“Public Relations Around the Globe” is a collection of essays and articles about PR around the world edited by me. Each chapter was originally developed as a Bridge Global Strategies article or blog post by our staff and me or as a bylined contribution by an international public relations executive. The book is divided into geographical sections and topics, including Europe and the Middle East, the Asia/Pacific region, the BRIC countries and a section with observations, insights and advice about international public relations. There are chapters on communications in Australia, Japan, China, Brazil, Spain, Germany, England, India and the United Arab Emirates.
The book is available as a download from Amazon for $2.99. I have some copies available at no charge for people who would like to review the book. If you’re interested in having a review copy, please email me.
I hope those of you who read the book find it useful. I would welcome your input on it.
My next book will be aimed at start-up companies, with tips for maximizing communications dollars and building a reputation. If there are topics you’d like to see in the book, please let me know!
I was one of a wide assortment of public relations and corporate communications people who gathered at a holiday party last month hosted by Douglas Simon, President and CEO of D S Simon Productions. The company is a broadcast and social media video production firm with headquarters on West 36th Street in Manhattan. Doug decided to take advantage of the gathering of this motley crew at his studio by recording interviews with some of us with tips for corporate communications best practices in 2012.
Some of you may remember a blog post I did last year criticizing my own performance on a video interview Doug did with me, for which I was, sadly, not well prepared. This time around I was better prepared.
I’d welcome your own PR tips for the year ahead. I just read an economic forecast predicting that 2012 would be the turn-around year that people have been waiting for, so hopefully many of you will have bigger budgets for public relations, corporate communications and marketing communications. What are your highest priorities for spending those budgets in 2012?
New Year’s resolutions are easily made and just as easily broken. According to a Wikipedia entry on the topic, a recent study showed that 78% of the people who make New Year’s resolutions fail to keep them.
Research done by psychologist and author Professor Richard Wiseman showed that those who succeed have certain characteristics in common:
They are specific with their goal setting, not general. For example, instead of “lose weight,” a goal people can more easily reach is to lose a pound a week by cutting out complex carbs and exercising three times a week.
Successful resolution makers tell others about their resolutions.
My personal resolutions are just like everyone else’s – lose weight, exercise more, save more money. I also resolve to make my resolutions more specific this year, in an attempt to be one of the 22 percent who succeed in meeting their goals. But business resolutions are less predictable. I know, because I asked a wide range of other small business owners what their business resolutions are for the new year. I’ll get to mine, but first I’ll share some from other small business owners’:
1. Eric Brody, President, Trajectory(a branding and marketing company in Morristown,N.J., working across health, wellbeing and beauty):
Eric’s resolution is to more strongly focus. “To focus our passion, people, products, process, procedures to better deliver results in the industry verticals in which we provide the most experience and expertise to our clients.”
2. Elayne Kling, owner, ZP Auto (auto repair shop) and ZP Vintage Stuff (vintage fashion & home accessories ), Williamsburg, Brooklyn , N.Y.:
Elayne comments that, after a move to a new location in 2011, she resolves to improve her company’s online presence. “I’ve also expanded to include a completely different business, so I’ll be working hard on tying the two together online with social media, blogging and coupon promotions.”
Bill says he will focus on communication with clients: “I always find that the most important part of my business is communicating with clients, making sure they I respond to them timely and effectively.”
4. Douglas Simon, President & CEO, D S Simon Productions (a video production company headquartered in New York City, with offices in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago):
“My resolution is to travel more in support of my regional offices,” Doug says. “I recognize the challenge of running a separate office in a different location and that it is easy to become separated from the headquarters operation. By traveling more, it will dramatically increase growth opportunities for the company and for those I employ in those key positions. Building the strength of our DC, LA and Chicago offices are a major goal of the company. Increasing my travel will help us be successful.”
“My resolution is to give our business a hard scrub,” Lee says. “I’ll be looking at what we need to stop and start doing, what our weaknesses are, and how we can take our work up to the next level. I particularly want to examine where I spent my time as CEO in 2011, and how I need to work differently going forward to be of maximum value to the business and our associates.”
6. Andrea Westmeyer, President, RMi (RMi provides marketing measurement and optimization services for the pharmaceutical industry. The firm is headquartered in Des Moines, and also has offices in New York City and Los Angeles.)
“One of my resolutions: think creatively about where competition may be lurking,” Andrea says, “and then ask myself if they are a potential partner rather than foe.”
7. My own business resolution for Bridge Global Strategiesis to keep my vision for the company in front of me at all times, and be more vigilant in assessing all of our activities to make sure our time is spent in ways that further that vision. There’s always pressure to spend time on things that may seem admirable and worthwhile, but don’t help us progress. I want to be very careful to stay on course.
Since the research shows you’re more likely to be successful with your New Year’s resolutions if you share them with others, I invite you to share them with us here. (Come on, spill your guts – it will help you take the first step!)
Over many years of providing PR services to start-up companies, I’ve noticed a lot of the same very basic marketing and communications mistakes being made by one start-up after another:
1) The goals for PR are unrealistic. Start-ups (and others) sometimes expect PR to sell their products. Public relations is not a direct sales tool. It can create awareness, educate the target audience about new technologies or solutions, build positive buzz, win over influencers, develop credibility and build relationships with potential customers. It can lead the potential customer to the company’s website or store or telephone sales force. These are not insignificant accomplishments; they are necessary steps along the way towards sales. But PR can’t always deliver sales leads. (You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.)
2) The company’s founders don’t think they need PR (or marketing) because the products are so great they’ll sell themselves. This relates to #1 above. It’s the “build it and they will come” philosophy that usually only works in a field of dreams! PR isn’t a sales tool, but the PR and marketing are steps towards sales that can’t be skipped. Even if the products are as great as the founders think, there must be a process to let people know about them.
3) The target audience is ill-defined or undefined. Sometimes when we talk to start-up executives about who they are targeting with their new products or services, the answer we get is, “Everyone. Everyone needs [or can use, or will like] this.” This is a serious mistake and marketing problem. There are important reasons to identify the target audience, consisting of those who are most likely to buy. It is more cost and time-efficient to focus on that segment of the population than to try to appeal to everyone. Even big companies with brands like Coke, McDonalds, the iPhone and Victoria’s Secret have target customers and aim their marketing towards them very specifically. There’s a good reason why you don’t see iPhone reviews orVictoria’s Secret ads in magazines published for senior citizens. It’s imperative to do research to determine the best target audience.
4) There are no key communications messages chosen to be communicated. What do you want your target customer to know and think about the product? Unfortunately the answer we sometimes get to this question is a very long, complex litany of attributes, facts and figures. It’s very difficult if not impossible to get across long and complex series of messages. We work with our clients to identify three or four of the most compelling messages and to repeat these over and over until they are well-communicated.
5) The company expects splashy media coverage just because it (or its product) is being launched. If there’s not much new or different to offer, when there is no important differentiation from competitors, there’s no news. If there’s no news, there’s no compelling reason for media coverage. We can offer the media interviews with company executives to discuss industry trends or current events, and the resulting media mentions help the company build credibility and visibility. But we can’t deliver a lot of coverage about a company and its products if there’s nothing new or different about them.
Most entrepreneurs don’t come from marketing or communications backgrounds, never had to be proficient in those areas and are not natural-born communicators. We’re there to help, by advising and educating. With a good, well-differentiated product, some education about the basics of marketing and PR – and a little luck – a small start-up can take giant strides in establishing itself.
Marian Salzman, CEO of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, on a PR Week Webcast this week, forecast what’s coming next in the PR industry. Her outlook for 2012, which was covered in an article by Matt Wilson on Ragan.com, included a prediction that people in the PR industry will have to become generalists, taking on a wide variety of tasks, including but not limited to media relations, developing “content” (a communications industry buzzword that means written, audio or video materials for use online) and serving as experts on transparency.Wilson reported that her explanation for the need to be generalists was, “The media is really being redefined by the second.”
Here’s the thing: some of us saw this coming years ago and refused to be pigeonholed as specialists at a time when the common wisdom was that you had to be a specialist to climb the communications career ladder.
When the dot com bubble burst and the technology sector crashed in 2000, people who had differentiated themselves by specializing in tech or internet PR were being laid off left and right. The situation got much worse after 9/11, when budgets were being cut drastically by PR agency clients in every industry. We learned at that time that it was risky to be specialists in one narrow area. Agencies with general PR practices stood a better chance of survival in a downturn than specialist firms. At that time it was tech that was the weak spot. But at other times health care, financial services, fashion and other industries have been the danger zones.
It’s not unusual for someone who has been a corporate communications professional in one industry to move to a totally different industry. I’ve watched colleagues move successfully from telecom to insurance, from television to the automotive industry, from the automotive industry to a non-profit.
One very nimble friend has gone from the corporate communications department at a Big 5 accounting firm to a beauty products company, a tobacco company, a financial services company, an educational institution, and she now works in the green IT and smart grid sector (and she’s excelled in each position!). Over the course of her career she’s also had a wide variety of roles within communications and marketing, including writing, magazine editing, internal communications, marketing communications and sales promotion.
This demonstrates that good communications principals are much more important to success than deep knowledge of a specific industry. Once we learn the basics of the communications profession, we can apply them to a wide variety of clients. I would argue that broad experience over different industries is a positive influence on creative thinking. You can leverage what you observe in one industry and apply it to another industry in a way that PR insiders in that industry would never think of doing. To be a good communications generalist, it’s crucial to be able to pick up the basics about a new industry fast, and to be able to distinguish between what you need to know and what you don’t. You don’t need a Ph.D. in physics to be a PR superstar for a laser manufacturer, or a CPA to head the corporate communications department at an accounting firm.
All of the above is why a liberal arts education is so important for a communications professional. In college, it’s much more important to learn how to learn than it is to learn the specifics of any particular profession.
I just read an article in the Harvard Business Review about how to make yourself indispensable. The author describes an employee that has done a terrific job, done everything right. He applied for a promotion and was stunned when he didn’t get the position. It went to someone else. He asks, “What did I do wrong?” and his boss says, “Nothing, you’re doing a great job.”
The author argues that it’s much easier to improve your performance (and your position in the corporate world) if you haven’t been doing so well, but much harder when you’ve been doing a great job. He concludes that incremental
improvements don’t help as much as developing other, complementary strengths. For example, an engineer who indisputably does a wonderful job for the company would gain a lot less by becoming an even better engineer than by improving a skill such as writing or people management.
The article stimulated a lot of comments and debate. How do you make yourself indispensable: by keeping on top of the
ever-changing needs and wants of your bosses, and then working to meet those needs? Or by determining how you could become more valuable, based just on your own strengths?
This led me to think about how public relations practitioners can be perceived as indispensable by their clients or, in the case of internal PR staff, by the top management of their companies. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a client, or not winning a client, due to a decision not to have an external PR firm because top management feels that PR isn’t a high enough priority. In these situations, when we are considered dispensable, the marketing department or the internal communications staff may disagree, but they’re overruled.
So how do we, as PR practitioners, make ourselves indispensable? Unfortunately, just as explained in the HBR article, simply doing a great job isn’t enough. The answer isn’t to provide even better results. If what we do is really that valuable to a corporation, then the onus is on us to make senior management understand that we are, indeed, indispensable.
It helps if we set measurable goals in the beginning of a project or a year and then actually do the measurement. However, this is a lot easier said than done, and a lot of attention has to be paid to what kinds of goals are set as well as how they are measured. Otherwise, who’s to say, for example, that it was the PR, not some improvement in the product or services, the sales methods or the distribution methods, that helped sell more?
It’s very hard to measure the impact of PR in isolation from other factors. It’s crucial to agree on goals that we can, without doubt, take credit for reaching. Often even if we can suggest appropriate, measurable goals, our clients don’t have the budget to spend on measurement.
In my most cynical mood, I’d say that very often it’s the people who have to be indispensable in order to sell senior management on PR, not the actual contribution PR makes. The most successful people in the PR industry (as everywhere) are those who have strong personal charisma as well as the ability to cozy up to the decision-makers in an organization and win them over. Sometimes indispensable means a bond of dependency. That kind of relationship trumps PR results every time.
I wish I had the answers to how we can make PR indispensable. Maybe you do. I’d like to hear what you think about this.
I read an interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times about a study done by Robert Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, and Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami on “the attitude of gratitude.” It seems they have evidence that when people are grateful, they are healthier, sleep better, are less anxious, and act more kindly to others, including their “significant others.” In the spirit of providing readers with a calmer Thanksgiving weekend with family members, I’d like to list some reasons for people in public relations to be grateful:
PR people have become the go-to professionals for social media relations. In order to keep up with the fast pace of change in communications in general, we had no choice.
Our need to keep up with what’s happening online has actually made many of us who were previously considered technologically challenged into technology early adopters. (I would have laughed at anyone who predicted this 20 years ago!).
Unlike our brethren in the communications industry with advertising backgrounds, we have been holding up fairly well in this weak economy.
Our profession has never had more potential for growth than it does now. I’ve been hearing anecdotal evidence of public relations being elevated in many companies to report to the CEO.
It has become easier and cheaper to measure the value of what we do. That surely must be an important factor in the previous reason to be grateful.
Professors Emmons and McCullough advise people to start cultivating an attitude of gratitude by keeping a journal listing five things they are grateful for. These can be small things – a turkey that was neither dry nor undercooked, a winning football team, etc.
Five things I’m grateful for today:
We have great clients from whom I learn something new all the time.
My two sons flew home from the west coast to be with their family for the holiday.
I’ve been able to be my own boss and keep my company running, even in tough times.
My staff members are smart and often funny.
The rain stopped; the forecast is sunny and relatively warm for November.
