why jamie from the thick of it is my pr hero

Who is your PR hero? For one comms person who has left the industry to return to journalism its the unlikely face of a supporting character from a BBC satire.

by Gurdip Thandi

When you think of The Thick Of It, Armando Iannucci’s peerless satire of a Government department, it’s nigh on impossible to get away from the character of Malcolm Tucker.

Played superbly by Peter Capaldi, Tucker is the Prime Minister’s Director of Communications or, in reality, his henchman. A vicious enforcer who spits, snarls and terrifies ministers, officers and the media through four series and three specials.

Click to read more ...

scratching the seven year itch

If you have worked in comms over the past seven years you'll enjoy this reflection on some of the changes we have all seen and experienced...

by Will Mapplebeck

Back in 2007 we had five press officers. That’s five people who just did media enquiries and press releases.

I know this, because I was one of them. I joined Newcastle City Council as a press officer in September 2007 I'm about to leave it for Core Cities in Manchester with the far fancier title of Strategic Communications Manager.

Now is a good time to reflect on changes to a discipline that's been transformed in less than a decade. Here are the seven biggest things, one for every year I've been at Newcastle.

Click to read more ...

fear is viral: the plague pr pitfall

The most terrifying thing about pestilence is its power to terrify. In reputational terms, any plague has a mighty PR punch that far exceeds the reach of the disease itself – and often brings out the worst in people. That demands responsibility on the part of PR professionals.

By GUEST EDITOR Alan Taman

Case in point: ebola. A haemorrhagic fever with no vaccine or cure. Meaning if left untreated victims will rapidly dehydrate and die through organ failure, shedding the virus in their body fluids as they do so. Which will infect new victims through any mucous membrane or broken skin. But not, thankfully, via airborne droplets, as in flu, or via parasites, as with bubonic plague (which could also spread via droplets; ‘Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down’ – grim, some nursery rhymes).

Click to read more ...

signs of health: ill or good?

How are you today? In good health? Health is massively important, to everyone. And communications is a vital if relatively recent professional function in the NHS. So why is it that it is often misunderstood, ignored or mistreated?

By Alan Taman

There are many PRs whose employers or clients misunderstand what PR is. The role of the PR then includes education about the realities of the profession and the process. But it is ironic that, to most health professionals, the communications function as it relates to public relations is something they are unfamiliar with.

Click to read more ...

even newspaper editors are ditching the press release

 If there's one thing that guarantees debate it's the future of the press release question. Thing is, while PR people are talking newspaper people have started to quietly turn away from it.

by Eddie Coates-Madden

I missed the apparently now annual @commscamp dust up over the Press Release this year. 

I may have inadvertently started it and run away last year, and I think I was supposed to kick off a brawl about it at an LGComms fringe event last year too, but sort of declined. Sort of. 

Click to read more ...

trust me, pr is dead: welcome to the progressive corporate future

There is a lot of thinking right now about what the role of PR is in the future. In this guest post, one PR veteran explains why he has turned author to set out his ideas for the future as he re-thinks what the sector must look like. This may be uncomfortable reading for some.

by Robert Phillips 

My forthcoming book, “Trust Me, PR Is Dead” has attracted a lot of chatter in social media, since the first article appeared last summer. It charts the fall of Public Relations and the rise of Public Leadership: activist, co-produced, citizen-centric and society-first.

It calls for new measurement and accountability metrics, based on Public Value, which will be unique to every organisation that develops them.

Click to read more ...

when I learned about pr from millwall fc

So what happens when your passion becomes your work? For one fan a love of a London football team helped her public relations career. 

by Karen Jeal

I have been a Millwall fan all my life, so I always jumped at the chance to include the club in everything I did. Every school project revolved around Millwall.

I redesigned match programmes and wrote reports after games. But where it all started was a project where I designed an anti-racism campaign. I got an invite to the ground to meet the press team and from there my connection with the club grew. I was very persistent and ended up working with them on a voluntary basis, until one day I got a job offer. Unfortunately due to timings I had to turn it down. But here's what I learnt:

Click to read more ...

communicating a utility network

Some public relations is pretty straight forward. You're an airport, say, and you'd like to tell people when you are open, when you are closed and where you can go. Or a car manufacturer - that's a pretty clear offer. But how about utility networks, the people who bring you things like power?

by Jonathan Morgan

Here’s a comms challenge. Everyone in your region uses your services – about 5m people – and some people literally can’t live without it. They don’t have any choice to use another company and they also don’t have a choice as to whether or not they pay you.

