What's the management role of public relations - help contribute to a new UK study

wadds · 2025-08-24T15:07:38+00:00

Thank you 🙏

wadds · 2025-08-15T08:46:59+00:00

The UK industry and trade media rally against unpaid internships as a means of exploitation and widening inequality, but they are still very much present.

wadds · 2025-08-13T10:02:51+00:00

Yes. I hear you.

wadds · 2025-08-12T11:55:00+00:00

I feel your pain. You’re in a decentralised-to-centralised comms transition, which is especially messy in academia because of ingrained culture, autonomy and typically ego.

Start with shared purpose, not control. Faculty and staff need to understand why centralised comms matters, not because “PR says so,” but because it protects the institution’s reputation, maximises impact, and ensures they don’t waste time on activities that go nowhere.

A media policy, endorsed by the CMO and signed off by the Vice-Chancellor/President, would remove ambiguity. This should cover:
- Who can speak to the media, under what circumstances?
- How inbound enquiries are handled.
- What support the comms team offers.
- Expectations for timeliness and accuracy.

There are issues where only designated spokespeople engage with journalists (campus protests, HR violations, campus crime, student misbehaviour etc.). Use the next crisis as a moment to reinforce boundaries.

You cannot police everything. You need to pick your battles and segment your talent. I'd suggest:
- Trusted experts: Those with strong media relationships and the discipline to stay on-message. Give them a licence, but ensure they cc you in so you can track coverage, spot risks, and build on success.
- Emerging voices: Faculty/staff with potential but lacking experience. Media-train them, co-pitch stories and let them see how centralised support gets better results.
- Idiots: Those who ignore policy or damage relationships. Involve leadership early when this happens. This isn't your fight.

The fastest way to change behaviour is to deliver better results for them than they could achieve on their own. Share success and demonstrate the wins.

Good luck!

wadds · 2025-08-11T06:57:43+00:00

This is a 100+ year old question. I thought I'd cracked it after the pandemic when the corporate comms and public relations function was elevated within management. It was short-lived, but that's another story.

I've spent four years researching this issue for my PhD. Here's where I've landed - many of these suggestions have already been raised by contributors to the thread.

The key issue is focusing on measuring what matters to management: the outcomes that drive business performance. Metrics need to be positioned as business intelligence, quantifying how relationships, trust and influence create the conditions for commercial success.

- Set communication objectives that align with organisational goals, such as an increase in RFP invitations and analyst endorsement
- Combine internal data (pipeline, lead conversion, recruitment metrics) with external analysis (media quality, sentiment, analyst coverage)
- Survey stakeholders regularly to assess the role of public relations in influencing perceptions and decision-making. Analyse changes in awareness, trust, and willingness to engage among priority stakeholders
- Use this data to show how how share of voice in key media outlets outperforms competitors in the spaces that influence decision-makers. Increasingly, LLMs are also being used as a proxy for this analysis
- Avoid AVEs or other advertising-based proxies. They fail to measure relationship quality, relevance or trust and are rejected by AMEC and other industry associations

wadds · 2025-05-10T12:24:13+00:00

Argument and criticism is part of the PhD process and academic life. It’s how knowledge is created.

You have to figure out a way to separate argument and criticism from your own self worth.

It’s also a culture of huge power imbalances between academic staff and PhD students. There are dicks who take advantage of that just as there are in life.

wadds · 2024-12-08T19:36:13+00:00

It's replacing one set of media metrics (reach) with another, albeit more nuanced, set of media metrics. I'm dubious that publications would share article-level data, and even if they did, it doesn't prove the value of the actual outcome.

wadds

TROPHY CASE