International Views on Communications

Every May, I travel to the annual meeting of the world’s oldest and furthest-reaching alliance of independent communications agencies.  The alliance is called Public Relations Organisation International (PROI) – and, yes, Organisation is spelled with an S, not a Z – which signifies the origins of this international group, which can be traced back 40 years to eight innovative firms in Europe.

Those innovators, owners of independent public relations agencies, banded together to share information on trends affecting how to best represent clients and their brands as consultants and communicators.  Today, people from 78 agencies, 120 cities, 40 countries and 5 continents gather twice a year to do the same thing.  Sharing knowledge and resources across borders has always been inherent in the independent agency’s character.  Imagine the depth of thinking when the world’s leading independent agency owners gather to study such important topics as crisis management across global social networks and working with procurement and sourcing models to deliver results measured in today’s terms.

This year’s meeting was held in Los Angeles and hosted by our PROI partner office there, mPRm.  In the coming days, I’ll recap the priority topics we huddled on in L.A.   I think you’ll find that all of us – as agencies and clients – must address them in 2010, a year that is expected to usher in a new era of communications in a world that’s largely been in turmoil over the past 24 months.

The first blog in the series will cover reputation management trends in this brave new world.  Join me, and I welcome your comments on this global discussion.  Stay tuned.