I’ve been on the front lines of PR measurement for over 10 years in my role at General Motors.  In that time, I’ve sat through more vendor pitches than I care to remember and watched many squirm uncomfortably as I poked at the black box that is their particular proprietary methodology. ...

As the public relations industry grows in size and stature, it is coming under increasing scrutiny by the public, media and government. But not all scrutiny is bad, especially if it helps broaden the understanding of a profession and advances its role and value. ...

IPR Trustee Rob Flaherty turned my attention to Jonah Lehrer about a year ago.  Lehrer, the author of “How We Decide” and “Imagine: How Creativity Works” (due out next week), writes about neuroscience.  Last weekend, his essay in The Wall Street Journal hinted at what’s to come in the new book. ...

If you follow the work of crisis communications scholars such as Tim Coombs, perhaps you too have wondered about assumptions versus proof.  How much of what we take for granted about effective crisis response is supported by empirical evidence?  Is there more to go on than the war stories of crisis veterans, as important as stories can be to professional learning in public relations?  Thus, I was drawn to a ti ...

As members of the global public relations community, we sometimes ruminate amongst ourselves.  But out of shyness, arrogance or distraction, we fail to circulate thoughts outside our own, more comfortable, friendly and ‘politically correct’ intellectual environment. We also tend to resist the explicit inclusion in our work of arguments, concepts or methods that come from other intellectual environments.  This overall approach is clearly at odds with the core sense of our field of study or prac ...

In a Five Minutes With … discussion a year ago, Professor Tom Watson of Bournemouth University in England mentioned that he was researching the history of public relations measurement and evaluation, with a particular interest in the source of AVE – Added Value Equivalence – which he called a “persistent weed”. Next month, Tom will be presenting a paper on his AVE research at the International Public Relati ...

To explore current public relations/communications practices with Wikipedia, I’m conducting a survey sponsored by the Arthur W. Page Center. My goal is to explore current engagement with Wikipedia and identify what changes are necessary. I started researching Wikipedia in 2006 with Marcus Messner, Virginia Commonwealth University, and we have been arguing for years that public relations professionals should monitor their Wikipedia articles ...

There is quite a lot of science in crisis response to go with the art. I was interviewed a few weeks ago (along with PRSA Chair Gerry Corbett and Council of Public Relations Firms’ Senior Vice President Matt Shaw) by The Business Journals for an article on “How to respond to bad publicity.” The thr ...

As a public relations professor who teaches a research and evaluation course, I know firsthand the challenge of keeping up with res ...

Economist Daniel Klein recently wrote a piece in the Atlantic that shows just how important it is to ask the right questions in research.  A colleague of Klein designed a survey to explore whether ideological differences stem more from people’s beliefs about how the world works or from differences in their basic values.  Klein and the colleague then isolated a few of the questions to t ...