Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Canadian Public Relations Society invents new logo for accredited members.

Here's what the CPRS news release says: "

Thursday, July 5, 2007
IABC names Todd Hattori as chairman

The International Association of Business Communicators met in New Orleans last week, and among other things held its annual meeting and named Todd Hattori as its chairman.

Many chairs ago, when Charles Pizzo was the chair, I realized that the IABC chair was the most important communicator in the world. Why? Name one other individual leading and representing  more than 14,000 communicators spread over more than 60 countries.

Hattori has not told the world what matters to him as chair, but he has posed some info inside a blog inside the IABC web site. You can find the information here: http://blogs.iabc.com/chair/

Who is Todd Hattori and what qualifies him to be (S)elected as chair of an organization as big as IABC? Here's the first couple of paragraphs from his bio on the IABC web site today.

In the IABC blog linked to above, there are 15 priorities posted. That sure seems like a lot to me. IABC's blog is supposed to accept comments from anyone who wishes to comment, within certain rules. Hattori has also written some new rules you can find via the same link. I commented on the rules earlier in the week, but my comments were not posted. Last time this happened, it was a technical flaw, not censorship.

Here's the comment I sent today in regard to the priorities. You may or may not find it on the site; too soon to know because comments get cleared by humans.

July 5 Café comment by BAK, in reply to the Focus on Continued Success thread at http://blogs.iabc.com/chair/

For those reluctant to count the little dot bullets, that's 15 activities that will get special attention.

The most important of these -- we could call it 1c --  is inside "Helping define excellence in communication through strategic, highly visible media relations, new social media, and public appearances;... "

I don't know what "Helping define excellence" means, but while that's being done, at least there will be some "demonstrating the value of business communications (as defined by IABC and including PR) in order to improve the positioning of professional communicators, open doors to new and expanded business, and build understanding that results in being able to do more, better, for clients and employers, while getting paid more," going on at the same time.

Is IABC going to hire a public relations professional to replace Heidi, to operate this program?

Is there going to be a volunteer publicity / media relations committee made up of members who will actually do something? I noted Mike Klein's comment in another part of this site, pointing out that IABC seems to not believe in itself, nor understand how to actually make news.

I look forward to your first interview / op ed / what-have-you, in the NY Times and/or Wall Street Journal, or even your home town paper, and the best business paper in San Fran.

The top Canadian op-ed targets are The Globe and Mail, national but edited in Toronto) and the CanWest News Service (Winnipeg, supplying papers in most Canadian really big cities). CanWest is the advertiser on the IFC of the July-August Commie Whirled.

The ideal public appearance venues are The Canadian Clubs in various cities across the country, and The Empire Club in Toronto. A recent past president of The Empire Club is a PR guy, which could perhaps grease the skids.

I'm sure ABC members reading the Cafe in other countries can chime in with a list of their most important business publications and business-oriented speaking venues.

Todd, you're now the most important professional communicator in the world -- no other person represents 14,000 professional communicators in over 60 countries, covering so many industries and organizations.

Wow.

Good luck.

Below the dotted line: 
Assorted association stories from before July 2007.
. . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . .

Friday, April 13, 2007, 2007
A plea, reprinted from O'Dwyer's PR Daily, for more openness at the Public Relations Society of America, where new "President" William Murray appears to be in hiding.
 

FROM O’Dwyer’s PR Daily:
April 11, 2007

“EMBRACE CRITICS,” MURRAY TOLD

Stuart Goldstein, managing director of corporate communications, Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., New York, has urged PRSA president Bill Murray to “fling the door open and embrace the critics.” 

Goldstein, who sent an e-mail to Murray last week and also copied this website, has yet to receive a reply from Murray.

“The PRSA governance structure suppresses debate and dialogue on critical issues facing the profession,” wrote Goldstein.

“The accreditation requirement for serving in PRSA leadership is a turn-off and barrier to input from senior corporate professionals in communications, who see APR as irrelevant,” he added.

Critics should be listened to, he told Murray.
“It’s rare that folks take the time, as I did, or Jack O’Dwyer does, to try to give a perspective not in keeping with the solo PR practitioners who are guiding PRSA,” he wrote.

Another part of the e-mail said:

“Instead of criticizing Jack, PRSA ought to be thanking him for keeping you visible and dedicating so much of his time to your activities. It’s ironic that a trade association intended to advance the value of communications is actually very rigid and closed to new ideas.”

