PR Week this week

PR Week this week

The front page of PR Week catches my eye with a story headed “Borkowski PRO in celeb email spat”. I’d received the email chain from a couple of friends, but also spotted Stuart Bruce’s take on it.The public relations trade is a pretty broad church, and whether we like it or not the starting point for many people’s perception of our business is Ab Fab and publicists. Of course this type of work bears no resemblence to what most public relations professionals do day in day out.
The marketing professions suffers a similar perception problem – marketing being perceived as being just advertising, or even more inaccurately being perceived as sales.
Going back to the email spat, the lesson has got to be that in the transparent connected world in which we operate, never commit anything to email that you wouldn’t be prepared to have in the public domain. Emails are too easily and too quickly forwarded to stay private unless you’re dealing with people you really can trust. Anyone remember Claire Swire?
In the public sector section (p6) there’s a short piece about East Cambridge District Council outsourcing its communications to Cambridgeshire County Council. It caught my eye as my main job is heading up marketing and public relations at Medway Council. We already manage media relations on behalf of Medway Primary Care Trust and are sole graphic design agency for our neighbours at Gravesham Borough Council.
This model is something we’ll undoubtedly see more among public sector organisations in the UK as pressure for efficiency savings increases and the demand for more responsive and professional multi-channel media relations grows.

About SIMON

I work with technology-centric businesses as an interim Chief Operating Officer (COO), consultant and advisor. I created the B3 framework® for scaling technology businesses and I write a newsletter called Build for leaders who are building brilliant companies.