It seems like the idea is finally getting through. After banging the drum for the humble stick of rock as the perfect metaphor for how businesses should think and communicate, it appears the people at British Airways have caught on.   Their new print advertising features a stick of rock, liveried in company colours, bearing the company crest and its founding motto: To Fly To Serve. The curt and…

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I love all things Apple. Always have. My first business, set up in the late 90s, depended on Steve Jobs’ early empire. With PCs, you had to rely on a technician to build your network. If anything went wrong, you had to wait for them to come back and fix it. With Apple, you could do it all yourself.   I still keep those old Macs and among the working…

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Every Friday, PR Week drops through the letterbox. And each week the twinge of excitement at the prospect of industry news is met by the twang of irritation at the magazine’s insistence on using the tagline: “’For professional communicators and reputation managers.”     Professional communicators? Undoubtedly. But reputation managers?   Writing a thought piece for The Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR), entitled the Importance of Reputation Management, Magnus…

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  Three American academics recently completed an interesting study into the effects of negative publicity, effectively testing the adage that: “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”   The trio, who represent such august institutions as The Wharton School and Stanford Graduate School of Business, suggest that ‘because negative publicity can increase product awareness and accessibility, it can sometimes have a positive influence on product choice sales.’   At…

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Philip Sheldrake is something of a tour de force in the world of public relations. He set up and sold hot tech outfit Fuse PR, is a founding partner of Influence Crowd and venture marketers Meanwhile, has just finished his own book ‘The Business of Influence – Transforming Marketing and PR in the Digital Age’ and has re-enlivened life at the CIPR – to name but a few of his achievements….

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Welcome to the Stick of Rock website.  Stick of Rock?, we hear you say. Odd name for a consultancy which promises to ‘build reputation through effective communication’.   Well yes, it is different. But that’s the point.   One of the key pillars of building reputation is to be distinctive[1]. There isn’t much point in investing time and effort in making a great reputation for yourself if people can’t remember…

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