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If you believe that one of your PR or communications projects undertaken during the last year deserves recognition, then why not enter it into the European Excellence Awards 2009? The deadline for entries is on October 9th, so you can prepare your entries over the summer.
Award application materials >
More about the awards and how to enter >
Summary
The Competition:
- More than 1100 entries last year
- Expert jury of 30 communication industry leaders
- 56 Award categories across all sectors, regions and areas of practice
- Deadline for entries: October 9th 2009
The Ceremony
- December 10th 2009, Hofburg Imperial Palace, Vienna
- Celebrate with 400 communication professionals from across Europe
- Commemorate your achievements and hard work with your team
- Showcase your expertise to current and potential clients
If you have any questions regarding award entries, Varvara Garneli (varvara.garneli@excellence-awards.eu) will be delighted to assist you.
Good luck!
Melitta
If you are working in the communications field in the Geneva region, you might want to check out our Networks page. There are quite some specialised networks for different areas of communications: web professionals, luxury professionals and those interested in CSR.
Many thanks to the over 60 participants who attended the GCN lunch event today at the Swiss Press Club. A special thanks to Liam FitzPatrick for his very interesting presentation. We will be distributing a copy of the slides to those who attended. If you want to contact Liam directly for any further queries you can reach him www.simply-goodadvice.com.
View the photos of the event on the left hand column of this page or on our Flickr page.
For those who are interested, you can read more about Liam on Swisster following an interview conducted by Marcus Berry.
As mentioned, our next event will be another networking apero in May and one more lunch event before the summer break in June.
Patricia, Melitta, Glenn, and Vincent
The current recession is deeply related to a loss of confidence and trust and, in many cases, is negatively impacting corporate reputation. Purpose & Performance in a downturn makes business sense; it helps restore trust, provides focus for business strategy, is a reputation differentiator, and can motivate employees and give them a sense of direction.
To find out more about how companies communicate Purpose and Performance (P&P), Burson-Marsteller conducted a Europe-wide survey of 200 leading corporate executives and opinion-makers in 11 countries. Highlights from the survey were:
- Purpose and Performance is relevant to all businesses
- Business reputation is driven mainly by Performance – but Purpose is gaining ground
- More than 90% see corporate Purpose under increasing scrutiny compared to five years ago
- CEOs are key to the oversight of P&P
- 98% say CEOs need to drive a broader sense of Purpose with employees
- 69% believe that companies that focus on P&P are seen as role models, and even deflect criticism
- Nearly 3 in 5 see a tension in focusing on both P&P
Purpose is key to both internal and external communications. Employees need to understand, engage and take ownership of this corporate purpose. External stakeholders need to be aware and convinced by it.
“Companies need to ensure that trust and confidence is maintained. External stakeholders will need fact-based evidence that the corporation is serious about its commitments as a corporate citizen, including corporate governance,” said Joanna Corsaro, Head of Burson-Marsteller Geneva and Vice-Chair of the EMEA Corporate Practice.
“This is a difficult exercise, and Burson-Marsteller’s Purpose & Performance Diagnostic Tool can help understand where the corporation stands in the eyes of different stakeholders and where it wants to go in the future.”
Find out more about Burson-Marsteller and their Diagnositc tool >
Melitta
The Global Alliance announces the launch of an international survey of PR professionals. The survey’s goal is to hear from PR professional associations and individual practitioners around the world on the key issues that will affect practitioners, associations and the profession in the next five years. The results will inform the development of the Global Alliance’s new strategic plan for 2009-2014. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete, and the results will be presented at the Global Alliance’s annual general meeting on June 6, 2009, in Vancouver, Canada.
To complete the survey click here>>
The Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communications Management is the umbrella organization linking PR professional associations around the world. By partnering with associations in more than 70 countries, the Alliance works to increase professionalism in public relations and enhance the global influence of the profession. The Alliance’s activities focus on setting standards, sharing resources, advocacy for the profession and outreach to help national associations grow.
Article on Tech Crunch on alternatives to Google:
Pipl.com: People Search Engine So Good, It Will Scare Your Pants Off
Google may be good at many things, but people search is not one of them. For that you’ll have to use a more specialized search engine. Spock
and Wink (merged with Reunion.com) are the people-search destinations most TechCrunch readers could probably name off the top of their head. However, slowly but surely—and mostly, very quietly—a new player has been making serious headway in this search vertical, and it’s name is Pipl.com.
Going by ComScore’s December numbers, Pipl is leading in the US with 557K unique users to Spock’s 260K, but is trailing internationally with 1.35M uniques to Spock’s 2.38M. How has Pipl pulled this off? Matthew Hertz, the company CEO, tells me it’s mostly word-of-mouth. It’s a simple answer but it rings true. Just take it out for a spin and you’ll see why—it’s just good. In fact it’s so good it’ll probably scare some people’s pants off when they see what information it is able to—legally—drudge up.
