Firm Voice Categories
Advocacy
Public Relations Takes Flight—Announcing the World Premiere of Some Exciting New Recruiting Tools
Have you heard of Avery the Owl? Well, allow me to make the introduction. Avery is the star of “A Story Takes Flight,” a new video the Council released this week in celebration of its fifteenth anniversary. The video is just one of a suite of new tools and activities designed to attract the best more…
Business Development
Broadening Your Network: How Strong Stakeholder Relationships Can Work For You
We counsel our clients every day to build relationships with a wide variety of stakeholders, but do we practice what we preach? When it comes to managing our own firms, public relations professionals can and should broaden their networks by building mutually beneficial relationships with organizations whose missions relate to our own passions and interests. more…
C-suite
How I Became CEO-Insights from Three Public Relations Leaders
Becoming CEO doesn’t happen by accident. Although luck can play a role, rising to the executive suite in the public relations industry takes hard work, special skills, hard-won wisdom, and strategic thinking. For an inside look, we interviewed three super-achieving execs—Ketchum’s Rob Flaherty; Luke Lambert, CEO of Gibbs & Soell, Inc.; and Stephanie Smirnov, CEO more…
Communications
Want to Build Your Business? Humanize It With the Art of Listening
Listen up, folks. Hey, you in the back, can I have a little quiet here? Okay. Thank you. This week’s blog deals with an old-fashioned skill that today goes largely unsung. It’s a skill important to any business’ success. And that skill is… listening. Not listening. Listening. In today’s world, we’re constantly chattering, twittering, blogging, more…
Community
Who is the Stakebroker?
As one Twitter follower noted when we launched Champion Brand and our concept of the “stakebroker,” another made-up PR word is the last thing we need. It is hard to argue the point. However, we didn’t want to be fenced-in by the old language of stakeholders and wanted to communicate that this is something new, more…
Corporate
Communicating Failure in the Age of Social Media
Failure has cachet. Harvard Business Review devoted its April 2011 issue to the subject, with many authors agreeing on its importance to the running of successful, innovative enterprises. Since Steve Jobs’ death, observers have catalogued his missteps—he never graduated from college; he was fired from the company that he himself had started—and ranked them as more…
Counsel
Advertising, Consumers, and the New FTC Advertising Disclosure Guidelines
Is your firm up on the latest FTC guidelines governing online advertising and the proper consumer disclosures required by law? It better be! In 2000, the FTC issued its “Dot Com Disclosures,” disclosures interpreting advertising law for the online world. At that time, the guidelines focused mostly on display advertising. Nearly thirteen years have passed, more…
Creativity
Going Viral—How to (Tastefully) Get Them to Spread Your Message
Next month, the Council will launch “A Story Takes Flight,” a new video campaign intended to alter perceptions about public relations among young people entering the job market. Our research has suggested that the 18-29 crowd has an “old school” view of public relations and doesn’t fully understand the exciting and fulfilling career opportunities our more…
Data
The Client’s Search for Insight—Becoming A Data-Savvy PR Firm
Last week brought the announcement of a new Twitter app, #music. Almost instantly came commentary about the great trove of data the new app would bring marketers. Yes, big business is discovering data, especially that produced by social media. But executives at some of the largest clients are also wrestling with its complexity. One social more…
Digital
What We’re Wondering about Social Media—Eight Burning Questions
With all the writing that has swirled around social media in recent years, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and also to assume that all the good, stimulating, provocative questions have already been asked. Yet judging from last week’s Critical Issues Forum, the discussion around social media is far from stale. Panelists, facilitators, and audience-members alike more…
Diversity
An Upbeat Message from Outgoing Chairman Andy Polansky
The past two years have certainly been an exciting and transformative time to Chair the Council of PR Firms. I’ve been honored to represent our industry, and in the process have had the pleasure of meeting many people from member firms from across the country. I also have had the distinct pleasure of watching our more…
Engagement
Building Bridges between Academia and Business: A Report from the Council’s “Taking Flight” Event in Chicago
We know our success depends on our ability to maintain a continuous flow of bright, motivated professionals into our industry. But with rapid change now a constant in the communications business, how can we assure that recent college graduates have the required skills and competencies? And how can we can communicate to them the many more…
Ethics
Greetings from the New Council Chair, Dave Senay
It’s my pleasure to greet you as the new Chairman of the Council of Public Relations Firms. As a lifetime agency devotee who believes strongly in our profession‘s social value, I accept these new duties with a great sense of responsibility. During my tenure on the Council’s board, I’ve seen Ray Kotcher, Margery Kraus, and more…
Firms
Changing Face (to Face) Time: Work Environments with Purpose
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to ban telecommuting at her company has been criticized by many as a backward step in the evolution of the more flexible, modern workplace. Yet the controversy over what Time magazine has called the “Memo Read Round the World” obscures another trend: The extent to which offices themselves are rapidly more…
Innovation
PR Agency 2020
