The Publicity Club of Chicago has an excellent report on a recent roundtable they hosted on Public Affairs and its impact on Public Relations.
A positive case study on how a South African supermarket chain successfully reacted to a crisis.
Read how a new UK PR company focused on small business was inspired by (ahem) Oprah Winfrey. It’s called ‘The Editor’s Office‘.
The Albuquerque Tribune has an interesting story on what PR is.
According to the UK Guardian, Financial Dynamics [FLASH Warning] has been bought in a management buy-out from it’s parent Cordiant for �26stg million.
The news hasn’t made it onto the Financial Dynamics news page.
up2speed have an interesting post on how Dave Winer’s Userland (whose technology enables this blog) have deleted John Robb’s weblog after he pre-announced he was leaving the company.
If that’s the case, it’s the best example I’ve found of why blogs will never replace journalism. Dave has defeated his own argument. While he argues blogs are this self-sustaining life force, the reality is that people have businesses to run and sometimes blogs run contra to what’s best for the firm. I hope this experience will help him take a more pragmatic (and believable) view of weblogs.
By the way, Rick Bruner from up2speed has kindly commented on my response to Robert Loch’s posting on pay-for-placement blogging. He suggests Robert was kidding. I hope he was!
Is there anything harder in the world than sitting in a conference room and slyly looking through a presentation hand-out and discovering it’s a really long wordy presentation? The lights dim, up comes the first slide and you know there’s fifty two to go.
An even worse scenario, and one that PR people have to face all the time, is a press tour where you know you’ll have to view the same slides time and time again, with probably the same jokes and asides. By the third meeting you are mouthing along with the presenter.
Darren and Julie over at Capulet point to the fantastic article from the New Yorker which looks at the development of PowerPoint and how it has changed communication between business partners, workers etc. It’s worth a read, and might even stimulate a change of heart for the most hardened ‘PowerPointer’.
We rarely use PowerPoints in press or analysts meetings anymore, because it’s simply not conductive to effective communication. Find out what your audience is interested in and talk to them! I will accept in some circumstances, PowerPoint can assist communicating complex concepts or helping nervous speakers, but mostly it can be avoided. Now that’s a good thing.
Murphy's Law 