Social media conferences - Oxford and Georgia, USA.

• Report in Guardian
  
• Reuters Institute Oxford which hosted the conference.
• University of Georgia and Integrating Social Media and Traditional PR
• Conference blog with highlights of main contributions.
  

Happiness is now on the agenda and its official

Following the discourse in policy and political circles since the financial crash has been a giddy but fascinating ride.  The latest development is that President Sarkozy has called for the way we assess GDP and national economic performance needs, to be reassessed and that happiness and health need to be measured and added to the picture.  This would have the impact of pushing France much higher up world economic rankings and closing the gap with the USA. 

What gives the speech added impetus is he is drawing on the work of US economist and Nobel prize winner, Joseph Stiglitz and the publication of the results of the Commission of Economic Performance and Social Progress, set up by the French government of which he was a leading member. Stiglitz is quoted in the FT (print version but not online) as saying "What we measure affects what we do." (Useful to remember for PR campaigns as well.)   He then goes on to say "Behind the cult of the figures, behind all these statistical and accounting structures there is also the cult of the market that is always right."  (A nice nod to Foucault.)

What is interesting for PR is the way that the dominant paradigm of market force supremacy which has stood relatively unchallenged for 40 years continues to be worked over from a range of sources.  It would be very interesting to hear how this discourse is influencing the work of the large PR agencies and in-house teams for major global companies.  Second, it also raises issues about the way that PR programmes are measured - what metrics are being used and are the metrics all market based or is there some debate going on in the industry about using metrics which might have a wider social context.  Finally, it could be argued that what Sarkozy and Stiglitz are wanting to measure and to value in an economy are aspects such as social cohesiveness even social capital.  Some commentators have argued that PR is about organisational social capital and that makes this intiative particularly interesting and also one which will further add to the interesting discourse developments over the coming months and years.

PR Academic Conference, University of Stirling - initial thoughts

Just a few initial thoughts on the PR conference at Stirling which I much enjoyed.    

• Foucault and Habermas were mentioned more than Grunig.
• PR as dialogue, discourse, rhetoric as well as power and contested space were well explored reflecting developing research agendas.  
• The PR practitioner as an ethical negotiator might have been a sub-heading for the event as certainly ethics was a constant refrain.  In fact by the end, when Joanna Fawkes from Leeds Met said that "PR as persuasion" was a more ethical stance, there were plenty of nodding heads looking for some moral confidence and certainty on the subject.
• From a practical PR perspective, Prof. Anne Gregory's talk with Paul Willis on work on the UK National Health Service was fascinating for integration of business and PR strategy, interpretation of social values which the NHS embodies into the campaign and then how the communications training programme is being rolled out across the NHS. 
• Some interesting European research from Ralph Tench on corporate communications due to be launched this week was unveiled.  Perspectives from practitioners on new and developing areas of practice from the survey highlighted decline of marketing communications in terms of importance for corporate comms and growth of internal communications.  Research also highlighted uncertainty about how to use social media. 
  
• A fascinating session on terrorism and PR; with a particularly interesting paper from University of Coleraine in Northern Ireland on the way they have used a research project looking at first year students' perspectives on the Troubles to develop awareness about media and PR.
• No mention of social capital which surprised me.
• Leeds Met and Stirling had an impressive range of papers and both bring different and complementary research perspectives to the industry.  Leeds Met is more practice based while Stirling is more focusing on explore the influence of different social sciences on the PR sector.

Stirling is a great location and the conference was held in the management centre which is superbly designed for networking with the bar just off reception.  Very welcoming and stimulating event.

A great summary of the media landscape in a Robert Peston blog/speech

Planning a course on Media Relations it would be hard to find a single source which raises so many issues on role and future of journalism and by implication role and future of media relations as Robert Peston's latest blog entry.  This is a reprint of Robert Peston's speech at the Edinburgh International Television Festival sponsored by the Media Guardian and reprinted as a blog.  The speech being a blog is of course significantly enhanced by readers' comments underneath (114 two days later) - for a recent Royal Bank of Scotland blog he ended up with over 700 - and this is of course an increasingly interesting and important aspect of media relations in terms of monitoring and judging how a story and discourse is being received and in its future development. 

I also thought it was particularly noteworthy how important the blog is in the development and disseminaton of his ideas; "For me, the blog is at the core of everything I do, it is the bedrock of my output. The discipline of doing it shapes my thoughts. It disseminates to a wider world the stories and themes that I think matter.....Most important of all, the blog allows me and the BBC to own a big story and create a community of interested people around it. Sharing information - some of it hugely important, some of it less so - with a big and interested audience delivers that ownership and creates that committed community."