Wrote Articles to PRSA in 2003
Goldstein noted that he wrote an article for publication in PRSA’s Tactics in 2003 that called on the Society “to foster a more open dialogue on PRSA’s direction and priorities.

It was only published “after a lengthy delay” while PRSA found someone who would write a “rebuttal piece” next to his article, he says.

PRSA then refused to publish second article outlining an “Agenda for Reform,” says Goldstein.

Instead, PRSA “buried the piece on its websit

In that article, Goldstein called on PRSA to end its emphasis on accreditation.

“Accreditation is not the standard by which PR professionalism is judged in the business world,” he wrote, saying it has “drained resources and diverted attention from the more strategic issues challenging PRSA. The lack of senior corporate PR professionals on the PRSA board and participating in PRSA activities is a sign that they question the continuing relevance of PRSA. The alarm bell is ringing off the hook.”

Goldstein’s piece also touched on the portrayal of PR people movies and in the media and said PRSA “should challenge these distorted views.”

PRSA, he wrote, should redirect its resources and energy “to focus on issues of major strategic importance to the profession. 

PR Should Mean Innovation
He said that if it created “laboratories of innovation, we’d see a resurgence in interest and commitment among senior professionals.

He said the emphasis on awards programs “should give way to research and authorship on issues, trends and innovation at the quality level of a Harvard or MIT business review.”

There are many PR people who are talented “technically” but the greatest need is for PR pros who can “think and act strategically,” says Goldstein.

“We have fewer people who bring the analytical and big picture perspective that can really add value to the development of strategy for senior management and clients,” he said.

Strategic, he explained, “has to do with influencing outcomes and affecting results. It means not seeing yourself as adjunct to the business strategy, but as an integral part of that process. Strategic means not seeing yourself less as ‘client driven’ (e.g., I do whatever my client asks), but seeing yourself as a ‘catalyst for change.’”

In a closing remark in his letter to Murray, Goldstein wrote: “You can shout down folks who are holding PRSA’s feet to the fire, though this only feeds the perception of a closed trade group. Or you can fling open the door and embrace the critics–and in the process everyone learns–and the interests of the profession as a whole are well served.

Thursday, March 1, 2007 Welcome visitors from The IABC Cafe
Some thoughts on "new social media" (whatever that means)
Yesterday I read a thread on the International Association of Business Communicators IABC Cafe blog about new social media, initiated by incoming IABC world-wide elected chair Todd Hattori, and I wrote a quite comprehensive, if I do say so myself, reply. But I'm used to the IABC blog refusing my work, so I saved it just in case. Sure 'nuf, it failed to get through.

PR LESSON? Don't trust any "new social media" to work right.

Anyway, for those interested, here's the story. To get the context, go to www.IABC.com, look down the opening page for Visit The IABC Cafe, or try your luck clicking on this: Visit the IABC Café

Read that, note the three questions from Todd Hattori at the bottom of the original posting, and then read below:

Re>What are your social media observations and experiences? How have you incorporated new social media learnings into your communication/business practices? What secrets do you have for engaging in new social media within a hectic, overloaded schedule? <

Question one:

If I knew the definition, I could answer better. Does social media need to be preceded with "new" and does the CompuServe PRSIG from a million years ago count? Does a well run bulletin board that's easy to navigate, such as dpreview.com (it's about digital photography) count, or do we need badly designed blogs, (plus the jumble of Youtube and MySpace?)

Is this very screen in front of readers' eyes (note the plural, optimistic, "readers") new social media?

O'Dwyer's PR Daily? Or just the part with comments after a story?

What I do know is that BAK's Report has, over the years, made a lot of people think about a lot of aspects of public relations and corporate communications and allowed me to "speak" with people all over the world.

(www.BrianKilgore.com for those curious) But BAK's Report does not have a way for people to insert comments without actually writing an e-mail to me. Or phoning, etc.

Question two (how have I incorporated...) Well, I've had good still photos on my web site since I started it a million years ago. And my site is topical -- go look at most sites owned by PR people and you'll find an out of date brochure. And I've tried to AVOID some of the common traits of what I think may be new social media., Type is big enough to read on all the sites I manage, for instance, and I've tried to avoid crap like the Go Fast movie with screaming jerks and bad shots of airplanes that's featured today on MySpace.