In a provocative article on Entrepreneur magazine’s blog this week, columnist Mikal Belicove, a social media specialist, reported there is now research showing that big companies are less social media conscious than small companies. Why are big companies less social media conscious? And, on the flip side of this question, what motivates smaller companies to use social media more aggressively?
The research data came from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s’ Center for Marketing Research. The Center’s study, ““The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America’s Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau?”, was based on data from the 2011 Fortune 500 list of companies, the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private small companies, and also the largest charities and institutions of higher education.
The researchers looked for blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter followers at all of the institutions. The companies were deemed to have blogs if they had “a public-facing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months.” The research repeated similar studies done annually since 2008. The researchers concluded that the use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook has grown very little in the past year at these large companies. Moreover, the Fortune 500 companies came in last among all the groups in adopting social media every year for the past four years.
In his blog post, Belicove suggests that big companies are risk-averse because they want to protect their top market positions, and are deliberately slowing down their adoption of social media because they believe they have more to lose than to gain from encouraging consumer/customer participation.
Why are smaller companies using social media more than big ones? Neither the researchers nor Belicove answered this question. My guess: the absence of big corporate bureaucracies and legal departments gives the marketing people at small companies more flexibility. Of course, small companies also have less money for marketing than big ones. Social media costs less than advertising and many other forms of communications (although it is not free, as many seem to think – the people costs involved in social media program development and maintenance are considerable).
The results of this study are heartening for small businesses. Small companies are able to be more flexible and nimble than big ones, and those attributes may well be giving them an edge in the use of social media for public relations.
There was a comment on Belicove’s blog post that big companies may be slowing down on their use of social media because it doesn’t produce sales results. This isn’t true, however, since the use of social media to find and attract prospective clients is one of its most important business applications, in my opinion. The ability for a company to obtain data on customer preferences and to build closer relationships with customers is a huge sales advantage.
In addition, the advent of the internet and social media in particular has changed the sales process for most companies by enabling a switch from “outbound marketing” to “inbound marketing.” Hubspot, on its excellent “Inbound Internet Marketing Blog,” defines outbound marketing as pushing the marketing message out, via trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. These methods are less effective than they used to be because prospective customers are inundated with marketing messages and have found ways to shut them off or screen them out. With inbound marketing, in contrast, says Hubspot’s CEO and Founder, Brian Halligan, “you help yourself ‘get found’ by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.”
Inbound marketing provides warm leads and eliminates the need for cold calling. I don’t know about you, but anything that cuts down on cold calling is fine with me!
I was interviewed yesterday by Bruce Hurwitz for his Blog-Talk Radio show, “Bruce Hurwitz Presents,” as part of a series of interviews with women entrepreneurs. The show is available on-demand as a podcast and the topic is “PR & Marketing for Start-ups & U.S.- Based Foreign Companies.”
Have a listen! Click “play’ below, and then click the arrow on the radio dashboard that appears. (There is a 10-second delay after clicking the arrow on the radio dashboard.)
There are trends and buzzwords in every industry, and “thought leadership” is currently on everyone’s lips in the world of public relations. Actually, this has spread way beyond the PR industry and is often heard now in the business world as a whole.
According to Wikipedia, a thought leader is “business jargon for an entity that is recognized for having innovative ideas.” The business media have featured articles ranging from how to “engage” [another buzzword] thought leaders, to how thought leaders can engage employees. Among many articles on thought leadership, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) weighed in with “How to Become a Thought Leader in Six Easy Steps.”
Thought leaders stand out.
If you read between the lines in the HBR article, you see that the headline is a little misleading. The article really tells you how to leverage the thought leadership you already have, rather than giving lessons on becoming a thought leader. The truth is, the best PR in the world can’t turn a follower into a leader. PR can, however, help people who actually are thought leaders to be spokespersons for their organizations, to draw attention to and build credibility for their companies.
Thought leadership doesn’t have to come from big company executives. Entrepreneurs in start-ups can leverage it to build their companies into “challenger brands” (companies that give brand leaders a run for their money). Steve Jobs was one of the most famous thought leader entrepreneurs. Although he ended up CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world, he started as an entrepreneur working in a garage.
Bridge Global Strategies has had the pleasure of helping entrepreneurs in a variety of industries to make waves by communicating their innovative ideas. Public relations can really make a small company soar when there’s a truly innovative thinker at the helm who has a good product or service to offer. With a good PR program, start-up companies can change their industries.
October 1st marked the fifth anniversary of Bridge Global Strategies LLC. While we’re in the middle of the busiest period of the year for our client work, I did pause to think about some of our activities and decided that after five years a few changes were in order.
Bridge Global Strategies has been publishing an e-newsletter about five or six times a year and sending it to clients, communications industry professionals and business people we’ve met along the way. Our readers span the nation and the globe, from Russia to Korea and South America, and everywhere in between.
The newsletter has been a pet project of mine, due to my years of journalism experience early in my career, and I have personally written a lot of the content and edited each issue. Our Bridge newsletter has focused on international communications. Past issues and articles about international communications are in our web site’s newsroom.
However, while a blog and a newsletter can offer similar material, with a blog my staff and I can communicate more frequently one post at a time (and we can lure the search engine spiders that will help bring new visitors to our company’s web site!).
Therefore, please welcome BridgeBuzz. We will send an email to our old newsletter subscribers to let you know when a new blog post has been published, but the easiest way to get the word immediately is to subscribe to our RSS feed.
Next post, coming very soon: “Public Relations in Brazil,” an interview with Fernanda Domingues, fd comunicação, Sao Paulo.
It’s easy to get caught up in our daily client work, but sometimes it’s important to take a look back to see the progress we’ve made.
20 years ago in mid-November I was in the throes of preparing for the launch of a U.S.-Japan pharmaceutical organization, the New York Pharma Forum (NYPF). Today my staff and I are working feverishly to get ready for the same group’s 20th anniversary of that event, its 20th General Assembly and Annual Dinner: inviting media, coordinating the program and speakers, and handling a thousand logistical details for an international event with 300 people.
The idea behind this organization sprang from the creative mind of Shiro Yamasaki, who had been sent to work in New York by the Japanese Ministry of Health & Welfare. It was ingenious for a few reasons. Those were times of terrible trade tensions between the U.S. and Japan (at about that time, members of Congress smashed a Toshiba radio outside the US Capitol with a sledgehammer). The last thing the Japanese government wanted was to have trade tensions spread from Toshiba to Takeda, the largest Japanese pharmaceutical company.
Before the 1980s, there were few Japanese pharma companies in the U.S. The Japanese government protected its pharmaceutical industry for many years against the onslaught of large overseas companies. However, by 1989 there were clear signals that these companies would have to face international competition at home. The more savvy companies knew this meant they had to move into overseas markets. The Japanese market was (and is) the second largest in the world for the pharma industry, and until then the Japanese companies made a comfortable income at home and hadn’t made a big push overseas.
Shiro Yamasaki knew these companies were entering a new era. He also saw the wide gap in the business culture they had to cross to have a chance of success in the U.S. market. When an important new drug is discovered, people worldwide want access to it. But medical treatment methods, health care systems, government regulations and marketing and communications differences create unique pharmaceutical industry environments and cultures in each part of the world. “Big Pharma” companies have been globalizing for decades, which really means becoming part of each local culture.
In 1989 the Japanese pharma companies’ U.S. subsidiaries had only a handful of employees, many of them from Japan. I don’t think a single one was marketing its own drugs in the U.S. Profits from drug licensing are only a fraction of those from direct sales, however. Efforts towards international harmonization of drug approvals were just beginning, and Japanese companies were only doing drug development work in Japan then. Japanese pharma companies understood the need to build the infrastructure and know-how to develop and sell their products in the lucrative U.S. market.
The Japanese pharmaceutical companies had a lot of catching up to do. New York Pharma Forum was a perfect venue to bring them together with Big Pharma, where they could be exposed to the workings of the international pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, the American companies welcomed the chance to meet and talk to Japanese government officials in an informal setting and get to know some of the senior executives sent here from Japan as a way to facilitate deal-making.
How has NYPF developed over 20 years? Stay tuned for part two of this post.
The launch of U.S.-Japan pharmaceutical industry group New York Pharma Forum in December, 1990 took the form of a symposium followed by a black tie dinner at the Waldorf Astoria’s Skylight Roof. If memory serves, about 70 people came to the symposium, and a little over 200 were on hand for the first annual dinner. There were speeches at the dinner by Ed Pratt, then the CEO of Pfizer, and by Shigeo Morioka, CEO of Yamanouchi Pharmaceutical Co., who, along with Haruo Naito, Director General of Eisai Co., came from Tokyo to participate in the launch. Mr. Naito gave the “kampai,” or toast, and then took part in a Kagamiwari ceremony, for which he and several of the other VIPs in attendance donned traditional happi coats and then broke open a sake barrel. We hired a dance band for the occasion, but I was told by the Japanese executives that there was little likelihood of getting the Japanese couples to dance. My staff and I received more than a few calls from Japanese executives before that first dinner asking us, at the instruction of their wives (yes, they were all men), what the women should wear, whether a kimono was appropriate since it was considered formal wear in Japan, and what black tie really meant. They were anxious to fit in and wanted to be properly attired.
Those of us who were there 20 years ago can attest to vast differences between then and now. There are superficial ones (besides our wrinkles): the Japanese never call anymore to ask what to wear, since they are quite accustomed to Western-style entertainment; unfortunately, it’s been quite a few years since we’ve seen a beautiful, graceful Japanese kimono at one of these events; the Japanese and Americans agreed that long speeches were too boring for a black tie dinner, and they were restricted to the afternoon symposium; and the dinner has now become a dinner-dance, with plenty of Japanese couples dancing as well as Americans.
The deeper differences in New York Pharma Forum reflect the results of two decades of change in the industry. NYPF’s Japanese leaders of have been at the forefront of that change. Two of the speakers at this year’s 20th anniversary symposium are a case in point. The Japanese companies, which all firmly stated 20 years ago that mergers were a Western phenomenon that would never affect them, have nevertheless undergone consolidation, including mergers with American and European companies. Hatsuo Aoki, president of NYPF from 1994-1995 while he was head of Fujisawa U.S.A. in Chicago, went on to head Fujisawa globally and was the driving force behind its merger with Yamanouchi to create Astellas, now one of the few global Japanese pharma companies.
In 1989, Eisai was headed in the U.S. by Soichi Matsuno, president of NYPF from 1997-1999. He had a handful of employees on his staff 20 years ago. By the time he left the U.S. 10 years ago, Eisai had grown exponentially and entered the ranks of global pharma companies. Today he is Deputy President of Eisai in Tokyo, and Eisai Inc. in the U.S. has thousands of employees and is in essence an American company, with all American employees except for a couple of expat Japanese. The company has developed and launched new drugs in the U.S. market before even introducing them in Japan.
We shouldn’t underestimate the difficulties that these and other Japanese expatriate executives have had to overcome to make their companies global competitors. There are cross-cultural business differences such as very divergent human resources and compensation systems between the U.S. and Japan, for example. The language barrier alone is tough for most Japanese. One pharmaceutical company executive from Japan said that when he first came to the U.S., around the time that NYPF was launched, he spoke English very poorly and had a hard time understanding what was going on around him. He recalls being utterly miserable for months, but he was determined to learn the language and the culture. He obviously succeeded: Dr. Isao Teshirogi met the challenges here in the U.S. and is now president of Shionogi & Co. in Japan. The American president he appointed to head Shionogi U.S.A., Dr. Sapan Shah, is a vice president of NYPF.
It’s hard to express how satisfying it is, having been involved in the development of this organization 20 years ago, to see the rise and success of so many of the people I’ve worked with – both Japanese and American. I wish that Shiro Yamasaki could be on hand for the 20th General Assembly and Annual Dinner to celebrate with us. Not surprisingly, however, he now occupies a very senior role in the Japanese prime minister’s cabinet, and unfortunately he can’t get away.
Representing our clients to the media has become quite a difficult task, given the current painful death of the traditional media in the U.S.
Every day there’s another article about a newspaper or magazine publishing company that has cut 100, or 200, or 500 jobs. I read a report earlier this fall about unemployment in journalism that confirmed what all of us in the communications industry already suspected: the rate of unemployment is considerably higher in journalism than for the society as a whole. Close to 36,000 journalism jobs disappeared between September 2008 and September 2009. Most of them are in the print media.
The destruction of the news media in the U.S. is both national and local. Downsizing has affected network TV and nationwide news publications such as The Wall Street Journal and Time. But city newspapers have been folding one after another, also. This has led to a couple of noteworthy trends: the American news media is becoming more centralized, and in the process, a few media outlets are becoming much more powerful than they ever were.
In many countries there is one national communications hub city where all the important media are located. While New York is the biggest American news media center, there are influential media voices in Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, and many other areas. Now, however, several once-prominent local news organizations are gone and others are severely weakened.
For example, The Rocky Mountain News in Denver died this year after being published for 150 years. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer also stopped print publication this year, after 146 years. And the The Washington Post just announced it was closing all of its U.S. bureaus and will rely on its Washington-based reporters to cover the news either remotely or by flying in and out to visit a news scene.
The consequence of downsizing and centralization is that local news isn’t being reported as thoroughly as it used to be. In addition, many local newspapers now rely solely on outside sources – syndicated material and wire services – for all non-local news, such as science and technology news, book and movie reviews and national news. An example: only two or three of the top 10 daily newspapers in the U.S. still do their own science reporting and write their own book reviews.
Only a few big city papers are strong enough to produce a wide range of content, and those papers are selling their content to all the others. So while the American news media used to be decentralized, the current destruction of traditional media has led to growing centralization. As a result, those few big papers, along with Associated Press and Reuters, are now immensely influential, since their content is used so widely in place of locally-produced content. This is ironic, since the biggest print media outlets are being eviscerated, too, and the staff cuts keep coming.
