The PR, comms and corporate affairs stories you shouldn't miss

Welcome to the first issue of PR Futurist using the newsletter feature on LinkedIn. I've been wary of using the LinkedIn newsletter feature as there is a risk it gets lost amidst a torrent of LinkedIn newsletters and I already publish a fortnightly PR Futurist newsletter using a traditional email newsletter platform. Hopefully, you'll find it useful. Do let me know what you think. Please do subscribe and try a few editions as it's easy to unsubscribe if you don't find it useful.

I'm going to send it out once a month as a round-up of the best news and articles from my newsletter, blog, Twitter and LinkedIn posts. It will all be content I've selected as important or interesting, but what makes it different to my regular newsletter is it will all be 'peer reviewed' as the most popular amongst my subscribers and followers in the global public relations and communications community. It's not just me saying you should read it, it's them!

Crisis communications

Whichever side of the argument you fall on in the moral debate about whether it is ever right for a company to sack all its workers and replace them with cheaper ones, all PR professionals can surely agree that the way P&O Ferries and DP World did it made a terrible situation even worse.

I usually don't like 'armchair critics' who criticise a company's communications in a crisis as they never know what's really happening behind the scenes. However, in this case it was so bad everyone was able to criticise P&O Ferries with certainty. I wrote an article with my immediate reaction to what was happening - Crisis communications lessons from P&O Ferries.

PRovoke Media founder Paul Holmes said "for a necessarily 'hot' take (given the time frame) this is a brilliant analysis".

As a result of the article, I was interviewed and quoted by BBC News in this unfortunately titled article - P&O Ferries' job cuts a 'PR disaster' say experts. Unfortunately titled as I made the point that it wasn't a PR disaster, but a failure of humanity. Ironically, the BBC even used that quote in the article.

We're in the process of creating a new Stuart Bruce Associates website to focus on issues, crisis communications and reputation, while the CommTech, PRTech and PR and communications measurement work will be in the new Purposeful Relations business.

Most popular with your PR and communications peers

The most popular news stories and articles I've shared recently in the regular PR Futurist newsletter are an eclectic mix of serious corporate communications and some useful CommTech tools. If you like the 'best of' articles below then please also subscribe to the regular PR Futurist newsletter as only the top three or four will make it into the next LinkedIn newsletter.

PRovoke top 20 crises of 2021

PRovoke Media's annual round-up of the top 20 crises of the previous year is always an interesting and useful read. This year's is no exception and the crises it analyses include Activision Blizzard's 'frat boy' culture, Yorkshire County Cricket Club's institutional racism, Goldman Sach's 'inhumane workplace', Better.com's Zoom sacking of employees (which almost unbelievably P&O Ferries managed to do even worse since then!), Peleton's product recall and product placement issues and Facebook's whistleblower crisis.

Watch four TV news channels at once in your web browser

PR professionals should be news junkies, so perhaps it's no surprise that VidGrid, a neat (and free) CommTech tool that enables you to watch four TV channels simultaneously, proved popular. Channels include Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, France 24, NBC, Reuters, C-SPAN and more. If you really want to, you can even include Putin's pet propaganda channel and watch RT (Russia Today). Check it out and let me know what you think. Not all channels are available in all countries.

ICCO World PR Report 2021-22

The annual ICCO World PR Report always has useful data on trends in the sector, which can help with decisions on future investment in training and technology. This year global PR agency heads predict measurement and analytics technology will have the greatest impact on the PR and communications industry's future. One in four respondents are increasing their investment in this area.

DataComms conference

There was also a lot of interest in Communicate magazine's DataComms conference where expert speakers explore the transformative power of data and how it impacts on communications, corporate reputation and public relations. I'm one of the speakers alongside Sam Knowles, author Narrative by Numbers and How To Be Insightful which are guides to data storytelling.

Changes and improvements to LinkedIn

The final article is I'll share with you in my first LinkedIn newsletter is rather surreally about LinkedIn! It has recently introduced some improvements to things like your newsfeed, messaging and analytics. The article explains the changes and what improvements to expect in the future.

PR and communications measurement and evaluation

The ICCO World PR Report predicted increased investment in measurement and analtyics technology, but our research and experience shows that's not enought. PR professionals still need to learn how to interpret and use the data.

On the Purposeful Relations blog, we published an article about how you can use regression analysis to make sense of PR and communications data to identify trends and help to work out if the public relations and communications activity is contributing. We'll be exploring more about correlation and causation in a future article. We've also created a short AI generated video summary of the article and turned it in to a podcast using an AI voice tool.

Thank you, and please tell me what you think

That's all folks. I hope you've found this useful as I'm hoping LinkedIn newsletters will become a useful way for me to keep you up to date on the future of public relations, communications, corporate affairs, crisis communications and all things tech related to them.

Thanks for reading and hopefully subscribing. Let me know in the comments (or privately if you'd prefer) what you think.