Contemporary Issues in Public Relations

Home culture vs. Host culture

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana) — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:03:00 +0000

Great feature on Geert Hosftede's website that allows you to compare your home culture with your host culture. By identifying and understanding the differences and common grounds with your own culture you can better and faster adapt to the host culture. Same principles apply for PR in global environments.

Here's Romania compared to the UK.

Pretty different, huh? :)

Global PR and cultural dimensions

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 19:42:00 +0000

Our class discussion today about global/ international PR led us to Edward Hall's concepts of high and low context cultures from his 1976 'Beyond culture' and to Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions.

Going through them was meant to make us understand why sometimes we *don't understand* each other all that well. And by 'we' I mean everyone from PR professionals working in multinationals to the incredibly culturally diverse group that is our class.

It got me thinking about some of the issues that came up in the group work that we've done the past semester. It was strange, at the time, seeing how dissimilar we all approached the same assignment and how differently we interacted with each other. But putting everything through Hall's and Hofstede's perspective, things started to make sense.

So in the interest of getting people to understand me better and getting myself to understand the outside world better in future similar situations, I started mapping out some of my cultural dimensions, according to Hofstede's research and the way this study attributes them to the Romanian culture.

According to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and estimations, Romania tends to be a culture that has a low uncertainty avoidance ranking, which indicates that “the society accepts more rapidly change and takes more and greater risks”, and is less rule-oriented. It also has a short-term orientation, as long-term traditions and commitments are not impediments to changes. Other indicators are: high power distance index reflecting presence of inequality of power and health within society and deference to authority figures, low individualism which expresses the collectivistic nature of society with close tights between individuals, and high masculinity pointing out a high degree of gender differentiation. (Source)

Summing up this study's findings (study developed by 3 Romanian researchers in the field of cross-cultural communication), Romanian culture has:

- A high Power Distance Index, corresponding to an efficient mechanism for preservation and distinguishing status differences; the index is mainly characterized through arbitrary leadership and an inclination towards indiscipline.

- A very low Individualism Index => it's a culture characterized by collectivism, which means that, within it, it's normal to expect help from the community. There also is a certain lack of initiative, a contra productive view of private property and group interests always take precedence.

- Medium Masculinity, with a slight tendency towards femininity. There is, however, a lack of homogeneity within this dimension: the Romanian culture has both extremely masculine tendencies (such as acute differences between male and female behaviours) and pronounced feminine ones (like egalitarianism, a negative view of wealthy people, attraction towards convenience etc.)

- An above average Uncertainty Avoidance Index, dimension characterized by the presence of opposed tendencies: on the one hand there are strong avoidance elements - related to the social impact of religion or the authorities' need for control - and on the other hand, uncertainty acceptance elements, such as casualness, indifference or lack of strictness , are not uncommon.

- Medium values for long term orientation, a consequence of the existing traditionalism and of the ease of change at the superficial level.

The results of the study vary in certain areas from those estimated by Hofstede:

Taking a look at Edward Hall's theory on low and high context cultures, I would immediately classify Romanian as the latter.

In a high context culture, such as mine, many things are left unsaid, letting the culture itself explain them. Words and word choice become very important in higher context communication: a few words can communicate a complex message very effectively to an in-group. But, at the same time, they do it much less effectively outside that group. This differs from lower context cultures, such as German, American or Scandinavian ones, the communicator needs to be much more explicit and the value of a single word is less important.

Knowing and being aware of your cultural dimensions is the first step of practicing PR in a global environment. After assimilating this, the next step is becoming aware and understanding the dimensions that apply to the people you work with and for. If you are able to successfully and open-mindedly go through these steps, your work as an international PR practitioner has just been way simplified.

PR Spam - An Inconvenient Truth

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 23:29:00 +0000

An Inconvenient PR Truth from RealWire on Vimeo.

One of the biggest and most common incrimination that journalists have made against PR practitioners over the years has been the massive amount of spamming that some of the latter tend to indulge themselves in. Millions of press releases are sent every year to publications and journalists that have no connection to the subject or target audience in matter.

Realwire chief executive Adam Parke, with the support of several important names in the industry, has launched a campaign entitled An Inconvenient PR truth, aimed at regulating the way journalists - online and offline - should be approached by PR professionals. The campaign's objective is to reduce what has become a true disease inside the industry -irrelevant and untargeted PR practices, otherwise known as PR spam.

The campaigns' key element is a ‘bill of rights' suggesting exactly the ways in which the dynamics between journalists and PR practitioners wishing to contact them should be conducted. To read its provisions click here.

This campaign can turn out be an important step in improving the relationship between PR pros and journalists, which, although it's defined on mutual dependence, it's also a rather conflictual one. And this isn't a secret to anyone mildly related to either industry. It might even lead to some kind of reciprocation, a code of how journalist should use the information they are getting (and using) from those press releases. In a perfect world that is.

And, who knows, if it expands outside its current national UK borders, the campaign could help demystify some of that villain image that PR has been wrapped in for a while now. Might work as a bit of reputation PR on the industry itself.

