Wag The Dog FM - The European PR Podcast

Hi everyone and welcome to what is, already, episode number 40 of the Wag The Dog FM Podcast! In this episode, I talk with Bart de Vries, President of the International Association of Public Relations (IPRA) about the Golden World Awards for Excellence in PR 2017. During our half-hour chat, we talk about; The importance of [...]

This week’s episode is all about my favourite topic; Crisis and Emergency Communications. What better guest to have on the show than Christine Townsend, founder of Musterpoint, who worked in law enforcement and public sector communications for fifteen years! During our half-hour chat, we talk about; Differences and similarities between the private sector and public [...]

Jo Detavernier launches a new website about Science for PR – to help communications professionals with insights from diverse scientific disciplines. In this episode, I have a chat with Jo on the why and how of a new website around this important topic. Let’s face it, we, as a profession, have concentrated more on the [...]

Smartphone apps designed for emergency & crisis situations (emergency mobile apps) don’t provide what people actually need in a disaster, according to University of Calgary researchers who studied the digital response to the Fort McMurray wildfire. The team used specialized software to analyze nearly 70,000 tweets sent by affected residents during the catastrophe to gauge “what people really want”. The [...]

According to Brand Finance, brands account for 18% of the top 500 global brands market-value (2017). Traditionally, brands have been created by agencies, and brand management has been undervalued. Fortunately, that mindset is now shifting… In this episode, I talk with Marc Cloosterman, CEO of the VIM Group on how to Future Proof Your Brand, [...]

Wag The Dog’s guest this week is Heather Yaxley and we’re talking about career strategies in public relations. In the context of her Phd research Heather wanted to understand how mid-career PR practitioners make sense of their careers, the career strategies they use and how they are responding to the changing working environment. This involved [...]

#FuturePRoof, a crowdsourced book and community with the bold ambition of asserting the value of public relations launched earlier last month. The book includes advice from a stellar line up of Communications academics and Public Relations practitioners who have all given their time free of charge to share their expertise. Chapters describe emerging areas of [...]

Monsanto… It seems almost impossible to mention the company without entering in a heated discussion about GMO’s. And for a very long time the management and employees of this 16 billion $ in revenue corporation didn’t get it. What was the fuss all about ? Science would and will always speak for itself they thought… But it doesn’t [...]

Episode number 32 of Wag The Dog is dedicated to the “Mother Of All Crisis” – Dieselgate. Estimates from Credit Suisse peg the costs of #Dieselgate at a worst-case scenarios of $87 billion. This would make the VW scandal almost 60 percent more costly than the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. – from Oilprice.com I know a [...]

This week I am talking to Maxim Behar, the brand new President of ICCO – The International Communications Consultancy Organisation (ICCO). Maxim and I met for the first time a couple of years ago in Davos at the World Communications Forum – one of the most international PR conferences I have ever had the pleasure to [...]

Thirty days is the length of time it takes to form a habit or shed an old one… In this week’s edition of Wag The Dog FM I am talking with Stephen Waddington, Chief Engagement Officer at Ketchum who – with his #PRBullets – is documenting exactly that. Stephen uses doodles and drawings on Post-it notes [...]

This week I am talking with András Baneth, the Managing Director of the European office of the Public Affairs Council. We’re covering the state of online advocacy in Europe and how email, social media, blogs etc.. are used (or not) by corporate and trade association public affairs professionals. Our discussion is based on the results of [...]

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 [...]