It’s healthier in a democracy if there are more, rather than just a few news gathering organizations controlling media content. While we’re going through a very dark period in American journalism right now, I’m hopeful that there will eventually be a total restructuring of the news industry that will bring it back to health and bring us back a greater variety of news sources and more thorough news coverage.
Last week an article was published in Crain’s New York Business online about older entrepreneurs in the United States – older than 55 when they started a business. I was 55 when I opened Bridge Global Strategies, and I was interviewed for the article. It made me think about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, why some people are more apt to be entrepreneurial, and why some countries seem to be easier than others for business startups.
I’ve watched many overseas companies start American subsidiaries, usually with only one or two executives assigned from the home country to the U.S. The ones who are successful have hearts and minds of entrepreneurs. Most of them are not particularly young, either.
It isn’t as easy to be a successful entrepreneur in some other parts of the world as it is in the U.S. Look at the U.S. biotech industry, where companies have been built on the strength of a single good idea, and consider software startups like Google, Facebook and Microsoft. All were started by individuals with little or no capital. There are a few other countries that produce more than their share of successful entrepreneurs and some places that just don’t seem to be good environments for entrepreneurial ventures. I was curious about what factors cause some countries to be more hospitable than others to entrepreneurship. Is it a national mindset, business traditions, government regulations, economic development, lack of stable corporate jobs, or what? I poked around a little online to see what others had to say about this, and I found a non-profit organization online, the Global Entrepreneurship Research Consortium (GERC), that publishes an annual Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) which reports the status of entrepreneurship around the world. I highly recommend reading this very compelling report on what is a complex subject.
According to the report, in the U.S. there is more early-stage entrepreneurialism than in EU countries or Japan. Japan has evidently improved as an environment for entrepreneurs in the last few years. It used to be very tough there for entrepreneurs but now it is at about the same level as the EU countries, according to the GEM report. The report says that the three EU countries with the lowest level of entrepreneurial activities are Belgium, France and Germany. Why? The GERC people don’t exactly know. Is it because people in those countries are less inclined to take risks? Or is it because there are enough attractive positions available there and economic need isn’t as much an incentive as it is in some other places. The GEM report discusses the factors that make one country more or less favorable an environment for entrepreneurship: economic freedom global competitiveness and the ease of doing business are very important.
The executives from overseas who are assigned to start a U.S. subsidiary are fortunate that the U.S. market has the factors that make it relatively easy to start up a new company. But they themselves have to think like entrepreneurs. They are the ones here on the ground in the U.S. and only they can make the best decisions about what needs to be done. Sometimes they have to fight with headquarters staff to move the subsidiary in the proper direction. Often those battles can be difficult and political and can be risky to their careers. So the type of individual who succeeds here in starting a subsidiary is someone with a very high desire to succeed, a risk-taker, a decisive person, a strong-willed person.
I believe that those are all qualities of entrepreneurs.
Our clients are usually either too intimidated by media interviews or are too confident. Those who are scared are extremely nervous that they will say something foolish and embarrass themselves and their organizations, or that they will be asked a question they can’t answer. The overconfident ones feel they know their business better than any reporter does, and figure there’s nothing they could be asked that they can’t answer – so they don’t prepare for the interview. Let me define “interview”: any and all discussions with a reporter or editor for a print or online publication, or a radio or TV producer or reporter, or a blogger qualify.
I think it’s better to be intimidated than over-confident. A little stage fright is like electricity to a light bulb – it gives you energy. Those who don’t worry at all can
“Don’t jump! I’ve sent the whole staff out to
buy every copy of the paper, so nobody
will read your interview – except in the
online edition, of course.”
get too comfortable. This is dangerous. People who relax too much in an interview often say too much, giving the journalist more information than she needs. This gives the reporter the chance to select what to use in her story from both important and unimportant information. Or they say things that were best not said outside the company.
The solution to under- and over-confidence is (no surprise) preparation. List the questions you’re likely to be asked and have someone role-play with you so you can practice answering.
If you’re pretty new at being interviewed, or the upcoming interview is a really important one, or if you’re from another country and not used to talking to the American media, consider some professional media training. At a coaching session, a senior communications professional will work with you to plan a strategic approach to your interview, ask you likely questions and help you frame appropriate, succinct responses. When I coach a client before an interview, I leave plenty of time to discuss the best way to handle the questions my client prays will not be asked.
The worst thing to do is hide from the media because you’re scared. The more you’re interviewed, the better you’ll do, and the less scared you’ll be.
The New York Times recently reported the results of a research study conducted by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to determine what people are most likely to share with others online, and why.
The researchers compiled the New York Times’ list of most-emailed articles over six months and analyzed them. They discovered that a significant percentage of the articles people e-mailed were about science, and a lot of them had a “surprise factor.” Many of the “surprising” articles had what the Wharton team called “an awe-inspiring quality,” according to The Times. The researchers concluded that, after reading something that touches them emotionally (whether it inspired awe, fear or other emotions), readers want to share and talk about their thoughts and feelings.
Communications professionals have always understood that emotion is what makes people remember what they see and read. Sometimes what matters most, unfortunately, are not the facts (the truth), but the “emotional truth.” If a story sounds plausible and appeals strongly to people’s emotions, many people accept it at face value and share it with others. There are numerous incidents of a company losing millions of dollars –brought to the brink of bankruptcy, even – because the “emotional truth” in a news story made the company look terrible even though it ignored the facts.
Here’s an example: 20 years ago, actress Meryl Streep launched an all-out attack on the apple growing industry for using the chemical Alar. Studies had shown a correlation between cancer and exposure to very high levels of Alar in lab animals. An environmental group, National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), claimed there were traces of Alar in bottled apple juice and wanted the Environmental Protection Agency to ban Alar. They hired a PR firm to develop an anti-Alar campaign, using Streep as a spokesperson.
In media interviews, Streep warned emotionally, from one mother to another, that Alar in apple juice could be harming children. One result was a story on “60 Minutes” that was devastating to the apple growers. Mothers poured apple juice down the drain, and sales plummeted.
The apple growers deployed legions of scientists to lay out detailed facts to prove that Alar was safe. But their complex scientific explanations fell on deaf ears. Mothers across America were very receptive to what they perceived to be the truth, the highly emotional anti-Alar accusations. Here was Streep, a mother herself, with no apparent ulterior motive, warning them about a product grown by “Big Agribusiness.”
It turns out that Alar actually does pose a small cancer risk, and children are more at risk from toxins in food than adults. One consumer group concluded that Alar should be banned if it posed even a very small risk. However, the group also pointed out that drinking juice made from apples grown with Alar was much less of a health risk to children than feeding them candy bars. Simple, dramatic and emotional, with a famous actress as the star, the anti-Alar crusade had all the elements of a story the media would love. But the arguments on the other side were not black and white and their complexity didn’t resonate well with the media. Finally the apple growers hired their own PR company, which also used a spokeswoman. She claimed that the anti-Alar hysteria was unscientific and had cost America’s farmers, many of them small family farmers, $100 million. This humanized the apple growers’ side of the story, and gave an emotional argument to bolster scientists’ facts and figures, but in the end, Alar was voluntarily taken off the market.
We live in a much more complex communications environment now than when Meryl Streep attacked apple juice in the ‘80s. Companies need to understand what makes news and what doesn’t, and how to respond when their own organizations or products are maligned online. This will not only help them to protect themselves from the plentiful mis- (and dis-) information that can be found online, but also help them take advantage of the incredible opportunities to be heard that the Internet offers to those who know how to use them.
1) You get to work with people who are smart, energetic, passionate and confident.
2) It feels great that our work is the key to their visibility, and essential for their success.
3) It’s fun to be with them to watch them grow.
Small business advisor
4) Start-ups come from obscurity, and acquiring visibility delights them. What delights our clients makes us happy.
5) What delights them even more is getting VC funding. We can celebrate a lot of interim successes with them even before they’re profitable.
6) Start-ups are more open to new ideas, and they tend to be very receptive to our creativity.
7) We don’t have to wade through an ocean of bureaucracy to get directly in front of the ultimate decision-makers.
8) We become part of the solution to a problem. As Winston Churchill said, “A pessimist sees problems in opportunities whereas an optimist sees opportunities in problems.”
9) We’re a match made in heaven: they’re hungry for attention and we’re great at feeding and nurturing.
If your company is a start-up and you are interested in learning how Bridge can help you, please contact us (lsiegel at Bridgeny dot com). We’d be happy to hear from you.
I was disturbed but not surprised to see a new statistic on the fall in newspaper readership in the U.S. this week. The New York Times reported that the Audit Bureau of Circulations figures show average weekday sales of newspapers across the U.S. have dropped nine percent from a year ago.
Newspaper readership is sinking fast in the U.S., but in many other places, newspapers are holding their own. In Sweden, 80 percent of the population read newspapers. In Israel this figure is 95 percent. And Japan has the highest newspaper sales in the world. By contrast, only 39 percent of Americans in a Pew survey last year said they had read a newspaper the previous day.
Many analysts blame the Internet for the decline in newspaper reading in theU.S., but the 39 percent figure above includes online papers! I’ve also heard people say the cause is the instant availability of news, 24 hours a day online and on TV and radio. To me, this doesn’t explain the situation. Other countries have access to news updates all day, either online or via broadcast or both, and yet their newspaper readership figures are still very high. And TV network news programs are dying here, too. It scares me to think of our democracy with so few people reporting – and reading – the news.
Mine was the first generation to grow up watching TV. Sure, we watched cartoons and “I Love Lucy,” but we also watched Dave Garroway and Barbara Walters on the “Today Show” every morning. We watched the Kennedy and Nixon debate on TV, and a few years later cried while we watched President Kennedy’s funeral. In 1969, we were awestruck and excited as we witnessed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, but horrified at the bloody images from the Viet Nam war on the network news.
We were the TV generation, but we also read the newspaper. We saw first-hand what a powerful effect the news could have with the courageous publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times in 1971. The result was severe damage to President Richard Nixon’s credibility and a shift in public opinion on the Viet Nam War. The skillful reporting of the two Washington Post journalists that brought Nixon down further reinforced the importance that newspapers play.
In the U.S., both newspaper and TV network news staffs are shrinking fast. A report last fall that almost 36,000 journalism jobs had been lost in the U.S. over the previous 12 months came as no shock to anyone in my industry. We work on a daily basis with the media and see this close up. In the last year or two there have been numerous prominent newspaper bankruptcies and closings. Many TV news shows have morphed into entertainment or disappeared.
We try to explain this trend to our clients from overseas and they find it hard to understand because contacting newspaper reporters in their countries is the way to reach almost everyone. We tell them that in America, especially if they want to be known by the “Millennials” – the 20-somethings who grew up using the Internet – they’d better starting learning how to use Facebook, Twitter and a host of other popular new media formats.
Wednesday, June 2nd marked the first official meeting of this year’s Public Relations Internship Summer in Manhattan (PRISM) program with seven PR interns coming together at Bridge Global Strategies for a meet-and-greet lunch followed by a guest speaker. The ten-week PRISM program meets every Wednesday and consists of interns from five different PR agencies, including Red PR, Makovsky & Co., Lotus PR, Herman & Almonte PR and Bridge Global Strategies. This unique summer program promises to expose the participating interns to first-hand knowledge of today’s public relations industry while also providing them with invaluable experience.
At our first meeting we were privileged to have Kenneth Bandler as our guest speaker. Ken’s extensive knowledge of the communications field was evident from the beginning of his informal speech. The PRISM interns asked questions about his past experiences and current responsibilities.
The major topic of the day was Ken’s position as Director of Communications for AJC (the American Jewish Committee). As an international think-tank and advocacy organization, the AJC attempts to identify trends and problems early – and then take action. On-going global issues of concern to the organization make Ken’s position both time-consuming and intellectually demanding. With such a high level of activity and responsibility to react quickly to numerous global crises, Ken must always be on his toes and ready to call upon his years of experience at a moment’s notice in order to successfully represent the AJC’s interests around the globe.
The PRISM inters both learned a lot from hearing Ken describe his present position and were inspired by the prospect of someday being able to work in a similarly fast-paced and challenging environment which produces tangible, real world results.
Recently I wrote on this blog about what kind of news people share online. Research has shown that news that evokes emotion engages people so much they want to share it with others.
GSK's CEO Andrew Witty
Earlier this year, not long after the Haiti earthquake, GlaxoSmithKline’s CEO, Andrew Witty, was the subject of a lengthy front page New York Times article with the headline, “Ally for the Poor in an Unlikely Corner.” The article links Witty’s earlier years working in Africa and Asia tothe company’s support for improvements in healthcare for the poor. If you read the article in print, you’d notice that the Times edited it down for the web and left out mention of Witty’s trip to Haiti after the earthquake. According to the article, he worked right alongside the doctors, Red Cross workers and, of course, CNN anchors. The reporter concluded that Witty went to Haiti because he’s genuinely concerned about the earthquake victims and wanted to see how his company could help. Unlike most other executives, he wrote, Witty is a man of action, not just words.
The article also reports on GSK’s commitment to sell malaria drugs for no more than five percent over the cost of manufacturing them, and credits Witty with establishing this and other corporate policies designed to help those who have a hard time helping themselves.