Most of the time they won’t even realise you’re there – unless there’s a problem. Then they may need to contact you, and fast, but that’s rare.

Click to read more ...

giving up facebook - new year predications

by James Baker

Well happy new year everyone. It's nice to be back at work after a bit of a recharge and absence from everything social and digital. I did pretty much abstain for the majority of the duration bar a bit of old school YouTube streaming of Christmas classic music vids. (East 17, Macca and Wham still being untouched by Maria's sorry sorry efforts...)

This did mean however that when I did eventually click the Facebook, Twitter, Vine and Instagram apps - I was feeling like I was playing catch up and had missed out on what seemed like loads of really important info and exciting stuff in both my personal and professional worlds.

Click to read more ...

public sector comms: from navel gazing to stargazing

When Dan Slee published his 2014 predictions for local government digital comms some agreed and some didn't and he was accused of navel gazing. With Brian Cox’s live space series about to return to our TV screens, Steve Chu argues public sector communicators should instead be aiming for the stars.

by Steve Chu

One of the problems we’ve faced in our profession is that the majority of us are more excited by content, creativity and now digital than where we sit strategically in our organisation.

I think this is what Paul Masterman wasalluding to when he made his “navel gazing” assessment, and I kind of agreed – although Dan did hit the nail on the head in his last prediction for 2014, when he wrote: “Teams that overlook internal communications – and in particular telling their own story internally – will suffer.”

Click to read more ...

comms? it's getting more digital say the 2013 survey results

So, what is the state of communications in 2013? It's getting harder... and the favourite cake is chocolate. Here's our annual survey.

by Dan Slee

A gaggle of geese, a pride of lions... and a chocolate cake of comms people. That was one of the verdict of the annual survey.

We asked UK people who worked in the sector to take part and take part they certainly delivered. More than 220 of us in fact.

In a closely fought battle the top choice of cake was a two way fight with chocolate (31.8 per cent) narrowly beating carrot (28.4 per cent) to the title.

But what were the other conclusions? They were many. It's a challenging time to be involved with public relations or communications. We're faced with a major change that's part exciting, part terrifying but never dull. The internet is revolutionsing the sector just as its doing the same to the media landscape.

Click to read more ...

what @justinesacco teaches us about pr twitter blunders

When a PR executive planned a trip to Africa she posted a tweet before she got on the flight. By the time she landed she had become a case study in crisis communications.

by Dan Slee

It's 5am in the UK on the last Saturday before Christmas and in an hour a PR executive is about to switch her phone back on after a flight from the US to Africa.

What will go through her mind is anyone's guess when she realises a tweet sent before she boarded has gone viral.

Justine posted: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!"

Justine is senior director for corporate communications at IAC. She has been for the past six months. Her LinkedIn profile also posted to Twitter tells us this. IAC is an internet company which deals with 50 brands across 40 companies. Google tells us this.

Click to read more ...

3 reasons why you can’t build a decent website without a comms expert

Next time you are building a new website, do make sure that you have a comms person on the team.

by GUEST EDITOR Helen Gill

For me, the power of social media as a PR tool is the power to publish your own content and start to influence and shape the agenda so that you don’t always have to rely so heavily on media relations any more. That’s why I don’t like the phrase ‘online PR’ or even ‘digital PR’ – it just feels like a way of doing what we’d always done but in a slightly different format.

Click to read more ...

engagement and abseiling – just another day in the office.

How an unlikely TV filming request can help with your comms. Or in other words, can the building that you sit in, the Army and rope help you connect?

by Victoria Ford

I often get asked what the biggest challenges of my job are.  I usually talk about varied audiences, digital, prioritisation, crisis communications and the like. 

Then last April a very different challenge came my way in the form of a request that went something along the lines of  ‘We would like to come and film at the DVLA and get the army to abseil off your sixteen storey tower block’.  Okay.  I wasn’t expecting that. 

Click to read more ...

practitioners are from venus, academics are from mars?

Public relations doesn't just have the people in the field doing it. It has academics. But is it healthy that much of what happens in academia is impeneterable?

by GUEST EDITOR Sarah Williams

I have just returned from the Euprera Annual Congress in Barcelona, where PR academics from across Europe and beyond met to discuss current research into issues pertinent to the public relations industry today, or are they?

Click to read more ...