Jun 13 2018
The inquiry into the collapse of Carillion has highlighted the pivotal roles played by company directors. By focusing on short-term financial goals rather than the long-term interests of the company’s stakeholders, Carillion’s board fatally undermined the business’s resilience, ruined their own reputations, and reinforced popular stereotypes of the construction and services sectors as outdated and …
Jan 16 2018
As news of Carillion’s liquidation exploded yesterday (see previous post), I provided a short comment for the Chartered Institute of Public Relations, in my role as chair of CIPR CAPSIG, and was subsequently asked to provide a longer opinion piece for PR Week, which was published earlier today. Below is my original draft (a little …
Dec 18 2014
Earlier this year, I joined the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA). For many years, this had been irrelevant to me – I worked mainly in-house and only when it sniffed a financial opportunity did it eventually (in about 2009, I think) open its doors to corporate communications teams. When I went freelance for the second time, I …
Jun 13 2011
The latest UK issue of PR Week features a front page story (with more depth online), titled ‘Fixer’ cleans Wiki entries, describing how: “A string of senior business figures have had their Wikipedia entries burnished by an anonymous ‘reputation cleanser,’ believed to be a senior figure in the PR industry.” David Singleton describes how 42 …
Apr 19 2011
As Twitter usage has grown, people have tried to quantify how influential some tweeters are, and I have started to incorporate two of the more commonly used tools, Klout and PeerIndex, into my work. Klout’s strapline is “The standard for online influence“, while PeerIndex aims to help you “understand your social capital“. The exact workings of …
Jul 16 2010
After my recent trip to Spain (post), I’ve been almost too busy to blog, and it’s taken me a while to catch up with some of my reading. Something that caught my eye though was an item by Peter Hay in PR Week on 18 June: Corporates ‘must act’ on social media, not least because …
Mar 21 2009
I sometimes save up my professional magazines and read them at one sitting. As a construction PR specialist, I yesterday caught up with last week’s PR Week and Building magazine. Both weeklies used to be stuffed with recruitment advertising, but not any more (the number of jobs lost in architecture, engineering and other areas of …
Mar 06 2009
I have just walked round to my friendly neighbourhood printer (Trojan Press in Blackheath, London SE3) to collect my new batch of business cards. Proprietor Dave tells me that I am the first customer he’s had who has their Twitter ID on the card! I was a little surprised, as I have been including my …