I don’t know how the Times article originated. Perhaps a CNN anchor in Haiti mentioned to a Times reporter that Witty was there. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone in GlaxoSmithKline’s corporate communications department or at its PR agency didn’t think, “Hmm, Andrew Witty is headed for Haiti – that might make a great angle for a profile piece in the New York Times.” A communications professional with good media relations know-how may have planted the seed of the story idea. I see nothing wrong with that, and I’m not implying that Witty’s trip to Haiti was done for PR purposes. I don’t doubt that he was genuinely concerned and wanted to help. GlaxoSmithKline could simply write news releases to tell the media about its programs to help the poor. But no news release could have the same impact as a personal, emotional feature story, written by someone outside the company. The article must have generated considerable public goodwill and admiration for GSK.
Because we’re bombarded with stories and information all day every day, thanks to the Internet and 24-hour news, it’s difficult for a company to get – and hold – people’s attention. It’s our job as PR professionals to deploy the maximum creativity and know-how to find the corporate stories that will stand out in the news so much that people will not only remember them, but will even want to share it with others.
As a brief aside, the BP crisis has certainly captured and held everyone’s attention and created content hour after hour for the news industry. The devastating impact of the oil gushing into the Gulf on wildlife and people has made this a very emotional story that people, in this country at least, will not forget for a long time.
…that business people from overseas often don’t know
A visitor from Europe came to discuss U.S. PR with us for his company recently. He thought he knew just what needed to be done and how it should be done, and he had already allocated a budget for the work. Our conversation shook him up a bit and sent him back to the drawing board. What he discovered is that the American market was different from his own in many respects when it comes to communications and that many of his assumptions were wrong. Here are five of the important differences we pointed out:
1. Size matters
The U.S. population is large and dispersed over a huge geographical area. There are as many people in all of Switzerland as in New York City alone. The number of media outlets in the U.S. is much larger compared to a country in Europe or South America, or one of the smaller Asian nations. (I’m not saying that Americans consume more news.)
2. From tostados to tempura
In the U.S., there are 21 languages that have at least 200,000 native speakers. Wide diversity is a fact of life in all the big American cities and even many small ones. There are few places where so many diverse cultures live side-by-side (relatively peacefully) under the same flag.
3. PR: not just “publicity,” a strategic function
In some parts of the world, PR is still restricted to bringing messages from senior management to the media and publicizing new products. It is “publicity” in an old-fashioned wining-and-dining sense of the word, and not a high-ranking function. In the U.S., PR professionals develop the messages, they don’t just deliver them. PR – and its twin sister, corporate communications – are strategic functions here that are considered very important by senior management. Often the top communications person reports to the CEO.
4. Higher budgets
Size, diversity and the strategic nature of PR all contribute to higher costs and bigger budgets.Overseas companies often come to the U.S. with too low a budget to do an effective job of communicating. They don’t understand that they need to spend more here to reach their target audiences (who have different lifestyles, are spread 3,000 miles apart, live in totally different climates, come from a wide variety of cultural traditions and speak different languages).
5. Vital importance of targeting
With such diversity and geographic spread, the way to make effective use of a communications budget is to narrow down the audience to the people you most want and need to reach – those who are the best and most important targets for your company – rather than trying to reach everyone. Unless this is done, either the budget becomes astronomical or efforts are spread so thinly they aren’t effective.
We’ve been reading about the woeful condition of the hotel and airline industries and hoping the turnaround is coming soon. We did a ”quick and dirty” survey of (mostly) American business travelers to get a feeling for what this key segment of the traveling public looks for, what sources of travel information are most important to them, and whether and by how much their travel budgets have been cut.
The survey results revealed a few interesting tidbits:
The source of travel information most valued by business travelers surveyed was what they hear from others, either people they work with, business colleagues at the destination, or comments made by other travelers online.
Most people reported that their travel budgets had been cut by less than 25 percent since 2008. Almost half said there had been no reduction.
When asked how they spend free time on a business trip, 14 percent said they never have any. Almost half said they stay in their hotels and work.
The three most important hotel facilities and services to these travelers are wifi, courteous and helpful staff, and a place to work in the room.
As a communications executive, I was struck by the responses to the question about what sources of travel information were most helpful and least helpful. At the bottom of the list – least helpful – were convention and visitors bureau visitor guides, print guidebooks and bloggers. Perhaps C&V bureau materials are mostly not aimed at business travelers, most of whom say they use whatever free time they have to work or relax in their rooms! But the print guidebooks look like an endangered species.
I wasn’t surprised at the influence of word-of-mouth and online social media (such as comments and reviews left by others at Tripadvisor.com). This conforms with trends in influence measured by Forrester Research. A survey that Forrester did earlier this year revealed that the online influence that people have on each other rivals the impact of online advertising.
Many travel companies were a little slow to pay attention to and understand the impact of social media, but over the last year a lot of progress has been made.
I have seen several articles recently in the media about companies dispensing with their public relations firms and taking their public relations work in-house. As a totally interested, completely biased owner of a public relations firm, I want to point out the negative consequences of this decision, which can be especially harmful for young companies and for foreign companies in the U.S. market.
The reasons are many and varied. Let’s start with costs and human resources considerations. There has been a rise in the number of public relations agencies and in the size of the PR agency industry over the years just as budget cuts have forced corporate layoffs, exactly because it’s easier for companies to buy the services they need for limited contract periods rather than have employees on the payroll. They cut down on benefit, human resources and management expenses as well as office space costs. Meanwhile, PR agency compensation is less generous than most corporate PR/corporate communications comp.
Then there’s the issue of the level and quality of service PR companies provide versus what a company can do for itself with internal staff. I speak now not for my whole industry, but for smaller PR agencies, which are known for their more experienced staff. A company that replaces its PR agency with one or two internal PR staff is limited to the knowledge and experience level of those people. An agency brings a variety of people at different levels onto a client team, and there’s almost always more experience and expertise available to the company from the agency than what a company can afford to spend on internal staff.
Put it this way: a company that paid us $10,000 a month would receive, on average, about 60 hours a month of our time. You’re thinking, “Yes, but for $120,000 a year, I could get a pretty experienced person and I’d have 160 hours of his/her time.” But $120,000 is not the actual cost of hiring a person whose salary is $120,000 – it covers the cost of someone who makes only about $55,000-60,000, due to expenses for hiring, benefits, payroll taxes, office space, office equipment, and extra work for a manager, and whoever does HR and cuts paychecks. That pays for someone with only a few years of experience.
In addition, a full-time person doesn’t actually yield 160 hours a month. After you subtract vacations, sick days, and unproductive time, you end up with about 120 hours a month.
“Yes, but that’s twice as many as you would give me for the money,” some of my readers are thinking. However, I maintain that my experienced staff and I will provide a better outcome in half the time of someone with a few years of experience.
The reasons go beyond the experience level of my team. The internal staff person has problems and limitations that an external communications company doesn’t face. More on that in my next blog post!
This week the Wall Street Journal featured an articleabout risk to corporate reputations that cited a survey in which 80 percent of CEOs said this was their top concern. The writer concluded, however, “Reputational management is still too often something that companies feel they should do rather than something that they want to do. A good reputation is hard to quantify and may actually get in the way of delivering short-term profits or cutting costs.”
Reasonable people could disagree about how a corporate reputation should be quantified. But when faced with surveys showing increased or decreased approval of the company, most would agree on the direction in which reputation is heading. That alone is a valuable piece of information for a CEO to consider.
I don’t believe that a good reputation can interfere with positive short-term corporate results or with cost-cutting. The author seems to be implying that a company may need to produce poor products or act in a way that is unethical or inhumane in order to make a short-term profit. Since the reputational fallout from this kind of corporate behavior can have a negative effect on long-term profits, corporate managers who believe it pays to sacrifice reputation in order to make a short-term profit are very short-sighted.
Cost-cutting such as staff downsizing doesn’t necessarily harm reputation if done in a logical and sensitive way. Even though employees may fear and resent the effects of layoffs, in recent years they’ve seen other companies going out of business. They’re aware that cost-cutting, even layoffs, may be necessary for survival.
However, the author is right that many corporations don’t like to deal with reputation management. I believe the reason most corporate managers are uncomfortable with this part of their business is because there are no formulas for success or for solving problems. Each decision that has to be made is a judgment call, and those related to reputation sometimes have to be made immediately. For example, when there’s a crisis, there’s no time to appoint a task force to study the issue and make recommendations. The direction has to be decided at the top, and the boss’s decisions can be criticized later if things go wrong.
This is where corporate PR counselors, whose sole focus is reputation, can be extremely valuable. They are trained to look at the issues from all sides and analyze the way different actions will be perceived by key audiences.
Foreign companies in the U.S. and start-ups, the types of clients we specialize in serving at Bridge Global Strategies, are particularly prone to neglecting corporate PR. Start-ups generally put public relations emphasis on their products rather than the corporation. Understandably, they need to build revenue quickly in order to survive. Foreign companies frequently don’t understand the need for corporate PR in the U.S. and they, too, often focus their communications efforts totally on sales. But if corporate reputation is damaged, customers won’t buy, no matter how much sales promotion a company does.
As reluctant as many companies are to spend the time and money on corporate PR, the cost of ongoing reputation management counseling is trivial compared to the cost of a damaged corporate reputation, or the effects of being entangled in serious crises.
During my career I’ve been a journalist, a corporate communications manager and a public relations agency manager. These different vantage points have given me some insight about how PR agencies annoy their clients and clients annoy their agencies. In the communications industry, there’s plenty of advice around about how public relations consultants should behave in order to stay in clients’ good graces. But I doubt that clients receive as much input about how they should behave when working with their agencies.
Perhaps you’re thinking that the client is paying the bill, and therefore can set the guidelines and tone for working with an agency. However, paying for a professional service doesn’t automatically make people aware of the best way to relate with the professionals providing the service. The relationship between the agency and client is vital for optimal performance of both, and the optimal performance of the agency provides the best ROI for the client.
So, here’s my list of six ways clients can drive their PR agencies crazy.
The agency team members start pleading for a change of assignment (or begin interviewing for new jobs) when:
A client criticizes really excellent work. (Some clients think the best way to get the most for their money is to keep the pressure on the agency at all times to make the team feel it never does enough. This is counter-productive, because it’s very disheartening for agency staff.)
A client expects the team to pitch the media and arrange interviews when there’s no news, and no budget to develop projects that would actually create news. Wasting a journalist’s time can ruin our relationship with that individual.
A senior executive makes a habit of cancelling media interview appointments at the last minute. Sometimes it takes weeks, even months, to arrange an interview. We know that busy executives sometimes can’t help cancelling, but it’s the responsibility of our client contact person to explain the importance of the interview and make sure that a cancellation really can’t be avoided.
Company executives – even the client contact – react slowly to agency messages about journalists’ needs for information or access. If the company doesn’t meet a journalist’s deadline, either the company will be left out of media coverage that could have beneficial, or the journalist will write about the company without hearing its point-of-view and input.
The client wants the agency to work for free. This is never stated directly in this way, but that’s what it means when the scope of a project that is underway is increased, but the agency is expected to stick to its original cost estimate.
The client doesn’t ask for the agency’s input, but simply gives orders to carry out plans made internally. The client squanders a valuable resource by not making use of the skills and experience of the agency team. We can’t do our best for a client that doesn’t include us in the decision-making process.
One of the advantages of being the owner of a PR agency is that you can decide which clients you want to work for and walk away from the impossible ones. At Bridge, we are very fortunate to have considerate, thoughtful clients. But it’s my job as head of the company to sniff out the prospective clients that would indeed drive us crazy, and walk away from them.
It’s only fair to show the other side of the story. My next post will list six ways PR agencies put client relationships at risk.
Even though I’ve been in a PR agency for quite a few years, I still remember what it was like to be responsible for agency activities within a corporation. That experience gives me a little insight into clients’ pet peeves about their agencies. Senior PR agency managers are generally pretty savvy from long experience about what not to do. But not everyone in their organizations has the experience – or the training – to know. For their sake, here are some tried and true ways that public relations agencies and their account teams put their client relationships at risk.
Agencies get fired for:
1.Not managing the client’s expectations. Often this happens because the agency over-promises to win an account. This may help win new business, but it usually results in trouble and leads to frequent client turnover for an agency.
2. Allowing the lines between business and friendship to become blurry in the client relationship. The relationship, no matter how friendly, is rooted in business. When the team members forget this, problems can develop that can lead to bad feelings on both sides.
3. Providing unrealistic budgets and then exceeding them.
4. Disappearing for weeks at a time without making contact with the client. Even if the agency is working diligently on its own, clients want progress reports.
5. Shoddy writing that is poorly organized and has grammatical or spelling errors, or factual mistakes because the writer hasn’t bothered to pay attention to details. Either the client has to spend valuable time editing or re-writing, or throw it back to the agency to be re-done. A frequent complaint we hear about “the last agency” is that the account team had poor writing skills and/or produced sloppily written materials.
6. Not measuring results. If the client isn’t given a ruler to measure the agency’s performance, then the agency sets itself up to have the results questioned. And the client has nothing to show top management to justify budget requests.
Some of these are so obviously destructive that it’s hard to understand why agencies aren’t vigilant in preventing them. And yet they happen over and over again. Agency management usually does know that certain types of behavior ask for trouble, but knowing it is one thing; preventing or eliminating it is much harder.
Great agency management and sound ethics should result in long-term client relationships. However, sometimes agencies lose clients even when everything is going well, through budget cuts or changes in a company’s needs. It’s a tough business, but I wouldn’t choose any other!
A member of a marketing organization I belong to (MENG, or Marketing Executives Networking Group) emailed the group for comments about marketing agencies working “on spec” as part of the proposal process for potential clients. He received a lot of responses, some quite heated, mostly from ad agency and design firm executives, although a couple of marketing consultants also weighed in. Almost everyone who replied disapproved of working on spec. Many respondents flatly stated that their agencies would never work on spec, no way, no how.
