The complete programme for the fourth European Communication Summit is available now on the Summit website. The Summit is divided into eight strands of Communication, and will feature keynote speeches by Viviane Reding (European Commission Vice President), Alastair Campbell (ex-Director of Communications and Strategy for the ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair), David Judson (Editor-in-Chief, Hürriyet Daily News), Brian Lott (Executive Director, Communications, Advanced Technology Investment Company) and Christof Ehrhart (Head of Corporate Communications, Executive Vice President, Deutsche Post World Net).
The Summit will be held on the first and second of July at the SQUARE in Brussels. The two-day conference is the largest international event on public relations and communications in Europe. It gathers hundreds of the leading figures from the field to network, share ideas and opinions on strategies, trends and tools in communication and to evaluate the most recent developments in the field.
The commplete programme, and registration options, are available by clicking the link below
Whenever the world of PR stumbles upon new tools of communication, corporate professionals need to answer one fundamental question: should they seize the day and be early adopters, or bide their time in the wings, waiting to see how the new techniques evolve once the dust of hype has settled? For the past couple of years, this conundrum could be applied to a multitude of social media novelties. Should your company run its own Twitter account? Should it take the plunge and engage with Facebook? Should it create its own internal social network for employees to speak openly? There are sound reasons for corporations to exercise caution. Jumping on the bandwagon without prior reflection is, without a doubt, a slippery slope to failure, for involvement with social media is not without its risks.
Could employees misinterpret freedom of speech and abuse the internal forum? Could there be an increase in leaks to unscrupulous journalists? Communications specialists could also get it wrong, and swamping social networks with aimless self-promotion will hardly endear you to your stakeholders. On the plus side, social media offers a unique opportunity to engage with stakeholders on a more spontaneous and intimate level than has ever been possible, building an organisation´s image and discovering trends and potential sources of crisis long before they materialise in more traditional channels. In this issue Story Teller section, a diverse range of experts from the academic and corporate worlds guide us through the distracting white noise of hyperbole and explore the ramifications of social media on PR and corporate communications. We hope you find some food for thought in this first issue of 2010.
A look back at the European Excellence Awards 2009
Over 350 European Communicators gathered at the Hofburg Imperial Palace in Vienna to see the presentation of the European Excellence Awards 2009 in a lavish gala ceremony. Awards were presented in fifty-five categories, rewarding the cream of European communications over the last year. In its third year, the awards set a record with over 1,250 projects entered in 2009. There is a review of the ceremony available online, by clicking the link below
