Pinnacle Insights
Public diplomacy in the Gulf
June 10, 2009 | Written by Jennifer Hardie
MANAMA, Bahrain, 10 June 2009 — At the Bahrain PR Association conference in Manama today more than 200 PR practitioners from around the region got together to talk about public and corporate diplomacy. Dave Robinson, CEO Hill & Knowlton Middle East, North Africa and Turkey kicked off the session on diplomacy in the Gulf in a presentation called “Public diplomacy: propoganda or public relations”. According to Robinson we “need both awareness & understanding to build engagement. Fundamental to that is trust”.
Robinson emphasised, that governments and organisations conducting diplomacy need to listen to their stakeholders: do research to find out who are the key influencers, stakeholders, what they did or didn’t know about your government, country or organisation. When you do the research, test your messages – what do people want to hear?
But countries must be aware when conducting diplomacy… “the more famous you become the more friends you earn, but you also get more enemies as well, but remember the friends that you do have will be very good and persuasive friends.”
It was really refreshing to hear Robinson talk about the importance of knowing your stakeholders and ensuring that all of your comunications activities are targeted to their interests. Too often diplomacy and communications fails because governments, institutions or organisations fail to think about who they are communicating with and what they are interested in – instead they think about what they want to say. For me, the whole of the European Union is a prime example of this, they have only thought about what they want to say, rather than what people of Europe are interested in, as evidenced in the poor showing for the recent European Elections.
He also made the point that diplomacy is… “not just about communications. You can do a lot about telling good stories, but behaviour is very important. If someone behaves rudely consistently it’s very difficult to convince people they’re polite. You need to walk the walk and talk the talk… and align behaviour and communications”
Next off was a presentation by Christine Warren, partner from Warren Macleod here in Dubai. Christine used to work on the “Business Friendly Bahrain” campaign and talked about the diplomacy that they used around this campaign. Because of its business friendly diplomacy and because it is easy to do business here, Bahrain is rated 12th globally in a UN survey of best countries to do business in.
Christine said a key for their campaign was that they maee sure that they communicated government and business policies effectively with the media – and have good consistent messages in the media. What international media write about Bahrain has considerable affect on the foreign direct investment to the country.
June 10th, 2009 at 15:31
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June 11th, 2009 at 14:56
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