It produces not only links to all of your profiles on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn, blog mentions, and photos on Flickr. It finds mentions of your name in public records, including property records, SEC filings, and birth databases. It also finds e-mail addresses and summarizes “quick facts” about the person. For instance, a search for “Roi Carthy” turns up quick facts like these:
Roi Carthy is an Israeli-based entrepreneur and startup consultant…
Editor’s note: Roi Carthy is currently writing for TechCrunch…
For some time, Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, has been dipping its big toes into the vast pool of Facebook, now the world’s largest social network. I recently knocked on the doors of both companies to hear how the experiment was going. Neither was inclined to say much.
Independent experts on Web advertising have been watching, however, and what they see is a myriad of difficulties in making brand advertising work on social networking sites. Members of social networks want to spend time with friends, not brands.
When major brands place banner advertisements on the side of a member’s home page, they pay inexpensive prices, but the ads receive little attention. Seth Goldstein, co-founder of SocialMedia Networks, an online advertising company, wrote on his Facebook blog that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”
When advertisers invite members to come to pages dedicated to their products, they can attract visitors only by investing in expensive creative material or old-fashioned promotions like prize contests.
And when they try to take advantage of new “social advertising,” extending their commercial message to a member’s friends, their ads will be noticed, all right, but not necessarily favorably. Members are understandably reluctant to become shills. IDC, the technology research firm, published a study last month that reported that just 3 percent of Internet users in the United States would willingly let publishers use their friends for advertising. The report described social advertising as “stillborn.”
All Web sites that rely on ads struggle to a greater or lesser extent to convert traffic, even high traffic, into meaningful revenue. Ads that run on Google and other search engines are a profitable exception because their visitors are often in a buying mood. Other kinds of sites, however, can’t deliver similar visitors to advertisers. Google’s own YouTube, which relies heavily, like Facebook, on user-generated content, remains a costly experiment in the high-traffic, low-revenue ad business.
Financial data would show the current state of Facebook’s advertising, but none are available. Facebook is privately held and a spokesman told me that it does not disclose revenue or any information about its ad sales.
Read full article here!
Pulitzer Prize Makes Nice With The Web As Print Media Stumbles
by Jason Kincaid on December 8, 2008
The Pulitzer Prize Board, the governing body behind American journalism’s highest honor, has announced
that online-only newspapers will now be eligible for the Prize. The announcement comes as many traditional media outlets are struggling – the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy today and The New York Times is borrowing against its Manhattan headquarters - and affirms the increasingly important role that online news outlets are playing in today’s news cycle.
The new requirements stipulate that entries come from:
“a text-based United States newspaper or news organization that publishes—in print or online—at least weekly during the calendar year; that is primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing stories; and that adheres to the highest journalistic principles. Printed magazines and broadcast media, and their respective Web sites, are not eligible.”
But what exactly is an “Online-Only Publication Primarily Devoted to Original News Reporting”? The release and relevant FAQ section shed little light on the matter, offering the following:
Q: Can you give examples of online-only newspapers that would qualify?
A. A growing number of sites, such as MinnPost, Voice of San Diego, St. Louis Beacon and Washington Independent, do original reporting. But it is premature to discuss eligibility before an entry has actually been submitted.
These broad guidelines give the Pulitzer’s governing Board some flexibility for judging entries as it tests the muddy waters of online content. But it leaves the doors open to seemingly absurd possibilities. Among the first to come to mind: what if someone won a prize for a Tweet?
Given the growing importance of Twitter during breaking news events, it is becoming increasingly possible that we will one day have a “Tweet heard round the world” – a 140 character message that breaks a news story of global significance. One that will be repeated ad nauseam across cable news networks and major newspapers – perhaps emerging as a candidate for the Pulitzer under the new rules. Far fetched? Sure. But not impossible. How about a series of Tweets?
Read full article here!
An interesting article in the New York Times about the challenges of following comings and goings in the media industry…
News About News, in 140 Characters
By JENNA WORTHAM
With staff changes and reductions across the media industry, even a blog post can be too time-consuming a way to announce who is in and out of a job. That is why a public relations employee turned to the instant-blogging platform Twitter to create The Media Is Dying, a Twitter feed that documents media hirings and firings in one-sentence bursts of text.
“These sorts of layoffs are unheard-of,” said the stream’s founder, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve his sources in the industry. “It’s gotten insane to keep up with who was moving around and changing beats.”
Initially, The Media Is Dying was accessible only to select Twitter members, as the feed was intended to help those in the P.R. industry stay on top of the revolving entries in their address books. But requests to be included flooded the founder, who decided to go public three weeks ago. Since then, the stream, maintained at twitter.com/themediaisdying by its founder and seven volunteers from the industry, has garnered more than 3,000 subscribers.
Read the full article here!