However, the really big question here is whether this can go even further and become a step towards regulating public relations as a profession. Because at the end of the day, that is really the burning issue that modern PR is facing.

But I guess I'm getting ahead of myself here - the campaign has only been launched yesterday. Still, it does seem like a nice thought to have.

PR and the Social Media Bangwagon

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 17:29:00 +0000

In class today we touched on a subject that I particularly feel attracted to and that in my own, probably biased, opinion is the future of public relations: social media.

There are tons of materials on the subject -especially online- and more than enough (self-proclaimed) experts that preach about the unbreakable bond that PR needs to build with social media in order to have a glorious future. And, of course, they are always sure to add convincingly build arguments and cleverly constructed examples to serve as proof of just that. Brian Solis, Shel Holtz, Todd Defren, Scott Monty, just to name a few of those whose blogs I find myself regularly reading. Some are more convincing than others; some insist on the world domination of new media, others tend to be more moderately opinionated on the matter. But they all view social media as the future.

And the thing is, if you're mesmerized by the influence that social media undeniably has on the world around you, but especially by the impact it exerts on your own life (like I tend to be when I wake up in the middle of the night because there is something I just *need* to tweet about), you will surely embrace all of it, jump on the bandwagon and stubbornly fight off all that try to prove it wrong.

Social media has creeped into our daily lives and has somehow become addictive, an extension of our material life, a place to cultivate our digitally enhanced alter-egos. And oh how well does it all mix with public relations! There is obviously no way of knowing what will happen to the industry in 10 years from now; we can't even predict, all that accurately, what will happen tomorrow. But if I had to take my best guess I'd say that social media is the trend to look out for and the driving force behind what PR will be at that point.

All the stats are there and proof of how efficient platforms such as FaceBook or Twitter can be has surfaced on numerous occasions (just think of all the buzz that social media, and social media alone, created around the iPad launch this week). It's up to the PR professionals to start rewiring their brains in business mode when it comes to how/ what to post on their blogs or update FaceBook statuses with, and figure out the proper way of using all these new tools in the advantage of their company and clients.

Because the hardest problem that a PR practitioner will ever face in the area is how to use social media to their advantage. Even though when you think about it in terms of 'updating information on Facebook' or tweeting 140 character messages on 'what's happening', you feel that it should come naturally(I mean, after all, it is something that you pretty much do every day), it may actually be harder than it seems once applied to an organization's or client's needs.

How do you time the release of the information, what kind of message do you want to send out and how do you make sure it doesn't get distorted on the way (we all pretty much know that social media = lack of control), how much information is too much or what social media platform best fits the profile of your client and the requirements of their audiences. Not to mention the whole issue surrounding measuring and evaluating results or that of defining the new ethical boundaries, if any left at all.

Information flows faster and more uncontrollable than ever before; and what better glimpse at this reality that a simple analysis of the dynamics of Twitter trends or of viral campaigns such as Facebook's 'What colour's your bra?' And if PR has come to terms with the loss of control over that information, it's about high time it start gaining some of it back.

All of the sudden we have all these multitude of voices that are automatically invested with power and that create a lot of new third party endorsers. PR practitioners have to come up with ways to manage these voices, identify those which are most relevant and powerful, and shift the power balance towards their client or company. And multiple voices also come with a benefit: two-way communication is more enhanced than ever. This is an exceptional opportunity to find out exactly what the public is thinking about and if social media hasn't told you that it means that the online tools are not being used properly.

In this new digitalized world, monologue has given way to dialog, professionals to amateurs (these days we seem more likely to trust in the words of bloggers than in any 'official information' we receive) and authenticity seems to be the key. But is transparency also a core integrated element of social media? It is definitely a top requirement in the social media scheme of things, but how realistic is it really? Gatekeepers have always been there to serve their purposes and social media is no different: the gatekeepers are there, just not as obvious as before; unspecialized users tend to be oblivious to their existence, but they are real. The public wants honest non-biased opinions in their grand search of the Truth, but it doesn't always seem to be feasible. Of course transparency is the basis of building trust and relationships, and these two elements are key to good public relation practices, but there is such a thing as too much information and honesty don't have to equate with utter vulnerability. And it's again the PR professional's duty to find the perfect balance between the two.

Used correctly, social media is capable of offering the PR professional the means to send out controlled messages while giving the public the opportunities and exactly the information it needs. And once PR learns how to manage all of the above, and starts using social media the way it was intended, the benefits are there to thrive in.

Hello world. Hello PR

noreply@blogger.com (Roxana) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:01:00 +0000

My name is Roxana and I am a master student in Public Relations at the University of Westminster in London. This blog is starting out as an assignment for one of my post grad modules and it is meant to bring forward and analyse different contemporary issues in public relations, throughout the course of the next few months.

And what better way to take on contemporary issues in public relations than through a blog - the essential new media platform - and what many believe to be the future of PR.

In hopes that this will not turn out to be a purely theoretical venue, nor an online ranting station, but rather a constructive, tactical and analytical approach to public relations issues today, I welcome you to my blog and wish you a pleasant stay. Feel free to ask questions or comment and be sure you will receive feedback.

Until next time,

Roxana