Personality

Everyone is different. Everyone is the same. As professional communicators, should public relations practitioners focus on individual differences, segmenting people into chunks by age, gender, geographical location? Or categorise by attitude – friend or foe? Perhaps by behaviour – which way did you vote? Are you with us or against? Stephen Waddington directs PR practitioners…

Kairos and the right time for public relations

It is 3333 days since I wrote my first Greenbanana blog post on 21 September 2006. In terms of chronological time around 80,000 hours, 4.8 million minutes and over 288 million seconds have passed. In numerical terms, this is my 1,000th post – meaning on average, I’ve written one every three calendar days. Although the…

Public Relations is a tradition of practice

I’m very interested in how we think about and study public relations – and how this conceptual understanding connects to what we do in practice. I believe in questioning the accepted wisdom, arguments, actions and assumptions that are inherent in public relations practice (and theory) using reflective and critical thinking. Only by being mindful of…

Being human – mental well-being lessons for Thomas Cook PR

This post started out as a critique of the response by Thomas Cook to the tragic deaths of the Shepherd children in 2006. It supported Andy Barr writing at The Drum who argued a failure to be human, and the FT conclusion that the company mislaid its moral compass in putting legal advice over the paying public. In…

Why Public Relations practitioners should ensure they are registered to vote

If you work in public relations in the UK – or are studying the discipline – I hope you are registered to vote, if you are eligible to do so. Today is the final day to register to vote in the general election and participate in the democratic process on 7 May 2015. It will…

A sinister perspective of diversity in public relations

I belong to a sinister minority group – I’m left-handed. We make up around one in ten of the world’s population, although apparently, about a third of people are cross-dominant, or ambilateral, favouring different hands for various tasks. I have no idea of the number of PR practitioners who may be left-handed as it isn’t…

In praise of the amateur in PR

I tend to refer to public relations as an occupation or practice rather than as a profession (although sometimes I use the term public relations professionals as well as practitioners). Bill Sledzik’s 2010 post Is PR really a profession? sums a lot of my thinking. In 1969, Goode reported the “industrial society is a professionalizing…

Be careful what you wish for in your new year PR resolutions

A great British tradition at this time of year is the pantomime, a popular form of theatre that tells (and retells each year) a range of family-friendly stories. These tall tales normally include a wish (or three in the case of Aladdin), ensuring villains and bad luck are overcome and a ‘happily ever after’ as the…

Black Friday and the PR blues

As  ‘awareness’ campaigns go, Black Friday was an undeniable hit in the UK last week. It has been bubbling under for a few years with Amazon cited as starting it here in 2010, the Mirror reporting £200 million spending taking place in 2012, followed by media focus on customers fighting over bargains in Asda supermarket…

Dirty Work on World Mental Health Day

10 October 2014 is designated as World Mental Health Day – with a focus this year on schizophrenia. A serious issue but one that is using a tactic that is arguably one of the most common in the PR Toolkit. This approach of the awareness day, week, month or year is used for health, environmental and…