Video presentations for Day 1:
World Public Relations Forum (WPRF) 2010 Day 1

Video presentations for Day 2:
World Public Relations Forum (WPRF) 2010 Day 2 (ready during Monday 21 June)

Power point presentations available on Slideshare:
Sven Hamrefors, Mervyn King, Björn Edlund, Hanna Brogren, Anne Gregory and Ronel Rensburg

Robin Teigland (own account)

Photos on Flickr

See you at the World PR Forum 2012!

Song was a common theme at the event. The opening act was Eric Whitacre´s virtual choir  where 185 singers via recordings on webcam created great music. During dinner later in the evening the artist group Gentlemen performed, three men with strong voices who made the guests stand up and sing along in Abba´s Thank you for the music. On Tuesday Ronel Rensburg began hers and Anne Gregory´s session with singing, one of the very appreciated interactive sessions at WPRF.

The participants took part in creating PR-history as the Stockholm Accords were finalised. It´s main evolver, Toni Muzi Falconi, describes it as “a brief to the communicators and the national associations around the world” and pushes the fact that it is not set in stone and can be adapted in the context it is applied.

A huge thanks to our sponsors, whose supprt and enthusiasm made this possible.

Cision

Why have you chosen to sponsor the World Public Relations Forum? The Swedish Public Relations Association’s members are important to Cision and we want to contribute expertise in relation to boosting the conference’s online visibility. We have also supplied a Social Media Newsroom for WPRF (www.wprf2010.se), which is perfectly suited to a conference on communication and PR.

What do you hope to get out of the partnership? It’s really great to be able to invite Cision’s 30,000 or so customers all over the world to one of the biggest events within the communication industry, which will be a milestone for the next generation of PR methods. We also want to have the opportunity to share the knowledge we have in relation to online visibility and social media. 

How do you intend to highlight your presence during the conference? We will have our own stand at the conference, where participants will have the opportunity to come forward and talk to representatives from Cision on site, from our offices in Stockholm and London.

Ferpi

Why have you chosen to sponsor the World Public Relations Forum? Ferpi is a founding member of the global alliance and organised the first WPRF in Rome (2003) and Trieste (2005). This year it is celebrating its 40th anniversary and will be represented in Stockholm by a 23 strong member delegation.

What do you hope to get out of the partnership? We hope to develop and exchange relationships with other associations from around the world and to create networks and working groups on major topics, beginning from the implementation of the Stockholm accords.

How do you intend to highlight your presence during the conference? We will distribute ad hoc materials from our booth; hold a session on Tuesday morning where six representatives of the delegation (a student, an educator, a consultant, the head of an agency, the head of pr for a big organization and an association representative) will describe how they intend to implement the accords in their respective professional environments.

Grayling

Why have you chosen to sponsor the World Public Relations Forum? Grayling is Europe’s fastest growing PR network and we are working across the whole of Europe to establish our new brand. We stand for “a different kind of thinking for a different kind of world”, which means that we’re always looking at new approaches in terms of reaching target groups. Conditions for communication are changing rapidly at the moment, which is why we have to find new perspectives on how to get your message across to people and tell them what your company stands for.

What do you hope to get out of the partnership? The World PR Forum brings many of the world’s top communicators together, which makes the conference an excellent partner for us. We get the opportunity to promote our new brand to a key target group. We will also be focusing on meeting and talking to as many people as possible during the conference days. The meeting will offer more scope for building networks and improving knowledge about Grayling and what we can offer as a strategic discussion partner in communication issues. And at best offer a slightly different perspective on communication.

How do you intend to highlight your presence during the conference? We will be holding seminars on creativity and be on site with a stand where you can vote for The World’s Greatest Communicator. We have come up with 10 people that we think are fantastic communicators, who have an impact and get their message across. All participants will be able to vote for their favourite.

Ketchum

Why have you chosen to sponsor the World Public Relations Forum? Ketchum, as an international public relations counseling firm serving clients around the world, is interested in, and invested in, the growth and development of global public relations. The Stockholm Sixth World Public Relations Forum is an ideal venue for expressing and implementing that commitment.

What do you hope to get out of the partnership? In keeping with the information-sharing mantra of the WPRF parent, The Global Alliance For Public Relations and Communication Management, Ketchum believes that we can, indeed, “all learn from each other”. In addition, we want to participate in the finalization and implementation of “The Stockholm Accords”, which will enhance and affirm the importance of public relations in the success of all manner of organizations.

