Women in PR

After a long awaited release, Series 3 of the Women in PR with Ana Adi podcast is finally ready for release thanks to the generous support of professional-podcasts.com and the patience of the amazing guests.

The pandemic has brought communicators a variety of challenges, greater pressure and visibility and a renewed sense of value. It also required reorganization and rethinking of both delivery and process. Just think of all in person meetings that had to move online, from team events to press conferences and autoshows.

For this final episode, we’re coming home, to Germany, to chat with Katja Bott. She’s learning the Global Communications team of Mercedes-Benz Cars & Vans since October 2018 having worked with the company for more than 17 years in Germany and the US.

Is there something that unites PR practice globally? And more importantly, is there something that the PR practice as a whole can identify as its ideal professional self?

Anne Gregory will help us find some answers to these questions. She is currently Chair of Corporate Communication at the University of Huddersfield and has formerly chaired the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communication Management. It is during her tenure there that she directed the seven continent team in developing the Global Capability Framework for the profession, a framework that we want to talk about today. Among many things she’s written (more than 80 publications) is the CIPRs AI in PR Ethics Guide.

I met with Marian Salzman, Senior Vice President, Communications at Philip Morris International, for a fireside chat at the Global Communication Summit in 2020. At PMI, her work is focused on designing a smoke-free future as the company embarks on its journey of transformation. She’s also a trendspotter, a professional hobby as she calls it, and a much awarded public relations executive being listed in PRWeek’s Global Power Book and as a PR News Top Woman in PR. Her most recent trends report is called Zoomsday Predictions

There’s often talk about international public relations yet it doesn’t seem to be very clear what exactly do we mean by it: PR work done by the same organization in multiple countries, PR work done together with an international team. What’s more, international PR and cross-cultural communication are often conflated, implying that communication practitioners are by default cultural translators and intermediaries too. But are they? Can they be?

We’ll talk about all that and more with today’s guest, Jo Osborn who has both an international career and has worked with multinational organizations, both in house and as a consultant, in government and for blue-chip businesses. A graduate in Film, Media and Cultural Studies, she started her career in her hometown Hong Kong, before moving to Italy and then onto London. Jo is currently the Head of Communications and Corporate Brand for Reckitt.

How can teams perform better and how can team members work better together. In this week's episode we talk about alignment as a process, the science behind it and the applications in practice.

Today we’ll focus on public relations for social justice, on the times when activism is public relations. To do so, we’ll also consider whether public relations practitioners themselves should be change agents. And we’ll be introducing a new view on theorizing public relations: queer theorizing.

This is all part of Dr Erica Ciszek’s research and it is with them that we’ll be chatting today. They are an Assistant Professor with the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations at the University of Texas with their work published in many of PR’s most valued academic journals including Public Relations Review, Journal of Communication and Public Relations Inquiry to name a few.

Diversity and inclusion have become such a big thing recently… especially after the #blacklivesmatter protests in the USA in 2020, companies around the world (or perhaps their communication teams) felt that it was about time they spoke about the topic. But you see, PR is not diverse. We spoke about this in previous episodes and covered this more extensively in the Women in PR book as well. So, generally-speaking, there are very non-diverse PR and communications teams and they are supposed to help organizations navigate internally and externally a world of acceptance and mutual support when in some cases they might have no clue whatsoever how others live and feel.

I don’t mean to lecture. Instead, we’ll have a conversation about these topics with Rochelle Ford. She is the Dean of School of Communications at Elon University, a Fulbright specialist and awarded educator and researcher. Her life’s work has diversity in focus.

From the PR fields of activity, corporate communications is still the most visible and praised, as is media relations. But it is really non-profit organizations that have been innovating in the field and they have been making an impact, in the world and on the profession. The reasons for NGO communications success are multiple: from the way their values resonate with those of the people joining them, from their generally assumed lack of resources or from the expectation that they do different and that they do better.

For a communicator, the move from corporate to non-profit is still unusual. Doing it out of passion is almost unheard of.

Which is why we’re heading to Estonia today (virtually, as usual) to meet with Anneli Ohvril, the CEO of Let’s Do it World, an NGO focused on engaging leaders and organizations around the world on environmental issues. World Cleanup Day is their biggest event, one day, uniting millions of people around the world with the mission to clean places around them – parks, walkways, lakes… in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, 11 million people joined the day - some outdoors, some online, some alone and some socially distanced.

So today we’ll speak about purpose and values and passion for a cleaner future and cleaner PR.

We have often spoken about what practitioners and academics perceive to be the role and mission of public relations and communications. And while discussing strategy, measurement and evaluation and thus research, two issues in particular keep popping up: the balancing of multiple stakeholder interests and demands - and VUCA, the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous context of the current practice.

Today’s conversation with Irma Meyer will give us all a new way of looking at things and, I think, a way out of exactly this conundrum.

Irma too started as a journalist and was then head-hunted into banking PR. She is currently running her own consultancy in Johannesburg and when time allows it she is a competitive Ballroom and Latin dancer. Well, she also has a poodle, loves chocolate and plays the piano… today however we’re focusing on her doctoral work and her theoretical proposal. A metamodern stakeholder relationship management model for non-profit organizations, is what we’ll be focusing on today.