Again, we can look at this site. (The one on the screen in front of you.) Once we get past the terrible layout -- see Ragan's Grapevine and some Ragan publication about good web design and compare it with IABC.com -- we see terrible use of stock photos and no-where near good enough use of Chris Salvo's excellent portraits. But, on a  positive note, we find easy access to the IABC podcast, but we find the podcasts -- at least until I gave up listening -- devoid of editing.

IABC members, or at least the good ones, know editing is the most important thing they do with words on paper, and even on screen. Why not words aimed at the ear? (I actually know the answer to this question... see #3)

Are there any pictures that move on this site? I can't remembe

Question three -- secrets for engaging...

Flipping this back to IABC, I wonder how much effort IABC has made in working with the schools that have IABC chapters to revise courses so that good still photogaphy and good pictures that move have become part of the curriculum. 

I do know that for years employee and member publications -- the heart and soul of so much of IABC -- have been packed with really awful photographs, or stock images that mean nothing to the readers, and few or no decent portraits of real people doing real things. (Take a look at Communications World and find real pictures of real people, with their names in captions. (The last issue I saw was the AIDS special -- maybe things have changed)

So, my secrets... note the phrase "pictures that move" above. There's a new category of visual image that is not yet named, or at least not named well. "Movies" are too long. "Clips" suggests to me something "clipped" out of something longer. i.e. 45 seconds from a 15 minute television newscast.

But for "pictures that move" I'm thinking of images created for a specific communications purpose, just like a good photograph is, except using technology that allows this/these image/s  to move, and perhaps include sound, and are short enough to work on computers and not bore people.

And, real pictures of real people doing real things, not pointless Flash animations.

In my particular case, I have the theory of commercial film making and public affairs and news videomaking down cold, except for the fact my knowledge is out of date. Apparently 16mm film has been replaced.

On Sunday I bought a Fuji point and shoot camera with the ability to record moving images and record sound. I've got Premiere Elements loaded on this computer. And I have a 12 year old son who has some direction talent, a business partner who is studying movie making and writing a script, and lots of my own out-of-date knowledge.

So, my secret is that I have two goals -- find good uses of pictures that move, and then produce to an acceptable professional level, in accordance with available budgets, pictures that move.

Then figure out how and when and, most importantly, why to put these in front of people.

The huge issues in new social media for IABC members are, I believe, being professional about it and finding audiences that matter, for the messages delivered.

If your client is the Backwards Baseball Cap Company, or you've got Jimmy Neutron's soft drink that makes you belch as a client, YouTube and MySpace are great.

Assuming that new social meda does not include your own well designed and well managed web site. For this kind of site, a picture that moves of a mud-caked little kid running towards a laughing mother might be a great picture that moves for your detergent company's advice and hints portion of a web site.

Take a look at www.thestar.com/onlinetrading and you can see much of the section. Later today I'll explain more about my work.

CPRS runs accreditation ad in Globe and Mail Report on Business
Yesterday, Tuesday, February 20, the Canadian Public Relations Society ran a quarter page ad about CPRS accreditation in the Report on Business section of The Globe and Mail, which is Canada's most important national newspaper and the paper best read by the high level executives PR people really should be serving. Excellent media choice.

A perfect audience to learn about the 23 newly accredited CPRS members. All their names were in the ad, along with an explanation of what accreditation is all about.

It would have been nice if CPRS bothered to put a headline on the ad, but that's just sort of nitpicking. The existence of the ad is great, and most of the content is just fine, (an intelligent copy editor would have been nice, too, but what the heck, the ad ran) and the type is big enough to read. There's a news release about the success of the accreditation candidates buried on the CPRS web site, at www.CPRS.ca But no reference to the advertisement.

