There are often times when the blog feels some despair about the PR industry, the people who run it and the skills of those in it.
The latest was when the Issues Outcome newsletter’s Tony Jaques sent him a link to the latest US Holmes Report research report on talent in the industry which demonstrates some insights into structural changes in the industry and, more importantly, some strange findings on the skills employers looked for in that talent.
If framing is the most important thing communicators do, audience segmentation comes a close second. If you set the frame you set the agenda, and if you identify the segment of the population you most need to convince, then much else about the communication (eg tone, channel and tactics) just falls out naturally.
Despite all the talk about innovation and agility Australia only has two really innovative industries – agriculture and tax dodging.
The second is well recognised – well not necessarily by conservative governments – while the second is often overlooked even by the National Party politicians who supposedly represent rural areas and agricultural interests.
While the vast majority of Australians are neither engaged with the current election campaign, nor very enthusiastic about who wins or not, the passionate have one question: “who will win?”
The blog has been asked – on a rough estimate – about 20 times in the past 20 days who it thinks might win. Forced to rely on gut feeling – a very unreliable guide – the blog subscribes to the conventional wisdom that the gap Labor has to bridge is too great and the Tories will win. Perhaps by more than people expect. Sorry – didn’t mean to mention Tories in conjunction with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull but so far his campaign is a direct rip off from a combination of the Cameron and Goldsmith campaigns in the last UK general election and the London mayoral election.
Joe Kennedy famously said that the time to sell shares was when shoe shine boys started to give you tips. A variation on the story was that the time to sell was when lift boys were also doing it.
What do we have as a proxy for these indicators today? Probably it’s when PR people start talking about the growth potential of financial PR and the media start talking about the PR firms that do the spinning to them.
It is easy to believe Americans are mad, well at least many of them, but occasionally there is evidence that rationality rules on some issues.
Okay not so much outside the east and west coasts when it comes to knowledge of the world or any sense of what works better in other countries than it does in the US. Discussing health care, for instance, is fraught and the horror which was evoked by everyone outside Brooklyn when Bernie Sanders advocated a health care system similar to the Australian, UK, German and other countries’ systems . History is also a bit of a knowledge exception as shown by the fact that you would never know from US commentary that the Bern’s idea is not new – it was first advocated by President Eisenhower who couldn’t understand why the US population as a whole couldn’t have a system like the military’s.
There is something about April which inspires poets around the world – Chaucer, Browning, Emerson and Eliot and others all had something to say about it.
Chaucer and Browning focussed on the natural changes which came with the Northern hemisphere Spring while Emerson and Eliot (“the shot around the world” and “the cruellest month”) gave more sombre or politically uplifting messages. The blog has to confess it had forgotten about Emerson and April but came across it serendipitously while checking a line from another poet online so threw it in because it leads on to that defeat heard around the world – well at least in Australia and Turkey.
It’s not often that you get the chance to see the results of experiments with an international dimension in which specific legal or social factors could possibly determine attitudes on given subjects.
In this case we have the benefit of a George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication study, with others, of US attitudes to fracking which can be compared with attitudes to fracking in Australia – and which provoke some thoughts on windmills.
Wittgenstein, among his various comments about why other philosophers and humans didn’t come up to scratch, said “a picture held us captive”.
Now it should be said that Ludwig meant the comment in the context of his belief that most of us are locked into looking at things in a particular way. Yet, to distort him, for communicators the problem is that most of them are locked into communication methods which don’t emphasise the visual.
One of the most depressing things about modern politics – especially in the US but also in Australia – is that to hear one assertion from a politician allows you to predict their views on just about every other issue you can think of.
Well that’s not strictly true of Donald Trump, of course, nor the odd Government type such as Warren Entsch or John Williams. However, in the latter cases their variation from the official line – unlike Trump – tends to be along the rational, progressive lines that Malcolm Turnbull once espoused.