For years now, leaders within our industry have been talking about how social and digital will either help transform PR firms, or be the cause of their slow and painful death spiral into irrelevance. The truth is that the social and digital evolution is just but one important part of a confluence of functional, operational more…
Intellectual Capital
Retreating to the past: Interpreting (and Lamenting) the Current Retromania
The other day, while waiting for my plane to board, I was treated to a throaty remake of the Beatles classic “Penny Lane” running over the airport PA system. Didn’t catch the artist, but didn’t need to: The re-make, of very recent vintage, was decent, but it didn’t ring half as true to my forty-something more…
Issues
Work Hard, Play Hard—How Successful PR Executives Think About Stress
Think job-related stress is a recent phenomenon? Not quite. The remains of Britain’s King Richard III were found last year. Turns out the guy was pretty stressed out. Analysis of his teeth showed that they worn smooth from teeth grinding and clenching—a common accompaniment to a stressful life. With late hours and client deadlines, some more…
Management
Supply Chain Screw Ups—Protecting Your Brand And Minimizing the Damage
If you’ve purchased lululemon’s yoga pants lately, then watch out: the brand has recalled 17% of its yoga pants after an apparent defect rendered them too revealing. The company blamed one of its suppliers—a screw up that could lower lululemon’s revenues by millions of dollars. Supply chain issues pose a constant threat to brands. Pet more…
Measurement
Setting the Standards—Changing the Way We Measure Public Relations Success
Setting standards for public relations measurement may not sound sexy, but I would argue that it’s one of the hottest new developments in public relations this year. When it comes to determining the success of public relations campaigns, practitioners have long measured a number of variables, including output metrics (such as “reach,” “impressions,” “web site more…
Media
Your Secret Weapon—A Good Blog!
We’re all struggling to manage the torrent of information out there today, to get information to work for us. One basic scenario runs like this: To get ahead, you need to come up with that next brilliant, account-winning, boss-pleasing insight. To come up with that account-winning, boss-pleasing insight, you have to bounce yourself up against more…
Procurement
Where Procurement Meets Marketing and More: Notes from the Advertising Financial Management Conference
I recently attended my second Advertising Financial Management Conference, an event hosted annually by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). The ANA’s members represent a quarter trillion dollars in marketing spend, and increasingly that includes public relations. As procurement managers (one-third of attendees) become more integral to the public relations selection process, I see this more…
Publics
Going Short—The Shifting Language of Public Relations
Not a message this week, but a musing: What does today’s short communication mean for the public relations business? It’s a commonplace to note the speed of communication in the digital age. But you hear a lot less about the small size of communications. Tweets. SMS. Facebook posts. Even blogs (gargantuan messages by today’s standards). more…
RFP's
Oh, the Joys of RFPs
Isn’t there a better way? I’m talking about RFP’s. Clearly they serve a necessary function: How else are clients going to choose among the many potential partners who can provide the service they seek? But that doesn’t mean all RFPs are created equal. One public relations executive we spoke with complained of “nightmare” RFPs, noting more…
Social Media
Channeling the Flow: How PR Professionals are Managing Information Overload
Did you read a novel today? Actually, you did. According to one estimate, each of us encounters 63,000 words of new information everyday, about as many words as are in your average novel. Yes, the torrential downpour of information is a fact of 21st century life, with substantial costs to our sanity and worklife. As more…
Stakeholders
Public Relations on the Menu—Reflections from a Successful Restaurateur
I’ll admit it. When it comes to launching a restaurant, I’m a huge PR fan. I would advise any budding restaurateur out there to work with an agency before setting up shop. And for guys like me who already have successful restaurants and are expanding into new cities, PR is just as indispensable. When I more…
Strategy
Are Best Practices Really Best? Three Senior PR Execs Weigh In
Talk of “best practices” is seemingly ubiquitous among business leaders today. You can’t have a conversation without hearing executives mention a process or procedure that has been found to work in other companies, and that they have appropriated for their own. Yet an article I read in last week’s Wall Street Journal got me wondering more…
Talent
The $10K B.A.—Can It Work in PR?
The New York Times recently ran a story by Arthur C. Brooks entitled, “My Valuable, Cheap College Degree,” about the $10,000 undergraduate degree. The author, the president of the American Enterprise Institute and a former college professor, decided that instead of going into debt for a degree from an average college, he would pay $10K more…
Technology
Filtering, Translating, Advocating: The Role of Storytelling in Technology PR
Aaron Kwittken’s thoughtful post on September 25 about the future of PR agencies got me thinking about what PR people do well. We tell stories. And we do that for a reason – to build brands and sell products. But what about when we’re dealing with very technical brands and products, whose value propositions are more…
Uncategorized
A Letter to the Class of 2012
Dear Class of 2012: Are you interested in a challenging, engaging career—one that exposes you to the world and pushes you to grow professionally and personally? Do you want to get in on the ground floor of a dynamic, rapidly expanding industry? Are you intellectually curious, a go-getter, a critical thinker, creative and a hard more…
