Conversations The Institute for Public Relations is an independent nonprofit that bridges the academy and the profession, supporting PR research and mainstreaming this knowledge into practice through PR education.

Archive for May, 2012

Bringing out the Best in People

By: Frank Ovaitt on Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 at 9:33 am

When the purpose of a public relations campaign is to encourage honest behavior, what really works? In The Wall Street Journal last week, Dan Ariely, the James B. Duke professor of behavioral economics at Duke University, shared lessons from his forthcoming book, “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves.” Few people can claim total honesty – no lying, no cheating, not even a little. But the great majority of us do the right thing when given the right prompts. Knowing that might make all the difference for a campaign to fight dishonesty on insurance ...

Read More

PR Needs to Grapple with the Implications — and Power — of Big Data and Images

By: Frank Walton on Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 at 8:58 am

I have a blog post published May 29th at CommPro.BIZ, “Seeing Is Believing — Why PR People Should Take Infographics More Seriously.” I make two related arguments. I contest that PR people generally have fallen behind other marketing and analytical disciplines in their understanding and use of big data, both for understanding challenges and for constructing effective advocacy. At the same time, though in a radically different realm, PR fails to take seriously the use of infographics in responsible, effective, and ethical ways. On the one hand, the data (numbers) scare us off, and on the other hand we don’t take ...

Read More

Reputation = Performance + Behavior + Communications

By: Frank Ovaitt on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 1:17 pm

Former IPR Trustee Björn Edlund mounts a spirited defense of focusing on reputation.  He responds to a column in The Economist that “says it is wrong for companies to aim at leveraging its reputation – or even to regard reputation as a corporate asset.” Read Björn’s piece on the Arthur W. Page Society blog. Frank Ovaitt is president and CEO of the Institute for Public Relations.

Read More

Brain Science and Public Relations Listening

By: Frank Ovaitt on Monday, May 14th, 2012 at 12:44 pm

Why do we get such a kick out of focusing on ourselves? Thirty to 40 percent of human speech informs others about ourselves.  Eighty percent or more of social media posts announce our own experiences or views.  Nine-month-old babies already try to draw the attention of others to things they find important in their environments.  Adults in all societies try to share their knowledge with others. Humans are wired to disclose.  In fact, a battery of studies by Diana Tamir and Jason Mitchell of the Department of Psychology at Harvard University finds that talking about ourselves lights up the same brain pleasure ...

Read More

“Glocalization” of China’s Public Relations Market

By: Guo Huimin on Monday, May 7th, 2012 at 10:20 am

The following post is excerpted from an article in PR Magazine, published by the China International Public Relations Association. 2003: The arrival of a turning point If 10 years can be considered as a generation, international firms were no doubt the backbone of the first generation of PR companies in China from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. In 1984, Hill & Knowlton, one of the biggest PR companies in the world, was the first to set up an office in Beijing. In 1985, Burson-Marsteller, another leading international PR company, also entered China by way of forging cooperation with Xinhua News Agency. This ...

Read More

Measurement Jumps to 9% of Corporate PR Budgets

By: Burghardt Tenderich and Jerry Swerling on Tuesday, May 1st, 2012 at 9:35 am

Research budgets are up, organizations increasingly evaluate outcomes instead of outputs, and the way companies measure PR is related to indicators of success. These are just some of the powerful insights about what appears to be a transformation of PR measurement and evaluation provided by USC Annenberg’s Generally Accepted Practices (GAP) for Public Relations study. In its seventh iteration this year, GAP VII is the largest and most comprehensive study to date of senior-level PR/communication practitioners in the United States. It was conducted with IPR as research partner and in cooperation with PRSA, IABC and the Arthur Page Society, and ...

Read More