Here's the list from the CPRS news release.:

Public relations professionals who received their APR in 2006 are:

• Sophie Allard ARP - Québec
• Cindy Bayers APR - Nova Scotia
• Andrew Berthoff APR - Toronto
• Michele Comeau Thompson APR - Vancouver
• Robert Cooper APR - Toronto
• Danielle Côté APR - Ottawa
• Cindy Goldberg APR - Ottawa
• Marion Grau APR - Vancouver Island
• Susan Kirk APR - Vancouver
• Angela Koulyras APR - Vancouver
• Jeff Lake APR - Toronto
• Asifa Lalji APR - Vancouver
• Albert Lee APR - Toronto
• Lin Moody APR - Ottawa
• Captain John P. Murray APR - Vancouver
• Krys Potapzcyk APR - Toronto
• Vincent Power APR - Toronto
• Heather Pullen APR - Hamilton
• Karla Sandwith APR - Vancouver Island
• Brenda Sweeney APR - Hamilton
• Mary Louise Wakefield APR - Vancouver Isl. Christina Winsor APR - New Brunswick
• Marie Zirk APR - Vancouver Island

Saturday, February 3, 2007
Don't be misled by IABC advocacy reports
There are some stories kicking around -- O'Dwyer's PR Daily, some Ragan publication, the IABC international web site at www.iabc.com and probably more places, that would have readers believe that IABC has some sort of "new" advocacy work group.

In fact, this so-called work group started months ago, and the vast majority of people in this work group did no work -- notable exception being my partner , associate, friend Jana Schilder. The work group is run my Michal Zimet, who did not get it going for weeks, and then let most of the participants get away with doing no participating. Most did not even take part in the one -- count 'em, one -- conference call. The working group supposedly had a private blog where they were to share ideas -- again, pretty much nothing from some members, nothing of value from most others, and an excellent think piece on PR for PR by Jana Schilder.

Now, IABC has a section on its web site that's a blog about advocacy -- I've written before about the terrible design of IABC blogs -- that will cause more time to be wasted as "leaders" fail to do any leading. Go take a look.

Wednesday, January 3, 2007

From O'Dwyer's PR Daily
PRSA finally replaces Catherine Bolton

PRSA announced on Dec. 27 (were they trying to bury this story?) the appointment of William Murray as president/COO. A 20-year veteran of catching international copyright violators for the Motion Picture Assn., he might be interested in PRSA?s 1993-96 battle with a dozen authors who claimed PRSA violated their copyrights.

Teckie note: The link above takes you to a paid page. If you are not an O'Dwyer subscriber, try www.prsa.org to find the announcement.

The paragraph above is the teaser for Jack O'dwyer's story yesterday on the appointment of Mr. Murray to the renamed post (Bolton was Executive Director) as top paid official at PRSA. I have some sympathy for the poor guy. Jack takes a shot at the date of the announcement, and he's right about it being buried. If you read the news release on the PRSA site, you'll see that Cedric Bess, the PRSA supposed-PR guy, did not bother following PR 101, and get a quote from Mr. Murray to put into the release. And a Google search yesterday tracked down an educator who got agreement from Mr., Murray to do a telephone interview with his PR class, and then Bess backed out of it. Who's the boss? Bess or Murray?

Monday, January 1 2007

Three resolutions or evolutions for 2007.

1/ BAK is getting more deeply involved in a major new project we're calling Branded Content Publishing -- the latest project, and the one in which I'll be taking a higher public profile, is the cretion of a special advertising section on Online Trading in The Toronto Star, Canada's largest circulation newspaper. The sections, planned for quarterly release, with the first in late February, will be a mix of advertising, what we're calling advertiser-linked stories, and what we're calling broadly-based content. My job is to oversee everything surrounding the ads. My challenge is to make the words and pictures so interesting that readers will spend enough time on the pages that they'll see, reac and react to the ads, and enjoy"my" part of the section enough that they'll look forward to seeing it every few months.

2/ More education in BAK's Report in 2007. 'll be writing feature articles on public relations and corporate communications themes, which will be published here and also offered to other PR publications. Two of the topics on the inital list are branding, based on an excellent IABC Toronto presention I was invited to cover by IABC, and one on party and event planning and implementation, inspired by a magazine I bought this week called Bizbash.To, To standing for Toronto. There are New York and Florida versions of this publication, too. It got me thinking.. I'll put those thoughts into BAK's Report for my readers.