How do you intend to highlight your presence during the conference? Ketchum will be quite a visible, and, we hope, valuable presence at WPRF. As sponsor, we are benefitting by our identification on all Forum promotional and informational material and in the conference exhibit area. In addition, David Gallagher, Ketchum President, Europe, will present a seminal breakout session on Tuesday:”Corporate Social Responsibility in ‘The Communicative Organization’ “. And, of course, it will be noted that a Ketchum executive is chair of the Global Alliance and has worked closely with the WPRF host organization, The Swedish Public Relations Association.

Kreab Gavin Anderson

Why have you chosen to sponsor the World Public Relations Forum? It’s a great event organised by the Public Relations Association. The role of the communicator and successful communication in a world of global networks is an exciting theme.

What do you hope to get out of the partnership? The partnership with the Public Relations Association and Global Alliance will enable us to contribute towards the content of the forum. This will be the biggest focus ever on the profession globally. The sharing of experiences will be of huge significance for the future in our network of 30 offices in more than 25 countries.

How do you intend to highlight your presence during the conference? Our founder and working Chairman of the Board, Peje Emilsson, will be one of the keynote speakers, and our Deputy Group CEO Charlotte Erkhammar will take part in both days, together with several other colleagues.

Prime

Why have you chosen to sponsor the World Public Relations Forum? Prime is one of the world’s top award-winning communication agencies and the World PR Forum will be bringing together global players from many different PR perspectives, including educational institutions, politics, corporate communication and digital media. We want to play an active role in this context. The conference is quite simply an excellent platform for announcing the fact that we as a company, and Sweden as an industry, are among the world’s leading innovators within communication.

What do you hope to get out of the partnership? Our ambition is to contribute towards the development of the communication industry, which is why we are actively participating in the WPRF, as we do in other contexts where industry issues are discussed.

How do you intend to highlight your presence during the conference? We have our own programme slot, Idea Driven Corporate Branding, where we will be sharing our award-winning case studies in brand communication for international companies. The purpose of the session is to challenge and inspire buyers of communication services, as well as other agencies.

Shell

Why have you chosen to sponsor the World Public Relations Forum? We believe it’s essential not only to keep up, but also to be a front-runner in developing and shaping of the function of Public Relations. The WPRF is a constructive platform where professionals will be doing just that, and we think it’s important to encourage this kind of initiatives.

What do you hope to get out of the partnership? It’s unique venue to meet colleagues from all over the world to discuss and be inspired by the best within the field of Public Relations representing corporations, governments and NGO’s.

How do you intend to highlight your presence during the conference? Björn Edlund, the former Vice President for Communications at Royal Dutch Shell plc will have a interactive session about how to increase the return on relationships and how stakeholder management can be evolved.

We will also have a stand where students from the Royal Institute of Technology KTH, Stockholm, Sweden will be displaying the award winning prototype vehicle that participated at Shell Eco-marathon Europe in May 2010. The Shell Eco-marathon challenges and inpires high school and university student teams from around the world to design, build and test energy efficient vehicles. The event also aims to inspire engineering students to develop new approached to sustainable mobility and fuel efficiency.

We would strongly recommend everyone to come and visit the stand and hear about the groundbreaking technology that students developed for which they won the Technical Innovation prize.

“Social media has democratized influence, forever changing the way businesses communicate with customers and the way customers affect the decisions of their peers. With platforms like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, anyone can now find and connect with others who share similar interests, challenges, and beliefs-creating communities that shape and steer the perception of brands. Without engagement in these communities, we miss major opportunities to shape our marketing messages.

World Television will be covering the two-day conference – to be held in Stockholm, Sweden, for the first time – and making webcasts of the keynote presentations available via the World Public Relations Forum (WPRF) website. World Television has also worked closely with the organiser Swedish Public Relations Association to develop an exclusive iPhone app, which will broadcast the live and on-demand streams of the event to iPhone users around the globe. The app is now available for complimentary download through iPhone’s app store.

“Our aim is to make this year’s conference as interactive as possible. World Television will be broadcasting live from the conference so that those who cannot attend will be able to follow the event online, and we will be continuing the debate via regular updates to Twitter”, says Sylvia Nylin, CEO of the Swedish Public Relations Association.

The World Public Relations Forum (WPRF) is one of the leading events of its kind. It is an avenue for key figures within the world’s PR industry to exchange ideas and present new methods and research within the field of professional communication. The 2010 Forum will also be used to discuss a provocative new model for the practice of public relations, “The Communicative Organisation”.

