Wag The Dog Newsletter Podcast

FINN PR – a Belgian, Brussels based public relations agency – is probably one of the few agencies which is working according to the Agile and Lean principles. A lot has been written and said about these new “ways to work” in the start up world but you can find some principles like reducing errors [...]

So true and yet, “emotion” is a strange word in the context of Public Relations work and content… That’s why I was so interested to talk to Chris Johnston this week. His company Adoreboard analyses data from over 600,000 news articles daily and over 4 million posts from all the major social media sources. Nothing [...]

Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR always had a bit of a greenwash feel to it if you ask me. You might call me an old cynic but in general I don’t trust “all good news stories” like you often read in those CSR reports. And now Bree Devin, a PR lecturer at the Queensland University of [...]

What kind of skills do we, public relations professionals need today ? What kind of credentials and competencies can we put forward ? What is the standard for a good communications professional ? The Global Body of Knowledge Project, run by the Global Alliance of Public Relations and Communications Management is trying to define and create a global standard for [...]

So how do you integrate social media monitoring and outreach into an organisation ? In this week’s episode I talk to Sofie De Beule and Sarah Mouton from Engagor. Both have loads of experience in training marketeers, customer support and PR professionals in using Engagor’s social media management platform. We discuss the status of social media monitoring, how [...]

For this episode of Wag The Dog FM I reached out to Steve Lubetkin, also known as @PodcastSteve on Twitter. We talk about a new book – The Business of Podcasting: How to Take Your Podcasting Passion from the Personal to the Professional – which he co-authored with Donna Papacosta of Trafalgar Communications, host of the popular “Trafcom [...]

One of my side interests is Artificial Intelligence and how supercomputers will impact all of our lives in the – not so far away – future. So I was immediately triggered by a new book called “The Automation of Public Relations” by David Phillips. In his self published book David talks about the automation of our [...]

Episode 21 already and this time I am going back to the topic of storytelling… I reached out to Michael L. Kent, Ph. D who did research around using the 20 Master Plots in Public Relations and recently published a paper on the topic. It was Forster, an English novelist who said: “‘The king died and then the [...]

Hi everyone, This will be a short episode but an important one as it is already Wag The Dog number 20 ! Although I am on holiday I couldn’t let this pass so I brought my iPhone and my add-on microphone and recorded this episode while sitting on the dock of the bay (yep, just [...]

This is the first time someone asks me to be on the Wag The Dog FM show… And I am glad they did…! In this episode we’ll cover a communications case study where the combination of good PR, thought leadership content and online advertising and marketing made the difference. Together with Farhad Koodoruth, Managing Director of [...]

Last week I spoke with Annick Boyen, CEO of Weber Shandwick in BeNeLux about their recent study called “The CEO Reputation Premium, a New Era of Engagement“. 81% percent of executives around the world believe it is important for CEOs to have a public presence for their companies to be highly-regarded. They also estimate that 44% [...]

This week I am talking with Richard Bagnall, CEO of PRIME Research UK Ltd and board director of the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC). The focus of our interview is around the Barcelona Principles, a set of seven voluntary guidelines established by the public relations industry to measure the efficacy of PR campaigns. We’ll [...]

Last week I was at the European Communications Summit, the yearly gathering of about 700 senior communicators from across Europe. The conference is organised by the European Association of Communication Directors, an organisation I am a proud member of and where I lead the Social Media Work Group. So for this weeks podcast I met [...]

“CEO’s come and go, the company stays…” That’s what a senior PR executive – and someone I consider a mentor – once told me and for one or the other reason it stuck with me. During my career I have always been very careful on how the CEO or the General Manager was positioned for public relations [...]

I admit, I am a history buff… Mostly military history but this time I am diving into the history of my profession; public relations. And I am very glad I can do this together with Professor Tom Watson – Professor of Public Relations at the Faculty of Media & Communication at Bournemouth University. We’re talking about power, influence, [...]

In this podcast we’re looking deeper into three online crisis communications case studies with Larissa Ott. Her Master Thesis is an analysis of the Applebee, Greenpeace versus Facebook and Jetstar social media crisis. All interesting cases as they come from different industries and cover different geographic regions. All of the cases are very much social media [...]

Politico and German publisher Axel Springer are acquiring the website and weekly newspaper European Voice and rebranding it as the European edition of the political website. – FT.com This article announced a huge shift in the Brussels Media bubble last December and when the doors opened of Politico.eu the media and media relations landscape had [...]

So you would think that social media have this “vox populi” effect and that Twitter would give everyone a voice…. Think twice… Research by Emma Pierson at Oxford shows that not all voices are equal online and shares some great insights from her social media analysis. Here’s just one finding about Twitter: A Twitter user [...]

It might be that the world has become a small village but at the same time, managing a global communications operation across different continents is not a simple task. I spoke with Steven Shepperson-Smith author of the research report, The Globalisation of Public Relations How Companies are Managing Communications Across Continents about his findings. We cover [...]

This week I am focusing on a lingering problem in corporate communications; the online press or newsroom… I am sure your online corporate press room is as good as perfect (ahum) but there are still many communications colleagues out there that publish press releases in PDF format, do not list their contact details or are [...]

“Culture is the widening of the mind and the spirit” said Jawaharlal Nehru – but do we really stop and think about the real cultural and social background of our audiences…? As global or regional communicators we can go wrong in so many ways; a wrong word, wrong colours, symbols or attitudes can ruin a [...]

I’ll be honest, the whole storytelling hype was really getting on my nerves… A bit like the “content marketing” one and – let’s face it, the hyped part of social media. But of course my idea of storytelling was based on – I admit – ignorance. And that’s why I love doing these podcast interviews [...]

Change and transformation. The new normal as we say, but still… It is never easy to change an organisation and its people, especially if the company has a long tradition and is active in industries ranging from steel over components to elevators. Today I interview Luis Ramos, Head of Communications at ThyssenKrupp Elevator AG. 

For this episode of Wag The Dog FM I met up with Frederik Vincx from Prezly and we chatted about PR apps, tools and hacks… While Frederik and his colleague are known in Belgium and beyond for their newsroom and Social Media Press Release service, they recently launched two other great initiatives. 

Internal Communications; if you ask me, one of the most challenging specialities in public relations. In this episode of Wag The Dog I interview Liam FitzPatrick, co-author of Internal Communications, A Manual for Practitioners – a book I reviewed on my blog last year.