New forms of communications change the French public sphere – or do they?

I tried to get an overall picture of public relations in France, but got frustrated in the lack of information. Instead decided to bring you a snapshot of the hottest societal topics in France at the moment (but please do check collegue`s posting on the challenges of French PR here).

President Sarkozy and his government take an effort to inspire the French to reconsider their national identity.

Questions like what is Frenchness, and the role of immigrants will be discussed in public discussions starting this week. Not all are excited about this. Some accuse Sarkozy for being a populist, others fear the discussions will end up in further stigmatizing and alienation of immigrants. The summaries of the discussions will be published in February – surprisingly – just a few weeks before the next elections in March.

Is this something that could increase the public discussion about citizenship, responsibilities and values in any other country as well, or just a new political trick? Choose your stand and follow the discussions on the Grand débat sur l`identité nationale website (in French).

“Something of a democratic revolution may be under way in France.”
The article in the Guardian (in English) suggests that even though the French revolution basicly ended the privileges of France’s ruling elites, the new governing elite never gave up their aristocratic rights and perks.

Lately we have read news about trials and convictions of former and present French politicians that have been forced to finally admit their mistakes and abuse of power. There are two major explanations to this change of political atmosphere in the French society.

First, the French judges have become more independent – thanks to the example of Italian magistrates who took aim at the mafia bosses. The second thing is the internet: no state secrets, and no aristocratic excess, can escape today’s bloggers. A good example of this is the President Sarkozy’s son, Jean (age of 22), who was appointed to a position in a powerful public company. Bloggers, followed by ‘traditional’ journalists, stood against such nepotism, and young Sarkozy was compelled to withdraw.

-Anne Tapanainen/22.11.2009

Alert management from Luxembourg

The title summarizes what the company, which is specialised to alert management, has to say. The company is from Luxembourg, called M-PLIFY, and I bumped into it by chance. My first idea was to search news about H1N1, which has aroused a lot of conversation all over the world.

Indeed, I found something about H1N1 . Informing accurately and quickly about mass vaccinations, the scedule of it, risk groups etc. adds pressure to various PR professionals as well as to doctors and nurses working in hospitals. Thus, it is better and more functional to have good communication. I found a press release from www.pr.com, concerning effecient communication and H1N1. The press release presents a new communication tool, AlarmTILT, which is explained to be a helping tool in all this confusion. AlarmTILT is already used in 15 countries, and with it people can communicate by SMS, email or voice call, and all the replies and answers will be presented in real time.

AlarmTILT has also a free version, which is called TeamTILT which does not need any software uploads.It was published on 1st October, 2009.

Grrreat, that M-PLIFY offers proper incident notifications and alert management. At the time being, when people are being informed about swine flu, I am really of the opinion that the TeamTILT version, which is free, might be a good communication tool for various companies and hospitals, unless they have already figured out something better.  In cases of crisis communication of companies or pandemic diseases, rapid communication is important, for example, in decreasing damages – in money or in the number of infections, in this case. In addition, I guess M-PLIFY found the right time to promote and publish their free product…

To get to know the product and for further reading, click the links (that I actually learnt to insert after using this blog for a week!!! )

- Meri Marttinen –

Baron Timothy Bell – a PR guru or a spin doctor?

Wow. My journey to PR in Western Europe started with a discovery that amazed me. Have you ever heard about a British Baron called Timothy Bell? He is the mastermind behind Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power in 1979. In 1994 he was an advisor to the Iraqi government on the “promotion of democracy”. In 2008 he started a year-long PR campaign in Belarus in order to improve the country’s image in the international arena. This advertising and public relations executive was knighted by Margaret Thatcher and made a Life Peer by Tony Blair as Baron Bell.  Some of his endeavours have been successful, some have been failures.  He’s a controversial character, but definitely interesting.

This man has done a lot. Bell was born in 1941. He worked in many PR and advertising firms, before finally founding his own PR agency Lowe Bell Communications in 1987. In 1994 he became Chairman of Chime Communications. In 1990 Bell was knighted by Margaret Thatcher and in 1998 he was made a Life Peer by Tony Blair as Baron Bell, of Belgravia.