3/ Expanded advocacy journalism in 2007. Readers of BAK's Report in the past know I've been in favor of some things and against some things, and I've written about these opinions here, often. At the heart of much of what I've written, more often than not, is the belief that the pr associations have a responsibilkity to promote the profession in addition to providing nice trips for the elected "leaders." (Note the quotation marks.) In 2007, I'll be writing my opinions in more places than here, and I'll be looking for opinions on national and international  association leadership from IABC, CPRS, PRSA and other local chapter leaders. My opinions will be seen in Toni Muzi Falconi's blog, at wwww.tonisblog.com and in O'Dwyer's PR Daily, at www.odwyerpr.com

To start off, I'm asking people who are invoilved in IABC to take a good look at the performance of the senior paid staff.

Is the IABC magazine really, really good, because no less should be acceptable to an association of communicators.

Do IABC news release sing? Are they the best written, most interesting, release around? And do they cover the entire world? Or are they just mediocre examples of quasi news, almost alwasy trying to separate someone from his money?

Outside of the speakers -- because the speakers are responsible for their own performance, does the IABC conference sing and dance and entice and enthrall? Is it the best communications convention in the world?

What about the IABC web  site? Is it a "living" document that is so interesting that members come b ack to it week after week, month after month? Is the type easy to read, are there lots of real photos of real people?

If the answers to these questions are in the negative, it's time to either fire, for cause, the senior web, publications, PR and conference staff. Or, if they are just doing what they are told, it's time for a new executive director, unless... what do you think? ...the IABC elected chair has told the paid staff to do a poor job.

Comments welcome.

Saturday, September 22, 2006

IABC Ethics study makes it into Marketing Magazine
UPDATE: I sent the graphic and this story to IABC headquarters in San Francisco, but the staff there apparently don't think it is important enough to post on the media clips part of the IABC web site.

This graphic ran in the September 11 2006 edition of  Marketing Magazine, Canada's number one, at least in my estimation, advertising industry trade publication.

Note that if you squint, you can see the credit to IABC.

When last I looked, it had not been flagged in the IABC news centre list of media clips.

For those who did not see the BusinessWeek graphic about IABC's ethics study that's mentioned in the clips report on the IABC web site, this one from Marketing is pretty close to the same thing.

Marketing is also the publication that ran an excellent story by Alix Edmiston about public relations, with credit to IABC.

As far as I can tell, this puts Marketing coverage well ahead of Advertising Age in the USA.

Sunday, August 27, 2006

BAK writes about Public Relations for Public Relations in Canada, published in O'Dwyer's PR Daily.

Here's a link to the story. O'Dwyer's is a paid site, and you can use sample and august in the log in box, at least for a few days. If that does not work, send me an e-mail and I'll give you current passwords.

Jack O'Dwyer edited my original story., to cut it down to a smaller size for his site.

Here is the original, considerably longer, article, for BAK's Report readers.

Original article, without editing by Jack O'Dwyer
for the version published in O'Dwyer's PR Daily.

PR for PR -- it's a big problem in Canada, too.
By Brian A. Kilgore
North of the U.S. border, there's barely any more PR for PR in Canada than in the USA, but this may be changing.

Canadians get almost all US media, so any American insults, or praise, of the profession reach them, and there are occasional efforts in Canada to do more PR for PR, but they are few and far between. But there is reason for optimism.

Trudie Richards is the head of the public relations course at Mount St. Vincent University, in Halifax, and a former PR woman herself -- Greenpeace, among other employers. Her university's course has provided the greatest number of degreed public relations practitioners in the country.

Asked how well the profession is known, and how well it explains itself, she said, "I think many who hire public relations practitioners have limited knowledge of what that person has to offer. Their understanding of the PR function is often limited to media relations, or employee relations. Education about what public relations practitioners are capable of achieving is made more difficult by the fact that PR is still practiced so badly, so often."

Public education about what PR is logically falls to the Canadian Public Relations Society, roughly equivalent to PRSA, and they share the APR designation. Colleen Killingsworth, with National Public Relations in Calgary, is the CPRS National president.

Killingsworth, asked whether CPRS plans to communicate more, says, " Yes, the governance and management review a few years ago resulted in the hiring of an Executive Director who is an accredited public relations professional. (This is Karen Dalton, a long-time CPRS member, based in Toronto, who has worked for CPRS for several years.)

"This year CPRS also awarded a contract to Torchia Communications," Killingsworth said, "to develop and execute a multi-year plan to promote the APR designation. This program will also improve perception of our profession with important opinion leaders."

In Canada, it is very rare to see either IABC or CPRS accreditation listed as a qualification in job ads.