Sophie Steen, General Manager of World Television Sweden, says “The World Public Relations Forum is a must-attend event for international PR professionals. We are delighted to be working alongside the event’s organisers to support the delivery of a conference that promises to be bigger and better than ever before”.

The Forum is co-arranged with The Global Alliance for Public Relations and Association Management.

The document contains six themes in which public relations add value to their organisations and it will be monitored and evaluated by Global Alliance.

The process is based on five basic guidelines:

• total transparency of mission, vision and strategy of the process and its short term objectives and mid term goals.
  All accessible to any student, professional, scholar, educator anywhere in the world;
• a few fundamental rationalizations inspired by some of the more recent concepts of our global body of knowledge such as: the network society; the communicative organizations; the value network; the authentic organization; the stakeholder governance model; the generic principles/specific applications and the global stakeholder relationship governance paradigms; the business case…. only to name the first that come to mind.
• a fully open and collaborative process which allows anyone from anywhere to offer input and or criticism.
• a particular attention to considering, beside the global picture, the diverse stages of development of the profession in different regions of the globe.
• the integration, in whatever platform would eventually emerge, of an evaluation and measurement process. 

Toni Muzi Falconi has been editing the document:

- Of course to keep the process moving we have – and I take full responsibility – had to sacrifice a few fundamental (ideological?) objections that were voiced during the process by some of our critics to who we are all (and I in particular) greatly indebted… as their criticisms, arguments and suggestions have led in parallel to actual changes in the text, as much as to convince us even more of the merit of the process and of the choices we made, he says.

- For example, we decided that the option for the stakeholder model of governance of the organization could not, as some indeed requested, be abandoned.
Similarly, and against the advice of others, we decided not to abandon the communicative organization, the network society and the value network concepts.
Again we did not think, as some suggested, that the sustainability option was in contradiction with the communicative organization: to the contrary sustainability in no way implies conservativism and it does stimulate risk taking…. Surely these points are all highly debatable but, quite frankly, we believe that the draft which is about to be posted on the forum website will demonstrate that these decisions were valid and founded on solid arguments.

- And finally, we all agree that the language could have been better (jargon some call it, management speak said others and plain crap from the more down to earth) but the English language today has many variations around the globe and no custodians… by the way, doesn’t this remind you of public relations? This is the good and the bad of a global language and of a global profession, and thank god that they exist and that we can at least try to understand one another….

This phrase sits at the core of a debate still simmering in society and within businesses even 10 years after the UN Global Compact (UNGC) was created, a move that institutionalized “business” as a societal force next to “government” and “civil society”.

In this past decade, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has also grown as a range of activities in the space between corporations and their stakeholders. This space has become a fertile field of action for academics and consultants, as well as a vital part of the ecosystem sustaining many NGOs and community groupings.

Friedman fuelled an fundamental debate in this area 40 years ago, with an article in The New York Times Magazine.

His story, headlined “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, laid out in stark language his case against what he saw as misguided, unproductive, even dangerous talk by business leaders about the social role of corporations.

“Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades,” Friedman wrote.

Forty years later, his anti-socialism seems oddly anachronistic – if for nothing else than simply because the Cold War world became, at the Millennium, the Flat World of globalization, and lately the Skewed and slightly Scary World of Global Markets.

But it is worth dissecting Friedman’s mantra, if only to assure ourselves that as PR professionals, we act with sufficient rigor as advisors about sustainability and the role of business to companies and institutions. Are we fully aware of the sensitivities involved?

I think those of us with an interest in sustainability have an ongoing need to debate whether business has a social role, and if so, what it consists of.

Using the Friedman test, perhaps we can discover if we as today’s dominant “intellectual forces” embracing the concept of CSR may have blanked out negative consequences or failed to see outright stupidities (otherwise only visible in painful hindsight).

After 20 years of working for 11 CEOs in three global corporations, I can reaffirm that each generation of corporate leaders, each new CEO, feels a real need to orient themselves as to the role of business in society, and the specific challenges of their sector and their company.

As executives, they seek to articulate, implement and measure for their own reassurance how the company sees and carries out its role in society. The modern CEO is also open to discussions about how good CSR performance is part of better business performance.

It is interesting to observe that it is only once she or he is named CEO that an executive often fully experiences this need to think about the wider societal responsibilities of the business.

