Corporate Social Responsability

Last class was about Corporate Responsibility, and how the public relations industry manages its CSR to work. Every business should be responsible for its own actions and should try and make our world better than it is by maintaining a self regulation. This means that sometimes businesses can make a lot of profit through different ways and some times they make decisions which have an impact on their activities, on the environment, consumers, employees, communities, stakeholders and all other members of the public sphere.

Corporate social responsibility is related to ethics because it has to do with what is morally correct, and where is it respectful for the environment and for the society to invest, or in other words to make business. The idea of corporate responsibility is to think about public interest, and to make a community grow and develop.

We can’t forget that every business including the public relations industry is about making money, and some ways of making money can be legal but may not be moral. A real example of a brand which does not think on corporate responsibility is Nike. It is a very successful brand and it has a huge income every year, but we must not forget about where it has its manufacturing factories and how much these poor people are earning per day, while the top businessmen are making such a huge profit out of this.

Here I am showing you a video that really interested me, because it explains and also gives examples of companies and what do they do for corporate social responsibility. The question would be which businesses do better in terms of financial issue, the ones that think about corporate responsibility or the ones that don’t?, and after answering that question to yourselves its easier to understand why Nike has their manufacturing factories in undeveloped countries where they can pay really low salaries for a whole day of work.

Women in PR Industry

I’ve been thinking for the past days about last class, and how women cope with the fact that they are far behind men in terms of salary and they are mainly always in a lower position compared to men in the public relations industry. It is well known that the PR industry is full of working women but always run by men. I would like to analyse why is this is a sexist world, in which men have all the power.

I’ve recently read an article from PR Week written by Stephanie Siegle about maternity and paternity in the public relations industry.

“With such a high percentage of women working in PR, how does the industry fare on maternity and flexible working issues, and is there room for improvement in light of new legislation proposals?”

After reading the article, I’ve realized that maybe this is the reason why women hardly ever reach “the glass ceiling” on the PR industry. Obviously women have the inconvenience of being the gender that has to cope mostly in every industry with the fact that having babies is not always compatible with reaching the top position in their careers, but there should be a legislation that offered some kind of flexibility for women in these cases.

“However, GlaxoSmithKline vice-president of corporate internal comms Elaine MacFarlane points out that flexible working is not always the right option and that there are certain roles that lend themselves better to it than others”.

This issue has been so controversial that the IPR is trying to work out a way of improving maternity policies in order to keep women able to grow in their career without having to decide whether to have family or to keep their career.

My own worries about the issue of feminization of the public relations industry are, if it’s all about maternity being a problem for the industry or it’s as well a problem of men being scared of women doing better or at least achieving the same level of work than men do.

Here you have the link for the article on PR Week, it’s really interesting, and really related to this issue. I hope that you enjoy it.

http://www.prweek.com/uk/search/article/234329//

Ethics in Public Relations

The title of our last class was “Can PR ever be ethical?” this topic has been very interesting for me since I started my course in PR. As we learned in class ethics is all about dilemma, should we do this, or that? These dilemmas emerge when we have to make any decision that affects our own values or principal in life.

Ethics in general are codes to help us decide what is right from what is wrong, but at the same time ethics depend on people’s morals. Each country has their own culture, therefore, their moral must be different from other culture, this doesn’t mean that one is right and the other is wrong, it just means that we all as human beings act according to our morals and our own codes of ethics. As we learned in class “ethics is the study of morals”.

Working in the PR world makes us as practitioners, think about how should we act in certain circumstances that will happen during our careers. Therefore there are codes of ethics in the different countries, which help practitioners to make decisions. There is the CIPR (Chartered Institute of Public Relations), or another example could be PRSA (Public Relations Society of America).

After reading about this topic, it could be said that codes of conduct are guidelines for practitioners when there is an absence of laws on a certain field. The codes of conduct are generally more related to ethical moral than the law, because although the actions must be framed within the law, these actions might not be legitimate. This means that although the action is totally correct according to the law, it might be immoral according to ethics. “The advantage of such codes is found in the number of professionals who are part of designing and then implementing the standards. The disadvantage is that in achieving this breadth, specificity is often scarified.”(Seib and Fitzpatrick, 1995, p.13).

I’m very concerned about ethics in public relations, and how different practitioners act in the same circumstances. There are thousands of books about ethics related to PR, and after having done a lot of research on this issue I agree on the fact that PR practitioners can be ethical but always in a subjective way.

PR in Politics

Nowadays we can see that PR tools are being used more and more for political purposes. It’s becoming a trend that that PR practitioners make use of New Media tools to build up political campaigns and politicians positive as well as negative reputation.

In the last class, some class mates did a presentation on Obama’s campaign and it was a fabulous presentation where they analysed every single PR tool he used. Obama managed to get through all different kinds of public using a really good PR strategy, and what worries me about politics, is that sometimes a politician wins the elections just because of their creative and strategical PR campaigns and not because of their beliefs.

Obama’s and Mc Cain’s campaigns where totally different, and obviously Obama did much better selecting his PR people, but politics is not only about campaigning, politics should be much more than that. We, as a whole society, should fight and go for our beliefs, and what is happening is that people have a blind faith in media and on what the media says.

The media has the power to convince a country to support a really harmful politician. An example of this could be “Hitler”. In this case, he used propaganda to such extent that he managed people to support him. The outcomes of his campaign lead the whole country to a terrible situation.

I’m not trying to compare Obama’s campaign to what Hitler did, but what I’m trying to say is that we, as PR practitioners, have the power of persuasion and, depending on how we use this power, we can do either really great or harmful things for our society.

I want to share with you all a video from YouTube that shows exactly how PR campaigning can be distorted, and how PR people have to fight to get their message across and to persuade people. Sometimes they create good strategies like Obama’s PR people did, and sometimes their campaigns are not that successful like Mc Cain’s campaign.

Becoming Famous Using New Media

Last Wednesday’s class was about new media. I’ve been thinking about new media for such a long time because I had to do a presentation on that topic, so I had to do an in-depth research on it.
From what I’ve learned new media tools are essential for any business to use as a way of social networking and communicating with a vast amount of public who they cannot reach by means of traditional media.
PR practitioners are able to reach their target easily using Social Networking Sites and information is easily spread out.

I want to share with you all a video about a British girl who started posting videos of herself singing on “YouTube”, a very famous social media network, and she managed to get the attention of musical producers in New York, and they actually hired her. Currently, she is recording her first single, and what is really amazing is the way she managed to attract the attention of many people all over the world, and this is the way she got famous.

As you can observe, new media has the power of making an unknown person famous. This is an example of how someone used new media in a positive way, but there are many cases of people who are using new media tools to destroy many organisations or people’s reputation.

There is a controversial belief about this girl called Mia Rose, about her being helped by a PR person to build her image in order to become a popular singer and to build her career as a musician. It’s very possible that a PR practitioner is actually helping her, but either way, this is a very curious example that shows how powerful new media tools can be.

My personal belief about new media is that its so powerful that it can help and at the same time be really dangerous, because anyone around the world can have their own blog and say whatever they think about any organisation or person and can really harm their reputation.