Tuesday 17 January 2012

Our role as consumers in the crisis of capitalism

Interesting article by Robert Reich, ex-Goldman Sachs and very successful Treasury Secretary under Clinton, now Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley on our role as consumers in the crisis of capitalism.  

Sunday 8 January 2012

Organisations start to post corporate communications plans online

The transparency and public diplomacy agenda is seeing a growing number of public organisations start to post their strategic or corporate communications plans online.   This is a new trend although it is one where very few commercial organisations have followed the same path and would seem to be an area crying out for more research.  Here are the unscientific results of some of these reports which I have found online in preparation for a course I am running this term on Corporate Communications and also for the Erasmus IP programme in March in Belgium on lobbying and government relations.

I became aware of this trend, attending the Euprera conference at Leeds Metropolitan University in the summer where Robert Hastings, formerly Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs at the US Defense Department spoke about the development of a strategic communications plan for the department.  Staying with the military and the US Marine has its 2007 report online.  Be prepared for an aggressive corporate agenda!

As part of this process and here the public diplomacy agenda would appear to be particularly influential and is driving the development of several reports looking at the role of strategic communications at a national level.  First the US Defense Department's research team, the Defense Science Board has produced one and more recently the UK's Chatham House think tank has produced one in conjunction with Bell Pottinger, titled Strategic Communications and National Strategy.    The idea underpinnng these is that communications is a strategic resource and is a response to the perceived dominance of communications by Al-Qaeda in the first few years after 2011.

It would appear that the forerunner (happy to be corrected if readers have other examples) of major communication plans online is the EU's White Paper on Communication Policy in 2006 and the EU Green Paper on Transparency in the same year.  Although the borough of St Edmundsbury in Suffolk deserve an honourable mention for putting up corporate communication plans in 2003, the earliest I have found.

Active current corporate communication plans available online are Portsmouth City Council and the Council for Healthcare Regulatory Excellence.

Finally a special mention should be made of one commercial group of companies, cement manufacturers, which with funding from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development and carried out by environmental consultancy ERM and Batelle has produced a corporate communications guide to its operators, titled Communication and Stakeholder Guidebook for Cement Facilities.  

I would welcome any links to add to the list.