The pandemic has brought communicators a variety of challenges, greater pressure and visibility and a renewed sense of value. It also required reorganization and rethinking of both delivery and process. Just think of all in person meetings that had to move online, from team events to press conferences and autoshows. For this final episode, we’re coming home, to Germany, to chat with Katja Bott. She’s learning the Global Communications team of Mercedes-Benz Cars & Vans since October 2018 having worked with the company for more than 17 years in Germany and the US ..read more

Is there something that unites PR practice globally? And more importantly, is there something that the PR practice as a whole can identify as its ideal professional self? Anne Gregory will help us find some answers to these questions. She is currently Chair of Corporate Communication at the University of Huddersfield and has formerly chaired the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management. It is during her tenure there that she directed the seven continent team in developing the Global Capability Framework for the profession, a framework that we want to talk about today. A ..read more

I met with Marian Salzman, Senior Vice President, Communications at Philip Morris International, for a fireside chat at the Global Communication Summit in 2020. At PMI, her work is focused on designing a smoke-free future as the company embarks on its journey of transformation. She’s also a trendspotter, a professional hobby as she calls it, and a much awarded public relations executive being listed in PRWeek’s Global Power Book and as a PR News Top Woman in PR. Her most recent trends report is called Zoomsday Predictions ..read more

There’s often talk about international public relations yet it doesn’t seem to be very clear what exactly do we mean by it: PR work done by the same organization in multiple countries, PR work done together with an international team. What’s more, international PR and cross-cultural communication are often conflated, implying that communication practitioners are by default cultural translators and intermediaries too. But are they? Can they be? We’ll talk about all that and more with today’s guest, Jo Osborn who has both an international career and has worked with multinational organizations, b ..read more

How can teams perform better and how can team members work better together. In this week's episode we talk about alignment as a process, the science behind it and the applications in practice ..read more

Today we’ll focus on public relations for social justice, on the times when activism is public relations. To do so, we’ll also consider whether public relations practitioners themselves should be change agents. And we’ll be introducing a new view on theorizing public relations: queer theorizing. This is all part of Dr Erica Ciszek’s research and it is with them that we’ll be chatting today. They are an Assistant Professor with the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations at the University of Texas with their work published in many of PR’s most valued academic journals includi ..read more

Diversity and inclusion have become such a big thing recently… especially after the #blacklivesmatter protests in the USA in 2020, companies around the world (or perhaps their communication teams) felt that it was about time they spoke about the topic. But you see, PR is not diverse. We spoke about this in previous episodes and covered this more extensively in the Women in PR book as well. So, generally-speaking, there are very non-diverse PR and communications teams and they are supposed to help organizations navigate internally and externally a world of acceptance and mutual support when in ..read more

From the PR fields of activity, corporate communications is still the most visible and praised, as is media relations. But it is really non-profit organizations that have been innovating in the field and they have been making an impact, in the world and on the profession. The reasons for NGO communications success are multiple: from the way their values resonate with those of the people joining them, from their generally assumed lack of resources or from the expectation that they do different and that they do better. For a communicator, the move from corporate to non-profit is still unusual. D ..read more

We have often spoken about what practitioners and academics perceive to be the role and mission of public relations and communications. And while discussing strategy, measurement and evaluation and thus research, two issues in particular keep popping up: the balancing of multiple stakeholder interests and demands - and VUCA, the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous context of the current practice. Today’s conversation with Irma Meyer will give us all a new way of looking at things and, I think, a way out of exactly this conundrum. Irma too started as a journalist and was then head-hunted ..read more

It was 2019 when the Oxford Dictionary added the term “fake news” to its list of definitions. It turns out that the term has been around since the 1890s – something to do with a story about a mine in Milwaukee! Anyways, for communicators, fake news means trouble, for there is a lot more nuance there which encompasses accuracy of information, intent and effect. Our guest this episode: Carmen Romero, NATO’s Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Public Diplomacy since October 2016. She’s a former journalist and foreign affairs correspondent (awarded too) who has covered events such as the revolu ..read more