Sadly, companies too often miss opportunities to develop the “societal competence” of up-and-coming leaders along their career path, from their first job as plant manager onwards. Fast-track executives too often grow up “protected” within their specialty, with a sprinkling of international assignments added.

But what about Friedman’s mantra, as a way to steer these discussions?

The first “business” in “The business of business is business” can be read as “purpose”, “role”, “responsibility”, “objective” or “mission”. Its meaning gels around the concept of “aim” (“The aim of business is business”) .

The second “business” is more open to interpretation. The broadest view, often heard in CSR circles, is to read this as a company, its employees, suppliers, customers, shareholder and all its stakeholders. The most narrow view would be employees in circumstances who are under the control of executive management.

The third “business” is, in my view, the key. “Profit”, “economic performance” etc on one end of the spectrum. On the other, if we follow the dominant, accepted CSR logic and define the company as spanning the whole value chain, we get to the triple bottom line.

And in real life, after a brief macho tussle around the executive conference table (“why are we getting involved with x y and z, that’s not going to sell any As or Bs?”) , where the debate in a modern company will shift.

With any luck, the question takes on a more pragmatic twist. Can performance be measured along the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social impact? What is a good set of tools to assess how a company performs as a societal entity?

In the charming engineering language of the extractive industry, CSR becomes NTR – for non-technical risk. Anything that is not geology or engineering is non-technical: politics, social norms, movements against possibly polluting or environmentally invasive ways of working – anything that causes delays in a project.

And, to answer the question posed in what I called the Friedman test, this is where business reality has proven him wrong.

It is only by understanding how societies function, and by placing the company, through its stakeholder relationships and overall communications, at the centre of society that business can fulfill its full purpose.

Corporations need to understand this role, and communicators – who bring the world into the business as well as the company out into the world – have a bridge-building mission. That’s a large part of the attraction of our profession.

“In our session at the WPRF, titled ‘New world, new challenges: what and how will communication professionals contribute to sustainability?’ we will attempt (by acting as provocateurs and idea midwives) to stimulate new thinking and lively discussion on the place and space of professional communicators in the “brave new world” of tomorrow.

The global environment as we know it is changing rapidly and governments, business and citizens must seek innovative ways to deal with the issues this generates, as well as with the sustainability of business, of organisations and of the physical world itself. The “one world, people and planet” imperative, with its focus on interdependence amongst all people, forces a consideration of the radical changes needed for the future. Documents such as Vision 2050 demand different approaches from business leaders, requiring them to rethink how they should develop and operate for a more sustainable future. This will mean challenges and a new agenda for governments, business and other organisations. The vision for the world on a sustainable pathway by 2050 will require fundamental changes in governance structures, economic frameworks, business, organisations and human behaviour.

Partnerships and strategic coalitions with all stakeholders will be more complex, but enabled and made more effective through developments in the way that people, governments and business use information and communication technology to connect. The use of social media and networks and improved communication technology will continue to increase the speed and scale of information exchange and will play a significant role in effecting organisational development, sustainability and accountability. Vast opportunities lie both in the unmet demand for basic communication infrastructures, as well as in innovative new platforms for improved interaction amongst stakeholders. This increased interaction across borders and cultures will speed up the dissemination of ideas and opportunities. Stakeholders will be enabled and more empowered to communicate their interests, concerns and expectations to organisations that operate in their social, economic, physical and political environments.

This new world with its novel ways of doing business will have to tap into the creativity and innovation of all stakeholders, using them as resource, but also recognising their increased accountabilities. Communication, communication management and the activities of public relations and communication professionals will be essential in facilitating the links between stakeholders and partners, building and maintaining reputations and relationships, as well as co-creating value in an interconnected world.

We will gather in Stockholm for the World PR Forum to find the next frontier in the practice and academic discipline of public relations and communication management by examining and ratifying the Stockholm Accords. In our session we aim to provide a platform for vigorous debate on how to fill the gap between public relations and communication as usual, to public relations and communication management as exceptional stakeholder engagement.

As an outcome of our session we will also seek to provoke ideas and suggestions on the ‘Stockholm Accords’ themes of Governance and Management. The global and national issues mentioned above will impact on public relations and communication professionals over the next few years and we will consider the implications for organisations, on the capabilities of communication professionals and on their roles in the future business environment. It will be an interactive session in which ideas on these issues will be shared and lively debate ensue – all for the development and sustainability of the discipline and practice of public relations and communication management. We invite you to become part of the change and substance we want to see in the future for our profession.

Let the paradigm shift begin….”