Recoding public relations

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Having co-founded, built and sold a PR consultancy. Having written a book on reframing marketing and PR for the digital age that’s now recommended reading across a number of under- and post-graduate courses. Having made some of the first presentations to the PR profession on the implications of the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web, and machined media. And having co-founded the CIPR’s prolific social media group, I have it appears left the profession. And for some good time now.

I’ve taken the best the PR profession and academe have to offer the world, and then determinedly escaped its narrow practice. I’ve found I can now offer consultancy that isn’t framed by preconceived ideas of PR. I can combine it with management consultancy more broadly, with org design and social business, with digital transformation and web science, without anyone saying “that’s not PR!”

It does I admit help that I am a chartered engineer. Engineering is my nature. I will always be an engineer, but my association with PR is always framed these days in the past tense, if only to disassociate myself from inadequate and inappropriate context.

21st Century public relations isn’t a synonym for media relations, or earned media, or simply “communications” come to that. It isn’t publicity or, worse, spin. It isn’t a side function and it’s definitely ill-suited as a marketing function.

Ogilvy on Philip Sheldrake

Recoding public relations