And, Killingsworth says, "CPRS also issues news releases announcing newly accredited members and many CPRS chapters place advertisements to promote successful APR candidates." The most recent news release, February 8th, 2006, reported 22 new accreditations, bringing the number of accredited members to 485, approximately one in three.

Killingsworth told this newsletter that, "During my first term as president, I visited and made presentations to 12 of the 16 societies across Canada. Many of them extended the luncheon invitation to include members of the business community and the media. I plan to continue this outreach and make use of my business travel as much as possible to promote CPRS and our profession."

The CPRS national web site provides no indication of any significant coverage of such events.

And in a followup to this newsletter", Killingsworth says, "The College of Fellows, under the leadership of Patricia Parsons, APR, CPRS Fellow, is establishing a speakers network whose focus is reaching out to the business community through boards of trade, chambers of commerce, etc

"As part of the Speakers Bureau, the CPRS Professional Development Committee, under the leadership of Christina Winsor, is establishing a speakers service which will provide local member societies with access to a network of speakers from across Canada.
One CPRS loyalist, although not a current board member, Gordon McIvor, a vice-president with Canada Lands in Toronto, wrote a very positive op-ed piece for The National Post newspaper, in June this year, after attending the Canadian Public Relations Society national conference. The Post is read across the country. He thinks the reputation of the profession -- and he calls it a profession in contrast to Mark Towhey's view, below, has improved dramatically."Until a few years ago," McIvor wrote, "most organizations largely viewed the public relations and communications profession as a necessary evil, chief executive officers eying its practitioners warily as back-slapping flacks on the peripheral of the organization's core business."

But, McIvor says, things are better, writing, "Fast forward to 2006 and to the height of the information age, and take a close look at the PR professionals who meet in different cities each year to discuss their profession.

"Today, these men and women are graduates from universities offering PR and communications courses, often at the post-graduate level. Their salaries or hourly rates (if they are consultants) are approaching those of lawyers, and more often than not, they are part of the senior management team of their organizations and often have privileged relationships with both the CEO and the chairman," he wrote.

While McIvor is thinking things are getting better, PR is Canada is still mocked frequently by the media. This week, the Globe and Mail's Patricia Best, in her Nobody's Business gossip column in the Globe's Report on Business, poked fun at IBM and the Toronto office of Ketchum, for promoting IBM's security, identity and privacy consulting practice by sending out DVD's of Harrison Ford's Firewall movie, which Best reports is full of Dell equipment and she characterizes the film as, "one of the most blatant product placement gigs in recent memory."

Geoffrey Rowan, Ketchum's Toronto-based managing director and himself a former Globe and Mail reporter for a decade, shrugs off the criticism. But he raises an important point about the reputation of PR people, saying, "I think Pat's column was simply another example of the healthy dynamic tension between PR and the news media. The value of the news media to PR is that it is a critical, skeptical, independent conduit to an audience that generally trusts it. PR professionals need to appreciate that value and make sure that any outreach to journalists meets the standards they set to maintain credibility with their audience."

McIvor's not surprised the PR has a bad reputation -- he knows that all too many news releases don't contain any news -- but he points out that the traditional rivalry between media and PR is one reason reporters write negatively about the profession, and the general public may get a poor impression of PR. But, he says, "PR is viewed better inside business, than it is outside."

Mark Towhey, a former soldier, banker, PR man, and a holder of an MBA from Ivey, thinks a lot about public relations, and he's no-where near as positive in his outlook as McIvor.

Asked about whether executives outside PR understand what it is all about, he says, " I don't know any CEOs (except those leading PR agencies) who've ever heard of IABC, CPRS or PRSA. Nor, do I think most general managers and strategic planners spend any time worrying about how their media relations folks and newsletter writers, speech writers, etc. are 'represented' to the business world at large. Few, if any, would consider PR a profession. And they'd be right. It's not, by any credible definition. It's a job. For many, it's a career. But the way the PR career path is currently being shaped by 'PR professionals, it certainly does not lead to the strategic ranks of business management. PR is a highly skilled trade. It could be an excellent breeding ground for future CEOs, but as it stands today... not so much."

