For most people summer is all about the proverbial long hot lazy days. Yet for some consultants, and many others in the PR industry, January is a time for planning and undertaking projects which need space and thinking time to do properly.

For PR consultancies one of the many rules of thumbs they operate under is that a very busy December is important to carry you through a slack January when holiday pay and lack of activity can throw you into a monthly loss. That’s why smart consultancies work really hard at getting summer promotions and projects to offset the usual downturn or use it for long range planning for themselves and clients. Other rules of thumbs: when you are busiest and consultant chargeable ratios are at their highest a fall off in revenue in a couple of months becomes inevitable because too little new business development has been done; consultants should bill three times their salary to be profitable; and, retainers have moved from being a way to maximise profitability (that’s a euphemism) to becoming a way clients can screw consultancies. read more

Syria and climate change – reaping what you sow

It is a curious fact that many of those most gung ho about committing troops and other assorted massive military options to Syria are often among the leading climate sceptics – with some preeminent examples being our former PM Tony Abbott and various US Republican presidential candidates. read more

The blog is taking a break for a while – back in the New Year unless some sudden inspiration on some obscure topic provokes a post. In the meantime – some odds and sods – in two parts.

Politics and brands

For decades people have bemoaned politics being marketed like soap powder – despite much political discourse resembling the soap powder market in having lots of activity and lots of promotion about products which underneath are pretty much alike. read more

Anyone puzzled by Treasurer Scott Morrison’s bizarre comments about tax and spending ought to remember that the man is a fundamentalist Christian who spends his life believing in the unbelievable.

As the blog remarked recently about Galileo – when he showed sunspots through his telescope to believers in an Aristotelian universe they couldn’t see them – and despite the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment not much has changed since then in some minds. read more

It is very useful to be reminded, from time to time, just how amazing the polymath and National Treasure, Barry Jones, actually is.

The blog first met Barry Jones when it was a student active in the University of Melbourne anti-hanging committee when Barry was leading the opposition to the Ryan hanging. Later the blog worked for the ALP Parliamentary Party when Barry was a Victorian MP and like everybody who knows him is constantly amazed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge. read more

Recently the blog has has seen two dramatic contrasts to US climate change communication – one from academics and one from Exxon Mobil.

The first, from the George Mason University Centre for Climate Change Communication, comes in the form of a new peer reviewed paper on how best practice insights from psychological science can be used to improve public engagement with climate change. The second, from the US Centre for Media and Democracy (publisher of PR Watch),  regarding the New York Attorney General’s current investigation into whether Exxon Mobil deceived its shareholders and the public about the impact of fossil fuel burning on climate change and the oil business’ viability. read more

For as long as the blog can remember someone in the PR industry has been telling it that something or other is transforming the industry ensuring it will never be the same again.

The latest transformation allegedly comes from social media and the blog concedes that while it is actually transformational the worry is that too many PR people are obsessed by the tool itself and give insufficient thought to how it can best be used and what the risks and limitations are. The last blog post on Tony Jaques’ analysis of the Victorian Taxi Association Twitter campaign disaster and similar “hashtag bashtag” results are an example of what can go wrong. Yet questioning the role of social media is a quick way to get dubbed a Luddite or a grumpy old man. read more

Looking back over a longish career the blog is frequently forced to admit that some decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.

One of the most memorable was in the Cadets’ Mess at the Scheyville Officer Training Unit in late 1967 when the Adjutant asked the blog whether it would like to go into the Army PR unit after graduation. The PR unit had some big advantages – temporary Captain rank; more money; the likelihood the blog would know more about PR than anything else in the Army; and, a possible degree of additional safety. Having watched too many WWII movies with stiff upper lip Brit characters when young the blog had a terrible rush of blood and replied “Sir, I was rather thinking I might go into a combat arm.” Next thing the blog knew it was in the Royal Australian Artillery and then bound for South Vietnam. read more

The blog’s not in the habit of making nice comments about Popes partly, of course, because there have been so few of them that would warrant it. But Pope Francis deserves much credit for achieving a significant shift in US opinion on climate change.

The George Mason University Centre for Climate Change Communication undertakes a number of longitudinal attitudinal studies on the subject and their latest, The Francis Effect: How Pope Francis changed the conversation about global warming, shows that more Americans, and more American Catholics, are worried about global warming than six months ago; and more believe it will have significant impacts on human beings. See http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/ read more