sources..."
There's a fairly bland piece in the LA Times on "Using Blogs to Build Direct Links to Public". It's not a bad article -- worth a quick read as long as you're not expecting any major insights. Looks like it may have been prompted by Edelman and Intelliseek's "Trust MEdia" whitepaper (about which I'll post more later). Good for them.
The standout comment in the piece is from Sun's Jonathan Schwartz, who says: "At the end of the day, the job of any good leader at any corporation is to communicate ... The hallmark of companies that will find blogs useful is the company that cares about its perception ... and the integrity of its relationship with its customers." Damn skippy. Companies that choose the fake blog route are telegraphing the fact that they don't really care if their customers think they're idiots.
Curious to see if there was any kind of ethical framework in place at AlwaysOn, I just clicked on "Post Your Own Editorial" link over there. Right at the top of the entry form, it says:
NOTE: Blatant promotions and advertisements will be removed by the editors and violators suspended.
Further, "The AlwaysOn Blogger Bushido" in the sidebar states:
"We shall not promote our own companies, events, or investments in our entries. We will object rigorously to posts we consider to be advertisements, and we understand that AO will delete them."
I think I'm just going to give up trying to update the blogroll of PR blog links here, and my own steadily growing list of PR-related blogs on the del.icio.us service. Now that I've discovered Constantin Basturea's canonical list of PR bloggers, my own meagre efforts seem completely redundant. Kudos to Constantin for this labour of love. It's so good, someone should be paying him for it.
Only just found this, and I've spent the last hour or so reading through the archives. Katie Paine is THE expert on PR measurement. She's proven again and again that, contrary to popular misconceptions, the value of PR is explicitly measureable - and that companies needn't spend a fortune figuring out how to do it.
I've admired and respected Katie for a long time, ever since I first met her at an international PR group meeting with the Lotus Development folks a few years ago. If you're in the PR business and don't yet know Katie's work, you have to check it out, for the good of your company and your career.
My Dad's fond of saying: "Insanity is hereditary; you get it from your kids." If that were true, we might almost be able to hold a certain notoriously airheaded heiress accountable in the latest Hilton Hotels debacle.
Renowned marketing strategist Joseph Jaffe is fuming at a clause in the hotel group's upcoming $45 million agency review, which stipulates that candidate firms sign over all rights to creative materials developed for the pitch - regardless of whether they win or lose the account.
He's absolutely right. As he says: "It's highway robbery and the worst possible insult to every last bit of integrity left in the ad business to have ideas from losing contenders implemented down the line."
Hilton get some twisted credit, I suppose, for at least being up front about their duplicity. I pitched a major consumer products firm about 18 months ago. Didn't get the business. Two months later, I got to watch the chosen agency execute exactly the big campaign idea we'd developed for the pitch.
Tom Murphy, on his splendid PR Opinions blog, points to this interesting survey of the use of blogs in corporate PR:
"Tim Jackson is a student of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations in the UK. As part of his coursework he is conducting an online study exploring blogging and public relations. The deadline for the survey is June 03, 2005. Why not participate by clicking here - it only takes a couple of minutes."
Some of the questions will definitely give you pause for thought (e.g. "Is the ghostwriting of corporate blogs by PR staff on behalf of senior executives acceptable?"). Good stuff.
A quick object lesson in the perils of media manipulation from today's papers.
Yesterday, Canada's largest and most closely-watched public company, Bell Canada Enterprises, held their Annual General Meeting in downtown Toronto.
The Toronto Star ran a surprisingly brief piece, buried on an inside left-hand page. The accompanying photo shows BCE's chief exec on a TV monitor outside the room where the meeting was taking place. The caption notes: "The Star's Rick Eglinton said photographers were forbidden to take pictures at the meeting."
The Globe and Mail's choice of photo is even more pointed. Denied access to the meeting room, the Globe's photo editor chose to run a shot of the protesting union workers picketing the meeting outside.
Michael O'Connor Clarke is proud to be a card-carrying flack. Currently based in Toronto, Michael has spent almost 20 years in corporate communications and marketing roles. He started blogging at almost the same time as he first moved into PR - over five years ago. Now he's trying to figure out how to combine these two areas of expertise for the benefit of clue-seeking clients. In his time, Michael has pitched people, products, processes and pop-tarts, but he has a congenital inability to peddle fluff.
