On my mind lately, Public Relations exists as a profession because organisations can’t be trusted to be ethical and responsible on their own.
Psychology teach us that within a large group people don’t feel responsible for the actions of the collective. We see it in riots, we saw it during World War II.
Big corporations seem to show the same disregard. Volkswagen was caught tampering with the environment testing of their cars, Enron was riddled with unethical practices.
PR professionals step in to establish and manage healthy relationships with the stakeholders and publics. And that’s it, right ?
Organisational procedures also tend to crystallise. If you’re hired to follow a procedure and work in a big enough company, do you feel responsible for the outcome and productivity ?
Public Relations should also be a pressure force within the organisation to motivate innovation. This can be done by making clear the needs and wants of the stakeholders and publics, by breaking the company silos, and fostering a culture of accountability. (Accepting the fact that this should also come from the C-Suite.)
Tools for this week
Markwhen is the offline-first, plain text calendar and planning app you’ve been waiting for. https://markwhen.com/
And you can use the power of generative AI to create realistic faces to represent stakeholders, with https://facestudio.app/.
https://knibble.ai/ Is close to what I have been looking for, an AI agent that uses a specific and curated dataset to answer questions. It uses chat GPT behind the scenes.
Cool people around
I hate gurus. The best people in their field tend to have a consistent level of quality and they don’t post or boast much.
Lately I have been going back to SEO tasks to improve a few client sites, and found myself reading up on two specific people.
Pedro Dias, Technical SEO Consultant & SEO Product Manager; Founder @Visively and ex-Google search quality. He’s been working in SEO since 2005.
Flávio Amiel, SEO and data analyst, he’s also what I’d call old guard on the field. He’s been working on https://www.swiftbrief.com/, brief generation engine that helps you scale your content marketing efforts.
nadine shaabana
