Your PR Architect

(c) DKassnoff, 2008 Next week (Sept. 18-19), hundreds of public relations pros will visit Rochester for the Public Relations Society of America's northeast regional conference. They'll talk about social media, SEO, media relations, and many other hot PR topics. They'll drink coffee. They'll multitask. They'll swap and lose business cards. But they won't talk about communicating with diverse audiences, or hiring diverse account executives. A colleague invited six diversity PR experts (including me) for a panel discussion. But it isn't taking place. Just one attendee registered for the panel, so it's been cancelled. That's disheartening for PRSA's Rochester chapter, which has had a very active diversity committee for about five years. A committee that has earned national recognition for a pioneering "Diversity Apprentice" initiative introducing high school students to public relations. That just one PR practitioner si...

By Oregon Department of Transportation (Diversity Uploaded by AlbertHerring) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Wow. Say what you will about Google's massive  Internet presence,  but when they mess up, they're not shy about it. A few days ago, Google admitted its workforce was overwhelmingly white. And male. They shared some metrics here . This is unusually forthright, because there's no major litigation facing Google regarding workforce inequities. Instead, they got out in front of their problem, defusing potential negative publicity before criticism or litigation arose. But dig deeper and you find their statistics are somewhat worse when it comes to the diversity of the company's leadership. Google's overall workforce is: 30 percent female, 70 percent male.  61 percent white,  30 percent Asian,  2 percent African American, and  3 percent Hispanic. Google's leadership demographics are less fo...