If you’re in a corporate position and don’t know exactly what I’m referring to, I’ll give you an example of the PR industry working on spec: company X decides to look for a new PR firm. After initial research, the company chooses PR agencies to invite to compete for the business. They provide each agency with background information about the company’s communications challenges. They instruct the bidders to propose ideas and strategies for solving the problems, including timetables and budgets for carrying out the recommendations.
Ever since I entered the PR industry I’ve heard agencies complain about being forced to work on spec, because it amounts to providing free consulting services to potential clients in hopes that the client will eventually hire them.
Like law firms and accounting firms, PR companies are professional services organizations that pay the rent and salaries by charging for employee’s time. One of the MENG comments was, “We can’t pay the rent on spec. Would you ask a lawyer to tell you how he was going to argue your case before you paid him anything? Would you ask a doctor to give you free treatment so you can see how it compares with 8 other doctors?” (I hear a loud explosion from agency folks who are reading this and shouting, “Exactly!”)
Every agency I know has, at one time or another, had its intellectual property (that’s what proposal ideas are) stolen by a potential client. In some cases, companies have gone through the agency search process, gathered great ideas from the agencies they’ve met, and then announced they weren’t hiring an agency after all. Instead, they cherry-picked ideas they liked and executed them in-house. I’ve also seen our own agency’s concepts given to another PR company to carry out. (Maybe the other agency proposed a lower price, but wasn’t particularly creative, so the company decided to hire the cheaper agency and have them use our ideas. Who knows. In any case, this is unethical and infuriating!)
Those of you in corporations may be thinking, “How else can we choose an agency if we don’t see them in action, see how they think?” First, ask each agency to discuss case studies of work they’ve done for other clients. Second, speak to the agencies’ references. What their clients tell you can be revealing. Third, describe a hypothetical situation to all of the competing firms and ask them to provide their thinking about how to handle the fictitious situation. We do this when we test candidates for job openings on our staff. It does involve some unpaid time, but we expect that as part of the sales process, and at least the PR firms bidding for your work won’t feel they are developing a communications strategy for you without being paid.
Although I feel it’s unfair to expect agencies to develop communications programs on spec, in the PR industry my firm does it. We don’t have a choice, since everyone else does it. If we didn’t do it, our chances of being hired would be quite low.
A website was developed to try to gather people in the communications industry together to stop the practice of working on spec. That’s how strongly many agencies feel about it.
The public relations agency industry in the U.S. has fared better than most marketing/communications disciplines in this recession for two reasons: the surge in importance of social media, and a much greater awareness by top executives of the importance of PR.
In a matter of hours, a few negative comments on Facebook, Twitter or any number of other online sites can spread quickly to a global,
"What’s that I hear? Oh, geez... it's a Facebook stampede of unfriendly friends. Robin, get the Batmobile ready to rock & roll. Fast, before they ruin the reputations of the Powers That Be." "Holy emoticons, Batman! We gotta get there before they reach the C-suite!"
Internet-wide audience, as well as to offline media. As result of online and other corporate crises that have crippled companies recently, the work we do in PR, especially in reputation and crisis management, has suddenly become more visible to and valued by CEOs, CMOs and other top managers. So, while companies have cut ad budgets, PR budgets haven’t been so badly affected, and some have actually grown.
A lot has been written about ad agencies working hard to get a piece of the social media pie, and succeeding. But this doesn’t mean that ad agencies are taking PR agencies’ slice of the pie. To better understand the role of advertising and PR in social media, we need to examine the role of each in social media.
We could view social media networks as both opportunities for promotion and as an ongoing challenge to the management of both corporate and product reputations.
The public relations industry is best equipped to take charge of the reputation management aspects of social media, hands down. Advertising professionals are trained to send out messages crafted just the way the marketing department wants them. However, social media networks are another ball of wax. The audience answers back, and sometimes not in a positive way.
Ad agencies aren’t accustomed to two-way dialogue with the audience, nor are they trained to respond without being promotional, which is all-important when communicating in a social media network. This, however, is exactly what PR professionals do well. When we provide journalists with information in a way that communicates carefully crafted messaging, we can’t guarantee they will use the information the way we want, or use it at all. It takes a great deal of skill to present a company’s messages to the media succinctly and persuasively, and then to respond quickly and honestly to journalists’ doubts and criticisms in a way that will serve a company well. This process has prepared us for dealing with people in social media networks.
But now for the promotional potential of social media: promotion is where ad agencies excel, although the PR industry is holding its own in this area, also. The way I see it, ad agencies are using social media as an extension of their traditional creative skills. The Old Spice campaign, for example, consists of a series of video ads that are spread around virally using networks such as Twitter. Ad Week noted in an article this summer that, “The [Old Spice] effort proves that ad agencies can use the social media tools at their disposal to embed their work as deeply in digital culture as their offline ads are seeded in popular culture.” The same article quoted blogger Edward Bocches, Chief Creative Officer at Interpublic Group ad agency Mullen, who said that what’s new is the expectation that the creative teams in ad agencies will come up with new material in response to what is happening online within hours, rather than in the weeks.
Ad agencies may be deploying new tools (i.e., Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) for the delivery of ads and sales promotion, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing a different kind of work than they were doing before. I don’t see ad agencies going after the public dialogue aspects of social media. Public dialogue is the traditional domain of PR agencies, whether the dialogue is online, in traditional media, in speeches, or wherever it takes place. Ad agencies are focusing their social media efforts on promotion, using humor, fun, sexiness, and other such attention-getting devices.
The advertising and public relations industries have never worked well together. What’s really evident to me is that we had better start to do so now, for the sake of our clients. Since we’re playing in the same sandbox and using the same tools, it’s more important than ever for advertising and PR professionals to understand each other’s disciplines better and work in greater harmony.
Bridge Global Strategies specializes in working with start-ups, in addition to companies headquartered outside the U.S. At every start-up we’ve worked with, the CEO is involved in the decision-making about hiring a PR firm. However, many entrepreneurs never had the responsibility for selecting a public relations firm – never even worked with a PR firm – until they started their own companies. They’re often not sure what qualities they need in a PR agency and don’t know what results are reasonable to expect. Dear readers, if you are the founder of a start-up, or if you’re working closely with one, this blog post is for you.
Here are 10 expectations you should have from any PR agency you hire:
It has ethical owners and managers who expect ethical behavior from all employees.
The agency gives you a realistic view of what can be accomplished with PR.
It will tell you if your budget is impossibly low and will walk away if you really don’t have enough budget to afford the services.
If you do hire the agency, it is able to stay within the agreed-upon budget.
The agency has a track record of success for other clients. You should ask for case studies, and for references from clients.
It has smart, experienced people who:
Are capable of developing strategy,
Can counsel you on key issues that affect the image of your company and influence product sales – not just business issues, but also social, political and environmental issues.
Won’t be afraid to speak up to you and other top executives if they disagree.
Will tell you what they don’t know.
Last but not least, write well.
A lot of start-ups aren’t sure what public relations will do for them. We’re often asked, “With budget limitations, why spend money on PR? Why not advertising, direct marketing or sales promotion?” What PR can accomplish depends on the circumstances as well as the work of the PR agency. Good agencies don’t over-promise what they can accomplish. You should be suspicious of any agency that promises you coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the New York Times, on the “Today” show or on top blogs such as The Huffington Post, TechCrunch or Gizmodo.
Sometimes this kind of coverage is possible. It isn’t impossible for a PR agency to help launch a totally unknown start-up company and/or product and catapult it into the limelight in a short period of time, even on a relatively modest budget. But most of the time for start-ups this kind of prominence isn’t within each, at least not at first, for several reasons.
Don’t ignore public relations at launch time just because the outcomes aren’t certain. A company has only one opportunity to launch itself, which can be a good kick-start to building some long-term reputation and visibility. And that’s what really counts. Unless the company continues to make news after the launch, the media and the public will move on to something else. However, with hard work and creativity, over time, a PR agency can help build a steady stream of attention that can be sustained.
There are no guarantees in public relations. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t being straightforward. PR agencies work with “third parties” – the public, local communities, the media, online groups, etc. They excel at using the power of persuasion, but that ‘s the real power PR possesses, and persuasion is different from control. Advertising and direct marketing provide control. But PR provides credibility: it’s effective for the very reason that the message isn’t controlled, it is merely suggested. It’s a big boost to the company’s credibility if those independent third parties accept the message and choose to pass it along to others.
Yes, times are tough, and corporate budgets are under pressure to be “lean and mean.” But being lean requires cutting fat, not muscle. And being mean is altogether unnecessary.
There are wise and unwise ways to save money on communications. Here are some of the worst ways to go about it:
Cut the most expensive programs. If the most expensive program is also the one that provides the best return on investment, cutting it may cost the company more in the long term than you’ll save in the short term.
Cut across the board, evenly reducing all communications expenses. This is just as bad as singling out the most expensive program to cut. Each expense should be evaluated for the support it provides to communications efforts and the return-on-investment it yields.
ABC Corp. cuts the fat from the corporate communications budget.
Do everything you’ve been doing, but with cheaper people. Layoffs of experienced older people in order to hire younger, cheaper labor is illegal - and invites age discrimination lawsuits. Besides, all other things being equal, you get what you pay for: an experienced communications professional can run circles around an inexperienced staff member and get much more accomplished.
Skip the college recruiting program for a year or two and don’t bring in any employees with newly-minted degrees. Many communications agencies did exactly this in the 2001-2002 recession, which hit the public relations industry particularly hard. The result was a labor shortage at the lowest hiring level that has moved up the ladder with time – the shortage of assistant AEs became a shortage of AEs, and then of Senior AEs, etc. Agencies fought over a smaller pool of candidates, resulting in disproportionately high salaries at each of those hiring levels. That, in turn, caused internal parity problems. That situation was corrected by the current recession, since those higher-paid individuals became prime candidates for layoffs.
Squeeze your service partners and suppliers until they scream – they’re small companies and they have no choice but to accept what you’ll pay. Negotiation is one thing, but when you force companies to forego any profit or even accept a loss, you show a lack of regard for their well-being that will result either in losing them as service partners or ruining your relationships with them.
By inference, you can guess what I consider to be the proper way to save money on communications: evaluate each activity, and cut the activities that are the least effective – and the least cost-effective. This shouldn’t be too difficult to do if you’re measuring results against goals you’ve set, and have some data on which to base your decisions. Any necessary personnel cuts should be made the same way.
Do you have any better ideas? I’d love to hear them.
Jeannette Paladino, a communications consultant for whom I have a lot of respect, has written a blog post about what kind of profile a social media director should have in a corporation. This is a timely topic, since Twitter is crawling with people calling themselves social media experts, and companies (in the U.S., anyway) are now hiring some of them.
Jeannette feels the role of social media director in a company involves “big time responsibilities,” and she believes that companies will soon start elevating this role to the executive suite, with the social media director reporting to the CEO. Her reasoning is that social media encompasses many areas: customer relations, marketing, corporate PR (“reputation management”), marketing PR, employee relations, and maybe investor relations, also. Someone with expertise in most of these areas would have to be a senior person. In addition, she sees one of the key responsibilities of a social media director as leveraging the potential for cross-product/service social media programs.
Communications technology has always had a deep impact on people's lives. From left to right, top to bottom: the Gutenberg press, Pony Express, early typewriter, 1950s TV, UNIVAC, email, social media and texting.
Just think of the infighting and power struggles that would ensue in many companies with a social media director and his or her staff focusing just on the social media aspects of the other areas in the company, which are the domain of other senior executives.
If I were a corporate CEO, I wouldnot hire a senior-level social media director. I wouldn’t place social media as an independent stand-alone corporate department, either. No matter how a company’s communications functions are organized, the communications staff in each area of the company must have expertise in social media. Social media has become an integral tool in all of these communications practices. I understand the valid point that it would be beneficial to develop cross-product/service social media programs. But this is also true of PR, advertising and other forms of communication.
It seems to me that having a high-level social media director in a company only adds more management expense (and if she has staff, another layer of employees). I read recently that someone is currently doing research on whether social media is causing an increase, a decrease or no change in employment in corporations. I’m really curious to hear the outcome of this study, but I have a strong hunch that it’s creating jobs, but I predict those new jobs will be eliminated 5-10 years from now.
Social media is a means of communication created by technology, and, as history has shown, technologies rise and fall in importance. People who devote themselves to becoming experts in new communications technologies become the “go to” gurus for awhile until the technology becomes part and parcel of everyone’s daily life, and until the next new communications technology comes along. The invention of the telephone, for example, had a profound impact on society. Pre-telephone, people communicated across distances via letters – i.e., slowly. The phone allowed real-time communication across long distances, which, among other things, drastically speeded up business transactions. The invention of television brought news and newsmakers into people’s living rooms. This changed the way elections were run and won, the way wars were perceived and created new methods for selling products, among many other things. The advent of each new communications technology has shaped the way we work and live, going back to the first newspapers (which Wikipedia says hit the newsstand in 1605 in Strasbourg, Germany) and leading up to cell phones, the internet and email.
If we can learn anything from the history of communications technology and its effect on business and society, it should be that sooner rather than later everyone will become adept at using the technology and it will be incorporated into the fabric of life. The process of experimenting with the new technology to tap its potential is an ongoing one.
If I were CEO of a large company, I’d much rather use corporate resources to improve the social media skills of all communications staff members than to hire a social media director to orchestrate the use of this technology. The more people are familiar with social media, the broader the exploration will be of benefits from this new technology.
The Battle Lines on English GrammarHave Been Drawn
If you Google “bad grammar,” you’ll see that there are two camps on this topic: the frustrated readers and writers who can’t tolerate the bad grammar all around them, and those who claim that bad grammar is unimportant. Their argument can be summed up as follows: “It’s the thought that counts, and it isn’t reasonable to expect people to stop and put their words into proper English before speaking or writing.”
