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Archive for April, 2012

Criticism Keeps You on Your Toes

By: Cees B.M. van Riel on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 at 12:05 pm

The following has been adapted from a January 2012 interview with van Riel in www.managementboek.nl , based on his book “The Alignment Factor.” Alignment is building long-term relationships with all internal and external stakeholders, those you depend on as an organisation. Where reputation is a means, alignment is an end. Communication staff are focusing increasingly on building alignment, the degree to which you are able to build long-term relationships with both your internal and external stakeholders. This has two consequences. First, communication professionals need to really deliver, they must initiate dialogue with all those who criticize you most or demand something from ...

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Legendary Research Conference, Stunning Venue

By: Frank Ovaitt on Tuesday, April 24th, 2012 at 10:13 am

The organizers of Bledcom, the legendary international public relations research conference at Lake Bled, Slovenia, have released the program for 2012. The July 6-7 conference breaks into two tracks focused on academic and corporate research.  Current and former IPR Trustees, Research Fellows and commission members appearing the program include Don Wright, Rob Wakefield, Ansgar Zerfass, Krishnamurthy Sriramesh, James and Larissa Grunig. Registration is available online. Frank Ovaitt is President and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations.

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Internal Consulting: Research on New Roles for PR Professionals

By: Ansgar Zerfass and Neele Franke on Tuesday, April 17th, 2012 at 1:46 pm

Internal consulting as a part of the role of communication professionals within organizations has been discussed by a number of researchers. But what does “consulting” in this context mean? Who are clients, what is the content? Which objectives, forms, and specifications are relevant? A recent research project conducted in Germany addresses these questions. We have developed a theoretical framework based on research in business consulting and existing public relations role models, and verified this in in.-depth interviews with corporate communication executives in major European corporations. The full paper has received an IPR Top-3-Paper award at the IPRRC 2012 conference in Miami ...

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Making Peace with Capitalism and Ourselves

By: Paolo D Anselmi on Monday, April 9th, 2012 at 12:12 pm

We need a new definition of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to apply not only to corporations, but also to governments, NGOs – any organization that competes for societal resources – thereby helping societies set a sustainable path. The economic crisis is a good opportunity for social scientists to talk to each other, who for decades have been telling us that organizations are not perfect: Herbert Simon and many others have proved Max Weber wrong.  For what concerns the environment nothing is very new either: The Limits to Growth was published 40 years ago. As for self inspection, on one side, we ...

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Public Relations, No More Excuses

By: Marco Herrera on Friday, April 6th, 2012 at 8:44 am

Last month I was in Miami for the 15th Annual International Public Relations Research Conference. For three days, researchers, teachers, masters, doctoral students and PR professionals from around 15 different countries were gathered together to discuss over than 108 researches that were made the past year. All kind of topics were presented, but social networks took the major attention this time: 38% of the research had to do something with this issue, while another important topic, with the 18%, was the one that involved the issue of Financial Crisis, eight papers were done about the evaluation and measurement of Public Relations ...

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Developing Risk-Literate Communications Professionals

By: Linda Locke on Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012 at 8:36 am

Careers in reputation management, public relations and corporate communications can be made or broken during times of crises. Communications practitioners who want more than a seat at the press-release end of the table should consider expanding their knowledge beyond communications to incorporate an understanding of the theory and research around risk communications. A compelling case for risk literacy among the profession is made in a soon-to-be-published paper by Dr. Chris Galloway, Swinburne University, Melbourne. Galloway’s paper suggests that risk communications expertise could be one of the most important contributions a PR practitioner can offer to an employer. The core of his paper ...

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