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Personal influence is one of the most powerful strategies to influence publics’ behaviours. Yet, there is scant attention on how personal influence is leveraged for different public relations purposes in different cultural contexts. This study empirically investigates the presence and use of personal influence among Italian public relations professionals.

A survey was conducted through a self-administrated, web-based questionnaire and was developed from earlier studies investigating personal influence in public relations literature. Survey participants included public relations professionals across public, non-profit and private sectors.

The findings empirically show the presence and regular use of personal influence by professionals from all sectors to cultivate interpersonal relationships. Personal influence is considered a personal resource and used to leverage own influencing power. The findings also document four major manifestations of personal influence, which were named: relational closeness strategy, engagement strategy, expertise strategy and added value strategy.

This study enhances our understanding of personal influence in a specific cultural context and offers strategic insights for international professionals seeking to leverage influence in the socio-political environment of Italy. It also offers elements to improve public relations education and training.

The study offers some preliminary understandings of how Italian professionals leverage their personal influence in their daily public relations activities contributing with empirical evidence to the body of knowledge in public relations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between personal public relations practices, which trigger parasocial relationships between celebrities and their followers, and initial reactions to celebrity crises. For this purpose, the study analyzed Johnny Depp’s (JD’s) communication practices over a period of 15 years and assessed online perceptions of responsibility attribution and message valence in the aftermath of JD’s 2016 divorce and accusations of domestic violence.

The study employed the case study methodology and analyzed two data sets. First, a frequency analysis was conducted to determine the most prevalent cultural dimensions (Hofstede, 2011) present in JD’s interviews (n=116). Second, several χ² tests were run on an additional sample of analysis (n=1,044) which comprised reactions on Twitter in the aftermath of the crisis. The study tested whether there was a relationship between culture, responsibility attribution, and message valence.

The results indicate a relationship between the dimension of long-term/short-term orientation and message valence, indulgence/restraint and responsibility attribution and finally, male dominance and message valence. These results suggest that, to a certain degree, the reactions to the crisis analyzed mirrored the celebrity’s public relations practices. Namely, cross-culturally initial responsibility attribution and message valence were influenced by the degree to which the celebrity’s values carried more weight in a culture than in others.

The study only considered tweets that were written in English and stemmed from profiles that identified the location of the users. Furthermore, this analysis took a case study approach and assessed JD’s public relations practices. Therefore, it is difficult to generalize the results and their implications especially in circumstances in which celebrities do want to promote an image that deviates from their real identity so as to hide certain less appealing aspects of their lives. Nonetheless, the study represents a step forward toward the transition from marketing celebrities to promoting them transparently and around their personal values.

Currently, the entertainment industry is dominated by a marketing approach that commodifies celebrities to the extent to which their promotion deviates significantly from their personal values. As a result of this deviation, the approach makes it difficult to appropriately address crises since the latter constitute unexpected events. In addition, the marketing approach has been shown to further erode a celebrity’s well-being and lead to self-destructive behaviors. Conversely, a personal public relations approach allows practitioners to anticipate reactions to crises and respond adequately, therefore reducing further reputational damage. In addition, personal public relations practices trigger parasocial relationships between a celebrity and their followers by focusing on the transparent promotion of a celebrity, and therefore address concerns that celebrities raised in the past with regard to their objectification.

Personal public relations practices shed light on the reality behind stardom and the promotion of personal values may be inspirational for celebrity followers. While marketing celebrities exposes publics to the glamorous life at Hollywood, personal public relations sheds light on the factors that triggered it, among which commitment, hard work, and/or dedication.

Currently, there is a paucity of studies that shed light on personal public relations and parasocial relationships in international contexts. In addition, the strategic communication literature with regard to celebrity crises lacks studies that analyze the publics’ reactions to crises. The present study aimed to fill these gaps.

This paper examines the processes used to create and communicate the public identities of New Zealand women politicians. Interviews conducted with women politicians and their public relations practitioners are drawn upon in order to develop a public relations framework for working with individuals. The framework is developed from Foucault’s work on technologies of the self and comprises six technologies of the self: historical narration, positioning, commodification, mediatisation, aestheticisation, and moral career.

Developing countries are fast becoming the emerging markets in a ‘global village’. Yet few systematic analyses exist about public relations in developing nations. This study uses Grunig's models of public relations to explore the nature of public relations in a sample of four types of organisations in India. Data were collected from 18 organisations and 40 public relations professionals using the survey method and ethnographic analysis. Whereas the self‐reported questionnaires revealed that respondents engaged in two‐way symmetrical communication, the ethnographic data suggested that the press agentry/publicity model was predominantly used by all the organisations. In addition, a new model, the personal influence model, was found to be most popular in the sample organisations.

This study aims to explicate the characteristics of ethical knowledge according to a knowledge management theoretical framework that conveys ethical knowledge as a form of tacit knowledge that is personal, subjective, intangible, and difficult to communicate to others.

The study is based on a survey with 350 public relations practitioners in the USA.

The findings show that ethical knowledge in public relations, as a professional construct, is tacit only to the extent that it is a personal body of knowledge grounded in individual actions and experiences, but it is explicit in that it is tangible and could be communicated and shared in the workplace. Age, work experience and the number of ethics courses taken in an individual's public relations career are some of the significant determinants shaping the public relations practitioners' conceptualizations of ethical knowledge.

