Mind blowing...

First a quick welcome to the new PRiDA students for this year...welcome to the module and this blog, I hope it proves interesting, useful and inspiring.

And we hit the ground running with an excellent example of crisis management and 'activism' from this week's news. Asda and Tesco have both issued apologies and withdrawn similar 'Mental Patient' and 'Psycho Ward' Halloween costumes after a furore about the portrayal of people with mental health issues.

Failing to consider each and every aspect of their value chain in the context of modern (and much more open) attitudes to mental health, both supermarkets missed the PR timebomb that was ticking in their aisles.

While both supermarkets were quick to respond with abject apologies and sizeable donations to the mental health charity, Mind, this was an exercise in damage limitation as the 'unacceptable error' was broadcast on TV news, radio news, newspapers and, of course, the internet. A better PR approach would have been to spot the issue before the products even got to the shelves, emphasising how PR should be embedded at every level of an organisation.

Meanwhile Mind have made the most of the supermarkets' blunder: with credible, qualified speakers on news broadcasts across the UK, great quotes in news articles, and the support of well-known public figures affected by mental health issues themselves. Stan Collymore, Alistair Campbell and others tweeted and issued statements - and every communication serves to reduce the stigma of mental health a step further.

Even better, ordinary people who are affected by mental health issues took to twitter and published photos of them looking, well, ordinary, with hashtag 'my #mentalhealth outfit for the day'. 

Effectively 'newsjacking' Asda and Tesco's mistake, Mind have snowballed national outcry at such insensitivity to mental heath to promote their agenda and raise awareness of the continuing stigma and misperceptions of mental health. For little or no cost, the charity has 'earned' millions of pounds worth of column inches and the airwaves, and a significant chunk of the twittersphere, to help achieve their overall aim of destigmatising mental health. And that, my friends, is the beauty of PR.

Public Relations: the champion or slayer of democracy?

Has PR 'revived' democracy?

On PRiDA we talk a great deal about the role of social media in promoting democracy: stimulating public lobbying, raising awareness of issues and being the driving force behind much of the Arab Spring - eventually leading to some governments blocking Facebook and Twitter.

However this article by Kent (2013) (if you have UWE access) argues that PR practitioners fail to use these media to promote dialogue and democracy, and indeed their overuse of one-way comms could be stifling democracy. Kent claims that "connectivity to our "friends" on social media comes at the expense of isolation from our fellow human beings who live next door or down the hall".

Interestingly, Emily Bell on Radio 4 this week would argue the opposite.

I also argue that PR practioners even actively undermine democracy with private lobbying - using money and connections to have a quiet word in the ear of influential politicians... So obviously, social media are tools that could be used better by many mainstream practitioners, but charities and campaigning organisations may be much better at using social media for public lobbying and rebalancing the influence of the people with power and money - for instance campaigners such as Surfers Against Sewage using Facebook and this app.
So while social media may be great for the voice of the people, PR practioners could often be accused of doing the opposite, according to Kent.