Archive for the 'Book - International Communications Strategy' Category

As I’ve blogged about before, I am co-authoring the social media sections of a book on New Trends in International PR to be published internationally by UK publishers Kogan Page in early 2009. I am trying a social media experiment as part of the book - I am posting my research online on a wiki and inviting readers to add comments and share their knowledge with me. I hope that you or your contacts may be able to help with this project.

Many books on social media as well as books on public relations have tended to focus on the West, and in particular the US and UK markets. But globalisation and social media, as you know, are rapidly changing the landscape of communications. Influence is shifting from organisations to individuals and the voices of Asia, Africa and non-Western cultures are becoming increasingly significant on the world stage.

Our book aims to explore the landscape of new communications from a cross-cultural perspective with special focus on Asia as well as other non-Anglo-Saxon cultures.

Would you - or someone you know - be able to give me an cross cultural perspective around how social media is used in Asia, Africa or South America? For example:

# What businesses in those regions/ cultures blog or podcast? What about not-for-profit organisations, politicians, campaigners, activists, solo professionals - do they use social media to help their enterprise?

# What is the impact of social media and networks like Facebook on business, culture, politics, relationships etc in those cultures/ regions?

I would like to share a strong cross-cultural perspective in the book, so I hope very much that you can help.

You can find out more about the book and follow my research at http://new-trends-in-international-pr.pbwiki.com/.

For others who have already contributed to the project, please see http://new-trends-in-international-pr.pbwiki.com/Acknowledgements+to+Contributors

If you’re able to share our views with me, you can contact me via the book wiki at http://new-trends-in-international-pr.pbwiki.com/contact.php or via the Contact link at the top of this page.

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I’ve just started work on my new book project New Trends in International Public Relations. As you can guess from the title, it’s not a thriller or a novel. It’s a non-fiction book aimed at business communicators, PR practitioners and marketeers.

This is my first non-fiction book and it’s an exciting challenge - but also a little daunting.

As with my two novels, my co-author Silvia Cambie and I started with putting together an outline. We then sent this to our commissioning publisher Kogan Page for them to approve it before we started any other work. Now that they’ve given us the go-ahead, stage two is the research.

I also started the writing process for my novels with research.

For The Flame Tree, I learnt all about geology and construction to make the central development project in the story - and the ultimate disaster at the heart of the book - as believable as possible. For Mindgame, I researched mind manipulation techniques and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (the brain disease that is generally known as “mad cow”).

But the great thing about fiction is that you can take the key elements of your research and blend it with your imagination to re-create hard facts and reality into the fictional world that you’re imagining. You can bend the scientific facts so long as the outcome is within the realms of possibility. You can also use verbal sleight-of-hand - for example, in The Flame Tree I needed the hero Luke to discover a fatal flaw in the construction project that would mean that it is unstable and likely to collapse. In a short paragraph, Luke works on the data he has found and through clever calculations, he finds discrepancies and realises that the foundations are too shallow and the blueprints for the building have been falsified. That’s all I need to say - I don’t need to prove to you his calculations.

In a non-fiction book, I have to prove everything. Every statement I make has to be based on some authority and I need to cite the source. Yikes.

So my research process for this new book project is much more meticulous and I am careful to keep a note of the web link, the name and contact details of anyone I have approached for their input, the name and page number of any book I refer to. Interestingly, blogging has really helped me in this process - without thinking about it, when I blog, I always add links to sources where I’ve derived some information or to other websites where you could find further writing on a particular subject. Non-fiction citations are similar, I guess - the main difference is that instead of a link, I would add a footnote.

If you’re interested to see how the book is going, I’ve posted my first bit of research for the book on my communications and social media blog, ZenGuide - it’s part of the introductory chapter and tells you all about the world’s first website.

Related posts

Nicola Stevens on Writing Business Books

Photo: thanks to lancs.ac.uk

We see news items about politics and military operations in Iraq almost daily but sometimes, it can all seem very far removed from our daily lives.

The Alive in Baghdad project shows the ordinary lives of Iraqis affected by the conflict there. Their mission statement says:

“Alive in Baghdad is empowering Iraqis to share their stories with the world, and provides a place of education and interaction for global citizens interested in the real life political, military, economic and social situation in Iraq.”

This video features child artist, Sameer Muhammad and is father, Muhammad Rubaie, who are now refugees living in Damascus. “They, like many Iraqis, have been forced to flee their country and taken refugee in Syria. They talk about their lives as artists, and how they are continuing their work despite the circumstances.”

You can support this important project by donating via PayPal - go to their site at www.aliveinbaghdad.org to find out more.

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This is a powerful example of the use of social media to spread a message. These stories and narratives would not be so easily available a few years ago before YouTube and user-generated technology, when we were all more dependent on conventional news media as conduits for telling our stories.

This project is going to form part of my research for the book that I am co-authoring on New Trends in International Public Relations.

If you know of any other similar projects where people have come together to share their stories in this way through social media, please email me or leave a comment. I’ll credit you, of course, if your contribution is used directly in the book - you can check out my ongoing list of acknowledgements online.

This is a cross-post from my social media blog, ZenGuide

I am delighted to report that my associate Silvia Cambie and I have been commissioned by business book publishers Kogan Page to write a book on New Trends in International Public Relations, aimed at business communicators, PR professionals and marketeers.

I will be focusing on the impact of social media on business communications and how PR practitioners can incorporate social media into their communications and marketing strategies. Silvia will be focusing on all the other key issues for practitioners such as corporate social responsibility, crisis communications and current hot topics and trends affecting international public relations.

We both have a strong interest in cross-cultural issues. Silvia is Italian and has lived and worked across Europe, speaking several European languages fluently. As for me, I have links with Malaysia and the Far East as well as being now based in London, UK. In today’s globalised world, PR practitioners are increasingly needing to work from a cross-cultural perspective so Silvia and I will be exploring the relevance and impact of cross-cultural issues for business communicators online and also offline.

I’ll be letting you know more details about the social media and cross-cultural issues I’ll be researching in the next few weeks. Silvia and I will both be blogging about our research and the progress of the book on our respective blogs and we hope very much that you will all be able to help us by adding your comments or sharing your experiences and thoughts with us. I will certainly give credit in the book to anyone whose contribution I use in the book.

My dilemma is whether I should blog about this book primarily on my social media blog ZenGuide, because obviously, it’s all about social media - or, on my cross-cultural blog Fusion View, because obviously, it’s also all about cross-culture. If I blog about the book on both of them, will it get confusing if different people comment on one or other of the blogs? Would it be better to choose one of them and then stick to it? But Fusion View has a great international, cross-cultural community there already and I really would love to hear what everyone has to say there. But my cross-cultural readers may not be so interested in social media as such? But if I blog about the book on ZenGuide only, will I lose the cross-cultural dimension by focusing on my social media readers? You see my dilemma. What do you think?

For those of you waiting for my third novel…. hmmm, it looks like that is going to be delayed while I try my hand at non-fiction with this new book project!

Further information

Silvia’s blog X-Culture is at www.chandacom-xculture.com.

Pic: thanks to health.state.ny.us

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