The study reinforces the importance of a holistic approach to ethics, where structured and formal training programs and codes of ethics are supported directly by a congruence between formal initiatives and public relations professionals' personal values.

By explicating the characteristics of ethical knowledge and its implications on knowledge transfer of ethics in public relations, and in understanding the determinants shaping public relations professionals' conceptualization of ethical knowledge, this study offers an empirical contribution to an area of study that has received mostly normative and philosophical discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of public relations, conceptualized as a strategic management function, in foreign policy making, and implementation. This research study emphasizes the relational perspective and seeks to examine its applicability to the practice of public relations in foreign policy settings.

This qualitative research study was based on in-depth interviews with nine individuals who were in charge of public relations aspects of a particular foreign policy issue in Latvian government institutions. The examined foreign policy issue was development cooperation.

The research findings revealed that public relations contributed to the strategic management of the foreign policy process to a certain extent. Public relations built and cultivated relationships, researched and scanned environments, built communities around a foreign policy issue, facilitated dialogic encounters and socialized foreign policies. However, the public relations function was not involved in the entire strategic management process: analysis, planning, implementation, and evaluation. Although the relational perspective may be applicable to foreign policy settings and relationships that are cultivated by public relations practitioners in these settings bring outcomes on three different levels – national, organizational, and personal – this study found that public relations is not the only function that deals with relationships between an organization and its key publics.

This research study investigated two areas that are little explored in the public relations research literature: the strategic management role of public relations in government institutions and public relations contributions to policy, especially foreign, making.

Public relations (PR) education has not kept pace with the rapid globalisation that has occurred since 1992. The existing PR body of knowledge, and PR curricula around the world, have a US bias. In order to prepare PR students in various parts of the world to become effective multicultural professionals it is essential for experiences and perspectives from other continents to be integrated into PR education. The complexities of societal factors such as culture, political systems and media systems make Asia a challenging place to conduct strategic PR. It is time for educators to integrate experiences from other continents into the PR body of knowledge, thereby building PR curricula that contribute to training truly multicultural PR professionals.

This paper discusses sex‐related differences in Greek and Italian public relations managers comparing individual characteristics, role, level of contact and perceived quality of relations with the various interfaces, allocation of their working time, difficulties encountered and solutions proposed. The results generally support the hypothesis that there is no difference between male and female Greek and Italian public relations managers, although the issues of environmental uncertainty and role ambiguity among women in public relations requires additional research.

Engaging with stakeholders in “a personal, intimate way” (Men and Tsai, 2016, p. 932) or “includ[ing] the ‘personal touch’” (Kent and Taylor, 1998, p. 323) is often seen as desirable in internal communication management. While the importance of personal communication is undisputed from the perspectives of internal communication, its communicators, and from internal stakeholders, this is not true when it comes to the dimensions and characteristics that constitute an experience of communication as feeling personal. The present study aims to explore what makes communication personal from the employees' perspective.

The study used the Q methodology and Q method, thus focusing on an individual's subjective perspective. The Q methodology was implemented in the form of a Q-sort survey exploring the perceptions of 32 German employees (selected from a representative cross-section of 400 employees in Germany, using a balanced-block design to maximize heterogeneity).

The results show that while direct and dyadic communication is often perceived as personal, many other dimensions and characteristics are also considered “personal” in both the literature and based on stakeholder perceptions. The Q-sort survey revealed four perception types whose perceptions of communication as “personal” vary widely, with all these types rejecting non-human communicators.

This study contributes to the limited understanding of employees' perceptions of internal communication as “personal.” It shows how the Q methodology and Q method—a rarely used perspective—can complement existing theoretical and empirical research on internal communication. For internal communication management, the findings show that a “one-size-fits-all” approach must be questioned and that a communication team's involvement in personal communication can have negative consequences.

The principle focus of the European Communication Professional Skills and Innovation (ECOPSI) Research project reported in this paper is to develop understanding of the competences held by senior communication practitioners and the contributing knowledge, skills and personal attributes that are relevant to their role. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

This paper is based on 24 months of desk and empirical work by the research team in three core phases: the benchmarking report based on literature reviews in each country region; quantitative data collection from communication practitioners in 42 countries across Europe; qualitative data from 53 interviews across four senior practitioner roles in the six regions of the study’s focus.

The findings highlight the competencies needed by senior practitioners through the creation of the Communication Role Matrix with critical evaluation of the current contemporary issues faced by the sector.

The authors acknowledge a limitation of the study regarding the selection of the four studied professional roles. ECOPSI has proven a common understanding of theses four studied roles in Europe, but further research on the competencies of diverse roles performed in the profession would need to be explored for a more comprehensive appreciation of the full spectrum of public relations and strategic communication practice.

The paper draws together findings from across Europe and presents a practical interpretation of the project in the form of an online self-diagnostic tool based on an online portal for practitioners to self-complete.

The programme improves the professionalism of practitioners across Europe and their ability to work across borders in a European and wider international community of communication practitioners.

This study benchmarks the educational and practice landscape in six key regions of Europe to demonstrate that the elements focusing on skills, knowledge and personal attributes of European communication professionals can be synthesised using competences as the foundational element. The originality is also reflected in the self-diagnostic tool for the project based on an online portal.