MarCom Professional

One of the side-effects of social media has been the amplification of public suspicion (criticism?) of major companies and brands.

Here's a slide I have been using in my presentations of late. Depending on the audience, the content of this slide generally hits home pretty hard.

 
What we have is a situation whereby companies are obsessed with pushing their message out in to the marketplace.

On the other hand, people aren't that interested - ever-growing numbers of consumers do not want to be on the receiving end of inane, incessant chest-beating ads and corporate collateral materials. More...

Yesterday I trawled the PR Warrior's vaults checking out the past 10 months' worth of posts. 

Reason being I had just written two not-overly-complimentary back-to-back posts on Westpac and wanted to make sure that over the journey I haven't been too negative with my stories! Nothing really wrong with being negative as long as criticism is constructive, and that's something I try hard to do, but maybe it doesn't always come out that way? 

Anyway, I discovered 'positive' stories far outweighed those where I had a strong opinion about a brand or company that I felt was going about things the wrong way. More...

Australia’s greatest musical export AC-DC recently returned to home soil for a major sell-out tour.

These guys are simply amazing. Still rocking after all these years, packing in the crowds year after year after year. Who would have thought  the band would still be one of the biggest rock acts in the world some 35 years after their formation in Australia in 1974?

POP QUIZ: What was the first gig AC-DC played? (check the answer at the bottom of the post!).

Let’s face it, any brand would kill for AC-DC’s longevity, their cross-generational appeal and the fanatical fan base that continues to buy their product year in, year out. More...

You have to appreciate the irony!

Some poor dude who works at Sydney's Macquarie Bank - financial adviser David Kiely - was this week caught on television checking out several racy photos of supermodel Miranda Kerr (from her recent shoot for GQ magazine).

For those who don't know the story, Kiely's workstation was in the background of a live TV interview between one of his colleagues and Chris Bath of Channel Seven news.

If you squint, you might - just might - see Kiely in the background opening up an email and checking out pics of Kerr. At the last second, he spins around and looks into the barrel of the camera - sprung! 

NOTE: More...

The world’s leading authority on public relations, Professor James Grunig recently said that social media has, “the potential to truly revolutionalise public relations – but only if a paradigm shift in the thinking of many practitioners and scholars takes place.” (Praxis, a digital PR resource centre.)

In the Praxis article, entitled Paradigms of global public relations in an age of digitalisation, he provides a lucid analysis of, and adds considerable value to, discussions on public relations and its dialectic with social media. More...