Online communication seems to have had both a positive and a negative influence on the use of proper grammar. My guess is that the introduction of email caused most people to write a lot more than before email was introduced. That was a positive influence when the writer took time to think about the words before sending them to someone else. In addition, blogging has millions of people writing every day, and I believe most bloggers take pride in their blogs and are careful about what they say and how they say it. Perhaps that’s why there has been more attention paid to grammar lately. I’ve seen several articles about grammar in the media lately.
However, chatting online – which is by its very nature a fast, unedited outpouring of thoughts – began to change that, and after awhile some emails started sounding as informal as chat room conversations. With the onset of texting and its length limits, abbreviations have been formed for online chatting, and these have crept into emailing and other forms of written language. [Yesterday I sent an email with a “Happy New Year” greeting at the end, and I received a reply that said, “u 2”. That was the whole email. Not even an upper case u or a period at the end.] It’s obvious to me that most people dash off emails quickly, thinking that they’re an informal form of communication, and they don’t stop to think about whether they’ve made spelling or grammar mistakes.
Despite the recent focus on grammar by some writers, there’s been an increase in grammatical errors in newspapers, magazines, on blogs, even on signs.
The classic grammatical error in advertising from my youth was, “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.” While English teachers and grammarians were quick to point out that “Like” should be “as,” the ad industry’s defense was that using “like” as a conjunction was popular usage. That ad ran for many years, and probably influenced the use of “like” as a conjunction! Finally, Winston developed an ad showing a little old lady saying, “Winston tastes good, as a cigarette should.” The ad copy read, “What do you want, good grammar or good taste?”
I read a best-seller over the holidays on my new Kindle from a nationally known publisher by a “promising new author” who wrote: “Me, my sister and Grandma decided not to go.” In the book’s prologue, the author thanked all who supported her while she wrote it, including the foundation that had given her a grant. Is the use of good grammar really so unimportant that a foundation is willing to dole out grant money to a writer who blatantly ignores the rules of grammar? A writer who doesn’t know enough to say to herself, “I wouldn’t say ‘me decided,’ so I shouldn’t say ‘me, my sister and Grandma decided”?
Sometimes the rules of grammar are necessary so we can understand what a writer intends to say. Not following the rules can cause confusion. The placement of one comma can make the difference in what a sentence means: “Stay away from smoking, dope.” “Stay away from smoking dope.”
New companies are very needy when it comes to marketing. Nobody knows the company or the products, and there’s no company track record to fall back on. Very frequently the CEO and most of the others in the company don’t have a good understanding of marketing. It’s extremely important for a start-up to have an experienced and talented marketing director because the tasks at hand are daunting: develop marketing strategy, carry it out and explain it to the boss, all at the same time, and, at least in the beginning, without any help.
I’ve asked several people who have been marketing directors at startups, or who have had to hire to fill this position, what they think the keys for success are in this important position. They have agreed to give Bridgebuzz readers their thoughts. So, what does it take to do the job?
Chris Carradine, Vice President, Marketing, ecobee (Toronto-based green tech company):
Selfless team players – while this is an overused term, their approach must be about the greater health of their companies, not their personal aspirations for awards and recognition.
The mind- set to do whatever it takes – build the plan, write the copy, do the calls, send the kits – it’s all up to you.
Its all about the “runway” – marketing directors at start-ups should not be so focused on spending to the level of their budgets but rather should challenge themselves and their teams to manage expenditures below the budget, while still achieving success, since every dollar saved “extends the runway”.
Michael Lamberson, Director of Marketing, Appature, Inc. (Seattle-based software company)
Vision. I think having a clear vision of what you want your brand to stand for and how it helps drive the business model is extremely important. And, having the ability to articulate and sell that vision upwards and communicate it internally is really important for people to “see” something that is ethereal and really get behind it.
Action. Having a good system of prioritizing actions, based on criticality, not necessarily urgency, is super-helpful. Since you are probably 12-24 months from build-out of your marketing “dream team,” you will have to rely on your own hard work and your network of “experts” to execute things that need to happen. And, it is critical that you helicopter up and down to ensure you are tracking to your overall brand building vision and your CEO and organization at-large see the connections. Don’t forget (and someone gave me this wise advice): the team you are working with may not, and probably doesn’t, know the value marketing can bring to a start-up, so don’t lose sight you will need to chalk up early wins as you are building and executing the long-term vision.
Have fun. If you are truly passionate about brand building and creating something the world has never seen, you will undoubtedly be successful.
Joan Rothman, Vice President of Marketing, CoreMatrix Systems LLC (New Jersey-based software/CRM consulting firm)
The most important qualities, in a nutshell:
Must be comfortable working in a constantly changing fast-paced environment
To head up marketing at a start-up, it’s very helpful to have extensive “roll-up your sleeves” experience
Outstanding ability to collaborate with triple A personalities is mandatory!
Takeshi Yamakawa, CEO, SNBL U.S.A. (Seattle-based contract research organization – he was founding president of SNBL Clinical Pharmacology Center in Baltimore)
I think the most important quality is confidence in himself/herself. Since a new start-up is yet to be tested by the market, he/she must be smart enough to judge the company, its strategies, management, plans. etc. and its competitiveness in the markets it is going into. Without confidence in his own judgment about these things, he/she cannot lead the marketing activities as representative of the company, or cannot market the start-up to customers who have never experienced its services. The marketing director needs to be confident in his/her judgment in joining the company in this position, one of the most important functions a start-up company needs. Self-confidence can help both the marketing director and the company go through the huge challenges they will face.
Last week I was interviewed by Doug Simon, whose company, DS Simon Productions, produces all kinds of video for use by PR and marketing clients, for broadcast and social media use. Doug’s video blog, or vlog, vlogviews.com, features a series of chats with marketing and public relations people, as well as some well-known journalists and businesspeople (Dan Rather, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Stuart Elliott, Richard Edelman, etc.) So when Doug contacted me and asked if he could interview me for his vlog, I was very flattered. The topic he wanted to cover was international public relations, which is one of our foremost specialties. This is an area I know a lot about – on which I’m considered an expert. So I was very confident about the interview. Doug even sent me the questions he planned to ask in advance. So I went blithely to the interview.
OMG. Oh…my…God!
That sums up the feeling I had after the interview was over. I told Doug and the producer who recorded the interview that I thought I hadn’t done well, but they insisted that it really was OK. I left the interview and walked back to my office thinking, “They were just being nice. I made a complete fool of myself. I rambled, I didn’t have any key points to make that were helpful to my business and my answers were way too long.” I told my staff that I had failed miserably and made a mockery of myself and the company. I kept thinking, “Lucy, you idiot, you didn’t listen to the instructions and advice you give your own clients. You deserve to be laughed at!”
Looking back, I realize that I made several key mistakes that made me feel terrible about my interview:
I was way overconfident. Yes, I’m an expert about international business. But I’m not accustomed to having a video camera pointed at me while I’m questioned on the topic.
I didn’t prepare well. I looked at the questions Doug wanted to ask and thought of how I would answer them, but since I was busy, I didn’t practice answering them. As a result, when I was on camera, I rambled on and on.
I didn’t prepare explicit examples that I could use to explain the points I was making, so I sounded vague.
I didn’t develop key messages for myself that I wanted to get across in the video – messages that would help my company in a subtle way.
These are just the types of problems that I coach our clients to avoid. A title of a rock ‘n roll song that was popular when I was a kid sums it all up: “Easier Said Than Done.” Those of us who work in PR telling others how to behave in a TV interview are rarely in the position ourselves to practice what we preach.
On Tuesday, I received a link to the interview and, because I had expressed so much doubt to Doug and his producer about how it had come out, they said they’d wait until I saw and approved it before they made it live. (This is something that a broadcast media outlet would never do, so don’t even think about asking CNN or MSNBC to do this!) When I watched myself on the screen, it wasn’t as bad as I expected. So, I told DS Simon Productions to let the video go live.
Here’s the thing: although I didn’t actually make a fool of myself on camera, I wasted an opportunity to link our conversation about international communications to my company’s experience and services. I was indeed my own worst client.
Now that I’ve pointed out the weaknesses of my own performance on camera for you, take a look at it with a critical eye. I’d like you to learn from my experience!
When I was a kid, there was a TV game show called “Truth or Consequences.” The host asked the guests trivia questions, and if they failed to answer correctly, they would have to pay the consequences, involving embarrassing stunts. In business, as on this old game show, there can be painful consequences for not knowing the truth. Executives at start-ups and from overseas at foreign companies are particularly vulnerable to these myths. So, in an effort to spare some of you from suffering the consequences, just call me Myth-buster, to the rescue, with some important truths about PR.
“Our services/products are so great that we don’t need public relations.” There are a few situations where a new product is able to generate a huge amount of buzz all by itself. For example, when your company already has the brand visibility and the market clout of Nintendo, you can launch the Wii and be fairly confident that it will be widely written and talked about. The same goes for Microsoft and a new version of Windows. But if your company and brand aren’t widely known, you have a big mountain to climb to get the media (traditional and social media) to pay attention. Success in this area isn’t just a matter of hard work, it requires a good strategy, careful planning and experience.
“PR people are publicists; they manage the media.” To me, the word “publicist” evokes a “Mad Men” image of men in suits smoking cigarettes and drinking martinis while they hang out in bars and restaurants with journalists. This is so far from the truth it’s laughable, since journalists don’t have time to hang out in bars and restaurants and neither do PR people, and there are more women than men working in PR these days. PR professionals are consultants (often to senior management) who manage the messages and communicate with (not manage) the media. We also listen to a company’s important constituents to identify key issues and help management communicate constructively with them.
“Any PR is good PR.” Tell that to Tiger Woods, BP and Toyota. Negative media coverage can cost a company billions of dollars – or even destroy a company.
“Using social media is free.” It takes many hours to create a social media plan, put it to work for you and build a social media presence. Is your staff’s time free? What are they neglecting so they can spend hours building a social media presence? Some paid help to jumpstart this effort can actually be economical.
“We aren’t ready for PR – our product is many months away from being launched.” Technology start-ups often feel they should work in stealth mode until they’re ready for market. However, it’s likely there are a couple of other start-ups working on the same breakthrough idea. I’ve seen situations where companies have waited to announce their new technologies and competitors have suddenly and unexpectedly beaten them to market. Even with a better product, they may never catch up if a competitor has already grabbed the limelight. This can be avoided by starting earlier and getting the buzz out that something exciting will soon be unveiled. If you were a buyer, you might not be so ready to jump on the first product to hit the market if you knew that something else is about to come out that could be better.
“Our sales people can reach our target market more cost-efficiently than PR.” PR isn’t a direct sales tool. It’s a tool for building the visibility and the reputation of a product and/or a company (which, over the long term, are prerequisites for sales). Sales people have a lot easier time doing their jobs if their prospects have heard of the company.
“We don’t have any news, so PR wouldn’t work for us.” Public relations is not just about delivering news. It can also be used to bring make the senior executives of a company more prominent as thought leaders who will be consulted and quoted by the media. PR can be used to create news for you, as well, through developing communications programs that will bring attention to your company. For example, a cause marketing campaign might position your company well for both increased sales and media attention.
“What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.” With wire services, email, Twitter and YouTube, what happens in Las Vegas can be broadcast around the world in seconds. This obvious fact should (but doesn’t) stop people from doing or saying things publicly in one country that can be damaging to their companies in other countries. For some reason, business people in countries with languages not widely spoken elsewhere (such as Japan and Korea) often mistakenly believe they’re an exception to this rule. However, news from those countries is translated immediately and distributed to the world at large.
I heard it again today on the radio: small businesses have been hurt most by the Great Recession in the United States. It makes sense. I also read a statistic about the cost per employee for meeting all the governmental bureaucratic paperwork requirements: it’s twice as high for small businesses as for large ones. Rent per square foot is more expensive for smaller spaces than for larger ones. Employer health care costs are much higher for small companies than for large ones. Add to these higher small business costs an attitude by some (misguided) people that “you never get fired for hiring IBM” – an unwillingness to stick their necks out to select a smaller service company that isn’t well-known to top management.
Why is it, then, that despite all of these disadvantages, boutique PR companies have survived, and in some cases thrived, throughout this recession? The answer is that the clients who hire boutiques know they will receive personal, hands-on service from senior professionals. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the firm, the more experience the staff will have.
During the past few years, big communications companies have had to do whatever they could to make quarterly earnings projections. The large multinational PR firms owned by ad agencies have been particularly under pressure due to declining ad revenues. The PR companies in these big conglomerates have had to pull in their belts and lay off large numbers of staff to bring down overall company costs. (I don’t think most of them will admit this – the PR subsidiaries of these conglomerates won’t separate out their annual revenues.) To meet their earnings goals, they’ve taken on very small clients – much, much smaller PR accounts than they would ordinarily agree to handle. I’ve heard about numerous instances over the last couple of years when the mega communications companies took on $5,000 per month clients. This is lower than the level that my boutique firm will usually consider; it is unprofitable for us. With the much higher overhead of bigger firms, their minimums are usually more like $20,000 per month. There’s no way they can make a profit on $5,000 per month business. Very young 20-somethings are given the responsibility for this kind of work with little or no oversight, and after six months or so the clients wise up and leave. But in the meantime, the big agency has collected some fees.
We hear about this kind of unfortunate neglect often when we talk to smaller company marketing executives. Those who aren’t very experienced in working with public relations agencies sometimes become very cynical after this kind of experience and hesitate to ever use external public relations services again.
By contrast, some corporate communications and marketing executives with the wisdom of experience have turned to boutique PR firms as a solution to their needs during these tough times.