And asked about the role and responsibility of CPRS, PRSA and IABC to implement PR for PR programs, he told this newsletter, "As I see it, communication associations have two public advocacy roles: First, they should be speaking out to build recognition for corporate communication as an excellent breeding ground for strategic corporate leaders of tomorrow. Second, they should be speaking out as the de facto trade association for PR businesses: agencies, independents, etc. and advocating for recognition, rules and regulations that would help member businesses be more successful."

And while Towhey possesses the non-traditional PR credential of an MBA and uses that knowledge for clients, over in Hamilton, Ontario, Terry Flynn, Ph.D, teaches communications (of the public relations type) to MBA students at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University, and serves on local and national CPRS committees.

He told O'Dwyers, "While I may agree with your sentiment that our professional associations are more internally focused -- accreditation, professional development and now education, I would suggest that there really hasn't been a great demand on behalf of the memberss, government relations, community relations and employee relations. Some understand the advocacy role of public relations and other see public relations as responsible for the organization's reputation."

That said, he quoted a movie star, saying, "As Richard Dreyfuss said in What About Bob! "baby steps, Bob, baby steps!"

"I believe that we are at an important juncture in our profession's short history ... managers are beginning to recognize the importance and effectiveness in public relations but we must break the easy stereotype that public relations is only about headlines and hits.

"I believe that under the leadership of Colleen )CPRS national president Killingsworth) and the current and future boards...we will continue to make small steps to furthering and strengthening our reputation."

In Halifax, Richards, the university educator who teaches PR students, has a slightly different take on the issue.

"I'm not sure having someone on staff to do PR for PR is the answer," she said. "It would seem, though, that the executives of each organization could be more committed to a PR role. At present, much of the work seems to be internal to members. And in the case of IABC, I believe there's no national (Canadian) office, and so no stated commitment to education about the profession on a national scale.

Jana Schilder's spent two decades in public relations and communications, worked for giant corporations and professional service firms, and runs a consultancy in the Toronto area. She's sat down with Charles Pizzo, when he was IABC chair, and with outgoing IABC chair Warren Bickford and incoming chair Glenda Holmes together this spring, urging them to look outward.

“Advocacy for the public relations profession is the single most important thing that either IABC or PRSA, or CPRS in Canada, could do for their members,” says Schilder. “Let’s go back to basics. Public relations is a management function and the top-ranking PR professional in any organization should sit at the right-hand of the CEO. This means that PR is present to review and input on all management decisions. Proactive, strategic and anticipatory.”

“PR is frequently called in after all the key variables that might have fixed that particular problem are already in place, cast in concrete. No wonder we have a reputation as ‘Spin Doctors’! It’s the ultimate irony that the profession that seeks to build understanding and awareness for others has bad reputation itself,” she adds.

“Throughout my career, only about 20 per cent of CEOs know and understand what good public relations really is,” adds Schilder. “Good PR is truthful, timely, and seeks to inform stakeholders of the facts to the benefit of that particular organization. The associations should be making this clear to the outside world, not telling it to themselves.”

Judy Gombita, manager of communications for the Certified General Accountants of Ontario, raises a PR for PR question based on her own role in an association. Should the public spokesperson be an elected official, or should it be the top paid staffer? Gombita says it makes the most sense for the CEO, president or whatever the top permanent person is called, to be the public face, and this should be built into the job description. This does leave, in her experience, plenty of room for the public relations professional to operate, including being in many cases, the first contact the public has with an organization. And there's still a role for the top elected person, limited as he or she is by a limited time in office.

If Gombita's concept took hold, Catherine Bolton at PRSA, Julie Freeman at IABC, and Karen Dalton at CPRS would be in the spotlight more than Proctor-Rogers, Holmes and Killingsworth. That's assuming those three ever got into the spotlight.

Across Canada, the profession, if "profession" is what it is, continues to be misunderstood. If the general public in Toronto were questioned now, as the Toronto Film Festival is about to start, many would think public relations professionals were party planners with clipboards and two-way radio headsets.

UPDATE: The O'Dwyer's version of this piece was #11 on the most selected story list for O'Dwyer's in August. Not bad considering it was published on August 25.

The Research section has this nice shot of a pen. Wow!, again.

Underneath the opening page portraits there's info on the conference in Vancouver starting this weekend.

Among the info -- remember, it's June 2 as I write this -- is this gen:

13,500 members, spending over $300 each in dues, deserve better than this, don't they?