Bell’s most famous job was his advisory role in Margaret Thatcher’s three successful general election campaigns in 1979, 1983 and 1987. In her first 1979 victory, he advised the future Prime Minister on interview techniques, clothing, and even hairstyle choices. He also courted newspaper editors and worked on devastating attacks on the Labour Party.

In 1984 Bell was seconded to the National Coal Board to advise on media strategy at the start of the miners’ strike. He did not just work on media relations, however: he also helped set the terms of the negotiations and course of government policy.

One of the most interesting works of Bell was the attempt to improve the image of Belarus and it’s President Alexander Lukashenko, dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” in 2008. Bell believed that the media coverage on the country was biased and his intention was to send more factual message about Belarus. A year later, after hard work and little success, the Belarusian government decided not to prolong its contract with Bell’s agency. During Bell’s campaign it was questioned whether or not it’s morally correct for controversial regimes to try to buy an acceptable face abroad.

-Maria Kuula-

The European view on the concept of public relations

To begin with I`d like you to pay attention to the concept of public relations (PR). I find the concept especially difficult to handle in English, and would rather prefer something like communications or communication(s) management. PR reminds me constantly of the Finnish term (‘suhdetoiminta’) used often as one of the means of competition in marketing (or, actually ‘markkinointiviestintä’) which is far too narrow in the sense of this course, Development of Public Relations processes. My feelings were met as I glanced through the course materials, and the article called “On the Definition of Public Relations: A European View”.

Verčic, van Ruler, Bütschi and Flodin found the definition of public relations broader in the European context as compared to the U.S. According to the authors the 20^th century public relations was dominated by North American scholars and thus it kind of neglected the work done elsewhere. They decided to put up a database of public relations literature in Europe, and this is where they ran into the problem of the concept ‘public relations’. The term has different meanings and dimensions in different countries.

According to the authors the European view of the concept of public relations includes another dimension than just relational, and that is public in the sense of publics and public sphere. Relational refers also to “a reflective paradigm that is concerned with [---] public consequences of organizational behavior”.

After a three year research project the authors suggested something that is called European dimensions of public relations, and identified the following roles for it:

1. Managerial – to develop strategies to maintain relations with public groups
2. Operational – to prepare means of communications for the organization
3. Reflective – to analyze changing values in society and discuss them within the organization
4. Educational – to help members of the organization to become communicatively competent.

Now if we look at the concept of public relations from this perspective it`ll give us a wider and deeper basis to our mission in Public relations in Western Europe.

-Anne Tapanainen/2.11.2009

Useful sources

I’ve used Library service, Nelli search engine, to locate relevant articles to our topic. Our library has access to following Journals that I’ve found interesting: Public Relations Review and Journal of Communication Management. Anyone can probably find some articles from those journals to support writing process.  For instance, I was able to find an article called Integrating emotion with identity in EU strategy that criticizes pr management of European Union. I will write an entry of that topic next week. Don’t you think communication of European Union is essentially reflecting the intentions and perspectives of Western European countries. After all, facilities of European Union are located in BENELUX-countries and the countries like France, Great Britain and Germany have most of the power in the organization.

-Juha Lintula-

It starts now!

What?

This is a blog about the field of PR processes on the area of Western Europe. Geographical focus is on following countries: Great Britain, Germany, France, Ireland, Belgium, Luxembourg and Netherlands.

Why?

The spark behind it all is our course YVIA313 “Development of PR processes” and therefor our main goal is besides our own learning process to inform other students about the special characteristics of PR on the chosen area.

How?

Our team will deal with topics considering the actual processes as well as the history of evolution behind the whole concept. Our approach style is to be intensive and produce fresh content several times per week. The sources of information we’ll be using vary all the way from books to modern medias like Facebook, including also information channels like TV, radio and other blogs.

We sincerely hope that you’ll enjoy the upcoming posts and the point of views they have to offer!

-Kaarle Parikka-