Inc magazine columnist Norm Brodsky wrote in a recent column that during a recession, companies should increase expenditures for sales and marketing. This is sound advice, because you have to concentrate even more on building your customer base when customers are spending less. Brodsky says the companies that follow that strategy are the ones that will come out on top when there’s a turn-around.
Finding the budget to increase expenditures for sales and marketing (or to increase expenditures for anything) isn’t easy. One way to do it is to turn to smaller suppliers with lower overheads, suppliers that can provide more service for a lower portion of the budget.
I expect to see faster growth now throughout the PR industry for both boutiques and the larger firms. As the economy turns around, the large firms won’t even look at the really small client accounts, leaving more on the table for the small firms. Meanwhile, the companies (some of them large ones) that have turned to boutique agencies looking for cost savings have now realized that they get a much better bang for the buck and more experienced professionals working with them when they hire boutiques.
Over the past few years most industry non-profit membership organizations have suffered financially and lost members. However, the new PR industry group for boutique PR firms that I helped found about three years ago has grown each year. When it was launched in 2008, PR Boutiques International had 12 members in five countries. It now has nearly 30 members in nine countries (about to jump to 13 countries with new members in process).
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the growing importance of public relations due to the ascendency of social media, which fits best into a public relations framework. For us small boutique PR firm owners, who have to put up with the same hassles and expenses as other small businesses, it’s a very heady feeling to realize that our industry’s day, and our day as boutique owners, has arrived.
This is the worst week I’ve ever spent in Tokyo. That goes for me and about 125 million other people.
I’d planned to be here and had meetings set up for a long time, and I was already in Bangkok about to come here when the earthquake hit. The people I had meetings with in Tokyo let me know they were ready, willing and able to meet, despite the earthquake. I was already in Asia, so rather than return to the U.S., I came to Tokyo as planned last weekend. For readers who don’t know much about me, I lived in Japan for a few years in the late ‘80s and have been here countless times on business trips. However, the past six days since my arrival are an entirely new experience for me.
By now, you’ve all read reports of the 9.0 earthquake, seen video footage of the tsunami wave that reached as high as 60 feet and wiped out entire villages, and you can’t help hearing about the danger posed by tsunami damage to four nuclear reactors at a Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) plant. Aside from growing levels of radiation near the plant, one of the biggest dangers here is a communications problem. It started with TEPCO under-stating the problems with the reactors to the Japanese government, which then repeated what TEPCO said and (unknowingly, I believe) under-stated the dangers to the Japanese public. The public has no trust in TEPCO anyway – the company has been caught in lies to the public before on numerous occasions, including safety reports that were falsified for years and forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president. Since the government has a long history of inaction against the company’s wrong-doing in the past, there is also a low level of trust in the government. A Bloomberg article today says, “Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.”
I can’t help thinking about the role that consistently good, honest communication plays in creating trust in institutions. Too many Japanese government institutions have ignored this basic principal of public relations, and the people of Japan are paying a high price for that now.
About 400,000 people who live near the plants have been evacuated. First we were told this was a precaution. Now we are told this is a necessary health measure. The “danger area” was defined by the Japanese government as within 20 km of the plant (about 12 ½ miles). However, the American government now defines the danger area as within 50 miles of the plant, based on its data collection flights over the area. This also causes one to speculate: are the Japanese authorities still trying to downplay the danger, or is the American government’s calculation unnecessarily conservative and just feeding fear and anxiety? The American media’s headlines are alarmist: “Frantic Repairs Go On at Plant as Japan Raises Severity of Crisis,” writes the New York Times today. This sells papers, but also helps increase the stress levels.
Because the power companies and government feared the nuclear reactor shut-downs would cause a severe power outage, planned blackouts began early this week in and around Tokyo for several hours at a time, rolling from one area to another, to cut usage. This has never been done before in Japan. The plans for these electrical power outages were not communicated well by the power company. Nobody was sure when or where power would be cut, and commuters feared being stranded again as they were a week ago in Tokyo when trains stopped running after the earthquake. Some of the Tokyo subways and trains are running slowly due to cancelled trains and/or reduced service, both of which are unpredictable. (Anyone who has been to Japan knows that this is truly extraordinary, since trains generally run on time within seconds here.)
Yesterday I took a train during the evening rush hour that was packed tighter than I’ve ever seen any subway train, either here or in New York: I could feel the wallet of the person next to me digging into my side. At each station we came to, there was a sea of people on the platforms waiting to get onto a train.
There is no lack of cooperation or effort by the public in saving power: many companies sent people home early yesterday to save electricity, and a lot of workers have been told to work from home. Lights have been dimmed in buildings and public places, escalators have been shut off and thermostats turned down.
Fear of gasoline shortages has actually helped create shortages. I heard that the line to buy gas was a half-mile long at some gas stations and others had run out of gas and were closed. Gas rationing had to be instituted, and the government announced it has ordered oil companies to release their reserves in order to relieve shortages.
Despite pleas by the prime minister for calm, food, water and batteries have disappeared from the supermarket shelves here in Tokyo. People fear another big quake in addition to the nuclear crisis, so they’re hoarding food, bottled water and batteries against the possibility of another natural disaster or a man-made nuclear disaster. A business colleague said he was going from one 7-11 shop to another looking for bread, rice, milk and other staples because his wife said she couldn’t buy any of these items at stores in their neighborhood.
A couple of days ago I heard the local governor in the area hit hardest by the tsunami being interviewed by NHK, the public television network. He said the biggest problem after the lack of gasoline is inconsistent or vague communications from the government and electric company spokespeople about the dangers from a nuclear plant explosion. People just want to know what’s going on. Even if what the government is telling them is the truth, the government doesn’t have enough credibility to get people to believe it. As a result, there are all kinds of rumors floating around about the danger posed by the reactors.
There is no violence or looting. Despite these extraordinary circumstances, people have remained calm (at least on the surface), lined up politely at the grocery store cash registers and in gas station lines, and waited in orderly queues for taxis. One sees the typical Japanese dedication to work and company everywhere: I heard about people walking for four hours on Friday after the earthquake to get home from work, and then coming on foot or by bicycle to get back to work again on Monday. The prime minister has asked for cooperation and patience, and that’s a perfect description of the behavior displayed by the Japanese people.
Geological experts have predicted continual aftershocks that could go on for months or even years. I’ve lost count of the small earthquakes I’ve felt. I’ve experienced four or five fairly large ones. According to scientists, there’s a high possibility of another very large earthquake occurring before the end of this week, but that possibility diminishes as time passes. And the end of the week is just about here.
I’m going home tomorrow, luckily for me, but people here will continue to live with the stress of the nuclear crisis and the sorrow about the tremendous loss of life for a long time to come.
Just like everyone else, CEOs sometimes need input and support from colleagues. While employees can give excellent counsel as well as support, there are times when a CEO has an issue (s)he only feels comfortable discussing with peers.
Participants at the PR Boutiques International Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.
I’m fortunate to belong to two groups of CEOs that are wonderful sources of objective input and advice, as well as encouragement and friendship. One is CEO Trust, with chapters in New York and Connecticut (so far) that have members in many industries. The other is PR Boutiques International, a network of independent PR firms that I co-founded four years ago. There are about 30 small PR companies in the PRBI network (so far). Both of these growing organizations are special and valuable to me for different reasons.
Those of you who work in larger companies can go to colleagues or bosses for input and support when you want to talk out an important decision or need information about how other companies handle a particular issue. CEOs, whether they head large or small companies, sometimes just can’t do that.
CEO Trust is a group of CEOs who have joined together to provide friendship and advice to each other. Because membership is only granted if the executive shares important business values with the group, the members have a lot in common even though they come from different industries and professional backgrounds. This creates a warm, supportive environment.
PR Boutiques International member firms are also vetted very carefully for important business values as well as a high level of professional service. All provide expert, experienced client service. We support each other in a myriad of ways: I can tap the resources of an overseas firm on behalf of a client, or bring in a member firm for extra arms and legs on a big project, for local help with an event or with media relations. We also have a firm owner Google Group where we share ideas, pick each others’ brains and ask for input on issues and challenges we face.
I just returned from a weekend with PRBI firm owners from around the country and the world at the group’s annual meeting in Washington. We talked for two days straight about marketing, selling, client service, better ways to run our agencies, and ways we can work together so that two plus two will equal more than four. We brought in two industry consultants, George Rosenberg and Ken Jacobs, both industry “sages,” to stimulate our thinking, give us new ways to look at our jobs and remind us of easy-to-avoid but crucial agency owner responsibilities. Here are a few of the words of wisdom they left with us:
Satisfying our clients is not sufficient; only superior client service is good enough. An industry survey showed that 75-78 percent of clients who changed agencies last year said they were satisfied. To be consistently successful, we must surpass expectations, deliver the unexpected and take the extra, extra step to wow our clients.
“People [you work with] may not remember what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.”
When it comes to our services, budget is always a difficult hurdle; a better way to discuss costs is to view them as investment.
What clients want to spend is not as relevant as the amount we know it will take to do a good job for them.
The definition of a good client: one that respects us, values our work, knows their goals, gives us direct access to the top decision-makers in their organization and can afford to pay us appropriately.
Research results announced last month by B2B Magazineshow that 93 percent of B2B marketers use social media in some form, but only 25 percent of them measure the return on investment (ROI) of their social media marketing efforts. To me, this isn’t that surprising, despite the mantra from C-suites everywhere for ROI metrics. The fact is, most people feel it is too difficult, not affordable, or not practical to measure social media results.
Even so, the discussion about measurement of PR results online, and of online influence, gets louder all the time. This topic has become more confusing as it grows more complex, and is especially difficult for small and medium-size businesses without large internal resources and budgets for communications. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve exchanged emails about online PR measurement with several colleagues and clients, both here in the U.S. and abroad, who want affordable and practical methods for measuring online PR results.
In an effort to organize useful information on this topic for both my own sake and to help readers of this blog, I’ll summarize some of the resources available to help with online PR measurement as well as current thinking about it by industry leaders.
Why measure online activity?
How do you measure online PR activity? A lot of marketing consultants, software companies, authors and conference sponsors are making money answering this question! However, before it can be answered, you have to ask why you’re measuring. Companies measure online PR activity to obtain a couple of types of information:
*The ROI from online PR
*Data about online PR and promotion programs that will help improve those programs
*Data about trends, market needs and competitors’ activities that will help in sales and marketing decision-making
Barcelona Measurement Principles
A few years ago, the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (www.amecorg.com) was formed as the global trade organization and professional institute for agencies and practitioners who provide media evaluation and communication research. Last year IAMEC published “The Barcelona Measurement Principles,” the result of several international public relations associations working together to come up with seven universal principles of PR measurement. (The bullet points below these points are mine.)
1. Importance of goal-setting and measurement
What to measure depends on the goals one sets for online activity
2. Measuring the effect on outcomes is preferred to measuring outputs
Example: the number of Facebook fans accumulated over a certain time period is much less important than the effect Facebook fans have on sales or on brand reputation
3. The effect on business results can and should be measured where possible
4. Media measurement requires quantity and quality
Example: the number of Tweets about a product aren’t as important as what those Tweets say
5. AVEs [advertising value equivalents] are not the value of public relations
PR agencies and in-house departments used to provide ROI numbers by figuring out what each piece of media coverage would have cost if it were a paid ad. This is not appropriate, since advertising and so-called “earned” media via public relations are apples and oranges, serve different purposes and should not be compared to each other.
6. Social media can and should be measured
7. Transparency and replicability are paramount to sound measurement
What to measure
Here are a few examples of what you could measure to help determine the ROI from your online programs:
Company website visits coming from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, a blog or other focus of online PR activity
Coupon use tracked to a specific online program
Change in awareness of a company or its products or services, measured with a survey
Both quantity and quality of online media coverage (quality = tone of articles, blog posts or Tweets; delivery of company’s key messages)
Search engine rankings pre- and post-campaign for online campaigns
Resources
6.Katie Delahaye Paine, who had one of the first PR measurement companies and is a communications measurement guru, wrote “Measure What Matters: Online Tools for Understanding Customers, Social Media, Engagement, and Key Relationships,” available from Amazon.
7.The Institute for Public Relations, a non-profit industry organization that encourages research about measurement, publishes papers and articles on this topic on its website
9.Sinickas Communications is a company that provides consulting services on PR measurement as well as offering training workshops for do-it-yourselfers.
10.You may find this article about measurement useful. It’s written by a former accountant in the UK who is evidently about to launch a new PR measurement tool
Tools
Here are a few online tools that measure specific types of online activity:
11.Klout Score –a new tool (free) that measures the online influence of an individual (or company). Klout’s software uses 35 variables on Facebook and Twitter to measure True Reach, Amplification Probability, and Network Score. Rumor is that LinkedIn variables will be added shortly.
12.Twitalzer – similar to Klout, provides an analysis of the Twitter impact, engagement and influence of a brand or a person.
13.Twitter Counter – tracks the number of followers you or a brand have over time.
14.Hubspot offers a free Website Grader that scores your blog or website on various criteria and lets you compare your site with competitors’.
15.Compete has a free tool for measuring the number of unique visitors to a website.
16.Radian6is a comprehensive social media tracking and measurement tool that was recently acquired by Salesforce.com.
I hope these are useful to some of you. If you have a good tool or resource not listed here (especially if it’s free!), please comment and let the rest of us know about it.
I am passing along to you some of the blog posts and articles I’ve read recently that have made me think, “I wish I had written that!” If you have time to try a couple of these links, please share your thoughts in the comment section.
Slate:“Awsum Shoes: Is It Ethical to Fix Grammatical and Spelling Errors in Internet Reviews?” Turns out that good grammar and proper spelling do count. An NYU Stern School of Business professor’s research shows that well-written reviews sell more product than poorly-written ones, even if the well-written reviews are negative. Some companies have started correcting the reviews on their websites.
PC Magazine: “Facebook Hired PR Firm to Run Smear Campaign Against Google”The PR firm hired was Burson Marsteller, one of the biggest PR companies in the world (and most expensive). Burson has its company’s code of conduct on its website, which includes the statement, “We are committed to acting ethically in all aspects of our business and to maintaining the highest standards of honesty and integrity.” Proves the point that bigger doesn’t equate with better.
Children in Beijing dress up as Colonel Sanders at a store opening in China
Jerusalem Post:“Success fees’ may not lead to success for Israeli firms”The author, a consultant in the U.S. to Israeli companies, says that they’re averse to marketing and often spend little effort marketing the world-class products they’ve labored hard to develop. Israeli companies aren’t the only ones that act as if somehow their products will market themselves.
Then there are the companies from other parts of the world that do come to the U.S. with plans for marketing, but the plans are the same ones they used back home and don’t work in the U.S. market. (Plenty of American companies have done this overseas. There’s the story about Kentucky Fried Chicken taking its U.S. ad campaign and simply translating it for use everywhere else. If it works here, it should be fine, right? So “Finger lickin’ good” was translated, and the ads in China told the local citizens: ”Eat your fingers off.” Despite this, KFC is a huge hit in China!)
About a year ago, a European entrepreneur came to our office and told us about his plans for entering the New Yorker market. He had a household gadget that homeowners could install to save money as well as energy, and he told us that he intended to test market his product in New York.
After listening to a few comments we made about the city’s diverse demographics, he realized that New York was probably the worst place in the U.S. he could test the appeal of his product.
Unlike other parts of the U.S., and other countries in the world, New York City’s population is extremely
The Big Apple is actually a fruit salad.
diverse ethnically, racially, financially, linguistically and religiously. If your company is planning to launch a new product in the U.S., you must research the demographics of the population region by region if you want to target your marketing appropriately.
How much do you think you know about New York? Try this quick quiz. We will put the email addresses of everyone who gets all the answers right into a hat and draw one winner of a $100 gift certificate to Amazon. The answers will be available next week for all to see. (If anyone has difficulty accessing the survey from this link, let me know [lsiegel at bridgeny dot com] and I’ll email you a link.)
Apparently even the New Yorkers among our readers don’t know the city all that well, because not one person got all of the answers right on last week’s survey about New York demographics. So, there are no winners for this contest.
I know you’re dying to have the answers to the questions, so here they are:
What is the largest European ethnic group in New York?
a) French
b) Irish c) Italian holds first place
d) German
2. What percent of the city’s population is foreign-born?
a) 12%
b) 23% c) 36% is the right number
d) 56%
3. Which of the following statements about New York are TRUE?
This is where everyone tripped up. ALL OF THE FOLLOWING ARE TRUE!
a) The Puerto Rican population in New York is the largest outside Puerto Rico
b) There are more Jews living in New York City than in Jerusalem.
c) The New York metropolitan area has the largest Chinese population outside Asia.
4. Which of the following statements about New York are TRUE? ALL OF THE FOLLOWING STATEMENTS ARE TRUE!
a) While the percent of Americans who own their homes (versus renting) is about two-thirds, in New York City the numbers are almost the reverse; only 30% own, and 70% rent.
b) New York City’s population is larger than 39 U.S. states.
c) In Queens the median income among black households is greater than the median income of white households.
5. Which of the following statements about New York are TRUE? ALL OF THE FOLLOWING ARE TRUE!
a) In Manhattan there is currently a baby boom which is unique for a U.S. city: it is caused by affluent families with median incomes above $300,000 per year.
b) Manhattan, (New York County), is the richest county in the United States.
c) The disparity between rich and poor is greater in Manhattan than in any other county in the US.
In my last post I gave a short example of why this stuff is important: the manufacturer of a household product from Europe had a product that was a big hit across Europe and wanted to launch it here in the U.S. Without doing any homework about the characteristics of one market versus another, the company decided to start selling the product in New York City. If sales went well, they would expand across the country.
However, the product was one that only someone who owns his or her home would be likely to buy, since it was an item that would be used to upgrade the home – to make a capital improvement. See the answer 4 a. above. The number of homeowners versus renters in New York is the reverse of the national norm. People who rent an apartment don’t spend the money to make capital improvements on their homes. Therefore, using the New York area as a test market would provide this company with a big negative bias against the product just because of the demographics.
Some months back, I wrote a blog post about why I enjoy working with entrepreneurs. I myself am a serial entrepreneur and I get a real charge about working with others who have the same mind-set. Most of the time I love having my own company. On my best days, I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for owning a small company and being my own boss. However, there are other days when being an entrepreneur really sucks, and an executive spot in a big company sounds mighty attractive. Here are five things I love about being an entrepreneur, and five that I hate:
The obvious number one benefit is freedom to do what I want. If there’s a potential client I really want to work with, even if the fee level is lower than our normal fees, it’s up to me. No big agency accounting department or CFO can tell me not to do it. By the same token, if a particular client is so difficult to work with that it makes everyone miserable, I can also decide, “Im mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” (a quote from the old movie, Network, that those of you who were alive in the ’70s will remember). I’ve made both of these decisions at times.
Every success is more exciting because our small team knows that WE , and we alone, made it happen.
I set the rules and if I want to, I can break them.
I don’t have to waste time or energy on office politics.
I’m working for my own benefit, not for the benefit of an amorphous group of shareholders.
I’m no longer dealing with the big company bureaucracy that used to try my patience and sanity.
Now for the debit side of the entrepreneurship balance sheet, and some tips on how to overcome them:
My income can fluctuate a lot. When business is good, I can pay myself pretty well. But during hard times, cash flow difficulties and client cutbacks have a direct effect on my pocketbook. I come last on the list of payments to be made, below employees, rent, utilities and other necessities. The ways I have been able to deal with this are to plan ahead very carefully on both my own and the company’s expenses, and to be tough about getting paid on time. I also bill before a month of work starts, and not after it’s over.
I traded company bureaucracy for government bureaucracy (such as the IRS and the NY State Labor Department). I also have a never-ending line-up of administrative tasks that I have to handle as the owner of the company. I’ve dealt with this by outsourcing as much of it as I can afford to specialists, and asking the staff to help with some tasks.
One person who doesn’t contribute appropriately to the team has a huge effect on a small staff. At a larger company, sometimes incompetent people manage to last a lot longer than they should because they can hide behind co-workers. There’s no place to hide on the small staff of an entrepreneurial company. There are two ways to handle this: hire very carefully, check references and give potential employees rigorous tests to determine if they have what it takes. And, when I realize that I made a mistake, I try to correct it as quickly as possible.
It’s lonely at the top. This is a cliche, but cliches usually have a basis in fact. The best way I’ve found to overcome this feeling is to be in close touch with other PR industry entrepreneurs. I helped found a network of small public relations companies, PR Boutiques International. If I want advice, I go to the other company heads in the group and ask their opinions. In addition, I belong to Public Relations Society of America’s Counselors Academy, which also helps fill this need.
Long work hours are a fact of life for an entrepreneur. What I do to compensate is enjoy my time off and not think about work every waking moment when I’m out of the office. I also prefer to take work home and do it there rather that stay in the office until all hours. At least I can work in my pajamas and slippers.
It can take a long time to build credibility. Larger, older companies have spent years and lots of money to do this. For the first few years, an entrepreneurial venture has to prove that it’s just as capable as bigger companies and that it’s not going to disappear. What got us over the credibility phase was doing lots of PR for the company and stressing the deep experience and capabilities that most of the staff members offer. Our message was (and is) that we offer experienced, capable professionals who actually do client work.
Those of you who are fellow entrepreneurs can certainly add to this list. What do you love, and what do you hate?
I’ve written before on this blog about the danger to our society from the huge payroll cuts at news gathering operations, due to the current transition of traditional media to online “new” media. The cuts in staffing have affected the amount of news that can be covered at the very least, if not the quality of the reporting. With papers such as the Washington Post eliminating their local bureaus (the Post shut down all of its U.S. bureaus and now covers the whole country from its headquarters in Washington, D.C.), readers only get second-hand reporting of news outside the region in which the media outlet is located. Newspapers and broadcast news operations nationwide are depending on re-reporting news from local media.
However, according to a lengthy new report released by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the amount of news coverage at the local level has fallen off sharply, also, due to drastic cutbacks by local broadcasters and newspapers. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, speaking on June 10th at Columbia School of Journalism about this report, commented that the biggest challenge to journalism in theU.S. is “the disruptive impact the Internet and economic pressures have had on local news gathering.” He noted that newspapers have cut back on staff, some have even shut down, and many local broadcasters also have cut back on news budgets. He said, “…Many stations have no news at all…This matters, because if citizens don’t get local news and information, the health of our democracy suffers. Journalism provides a vital check against corruption by those with power. The less quality local reporting we have, the less likely we are to learn about government misdeeds, schools that fail children, hospitals that mistreat patients or factories that pollute the water.”
I’ve seen discussions online among journalists about the big hole left in their coverage of the news and their fear that it will be filled with news releases supplied by public relations people. You’d think that as a public relations professional this would make me happy, but it doesn’t. It isn’t a healthy way for the media to operate, and it will ultimately result in a further weakening of traditional media.
Some people feel that so-called “citizen journalists” will take the place of reporters who have been laid off, and that they’ll do just as good a job, if not better. But self-proclaimed “citizen journalists” can’t replace trained professionals. For starters, readers can’t assess the accuracy of their reports. At least journalists working for media outlets have been interviewed and chosen by seasoned professionals, and their work is scrutinized on a daily basis by those who hired them!
Last weekend on an NPR segment about the new FCC report, I heard an interesting observation about the effect that Google search algorithms are having on the news people consume online. It turns out that Google’s software works in a similar way to Amazon’s and other retail sites’ search engines. When you buy something – or even search for something – on Amazon, the site’s software makes assumptions that you’re interested in that product, and the next time you log into Amazon, you’re presented with suggestions for similar items to buy. Google’s search engine remembers your searches and the clicks you make on search results to select websites. If you search for or visit Fox News, the next time you’re looking for news, the search engine will push Fox News as well as other conservative news sources to the top of your search results. Similarly, if you visit the New York Times or the Huffington Post, you’ll be directed towards other liberal-leaning news sources. Therefore, Google’s search mechanism in effect reinforces people’s opinions and biases. When I do a search on Google, the results I get can be drastically different from what someone else gets, even if the search is done at the same moment in time.
This built-in news bias, when added to the dearth of reporting at the local level, is very worrisome. No wonder politics in theU.S.has become so polarized, with the distance between red and blue, left and right, growing bigger all the time.
Last week a news item about the State of Washington was all over the travel trade media, and was reported by AP and on National Public Radio, as well.
The Washington state government announced that it was eliminating the budget it uses to promote the state as a tourist destination and attract visitors. Yet, according to the NPR report, tourism is the fastest growing industry in the world.
When asked what he thought about this, the head of Colorado’s state tourism organization laughed and said, “Frankly, I think it’s an opportunity for Colorado. If you don’t tell your story, people won’t show up.”
He couldn’t have said it better. There’s a lesson for organizations that have cut, or are thinking of cutting, their PR budgets. Telling your story is one of the two most important functions of public relations (the other one is listening). If they don’t hear your story, customers will listen to someone else’s.
It’s very simple, really: if you don’t tell your story, people won’t show up.
New York Times op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote a column last week headlined, “The Start-up of You” in which he described some of the factors behind the persistently high U.S. unemployment rate. He concluded there is something different about the unemployment we’re seeing today from high unemployment in the past. The companies with the biggest growth are Silicon Valley technology giants such as Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. Yet, compared to yesterday’s leading companies, these new corporate giants aren’t giant employers: they don’t hire many people. The rest of the business world has cut back drastically on hiring, depending instead on outsourcing, using robotics and deploying software.
Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, wrote in this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek, “What took 1,000 people to churn out in 1950—the dawn of a golden age for blue-collar work—now requires about 185, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.”
We are hearing from economists that many large companies are making excellent profits now. They can afford to hire, but they’ve learned how to get by without hiring. In addition, Wartzman wrote that a third of the nation’s joblessness results from a discrepancy between the skills employers seek and those of the workers available (figures he attributed to Narayana Kocherlakota, the president of the Minneapolis Fed).
This “jobless recovery” has created a very unstable employment environment. The spoils go to those who can’t be easily replaced by outsourcing or robotics. Those who are irreplaceable are “people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever,” Friedman wrote. He was not only talking about young people fresh out of college, he was referring to everyone looking for a job.
Friedman quoted from a soon-to-be-published book by one of Silicon Valley’s star entrepreneurs, Reid Garrett Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and on the board of Zynga and Mozilla: “…You should approach career strategy the same way an entrepreneur approaches starting a business…For entrepreneurs, it’s differentiate or die – that now goes for all of us.”
Differentiate or die. That’s exactly what we in public relations and marketing tell our clients. We had better learn to apply this maxim to our own marketing and communications careers, because it’s not just blue collar jobs that are disappearing. A few years ago New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote that when she was in Pasadena, Calif., she was told by a publisher of a local news website that the company planned to outsource reporting positions to India. About a year ago I heard from an extremely reliable PR industry source that at least one of the very large international public relations companies was outsourcing media relations to India, also.
Both of these were shocking revelation to me, since I firmly believe that local reporting can only be done well by people in the community who understand local issues and attitudes. I also believe that a good job of media relations requires a clear understanding of both a client’s business goals and of the mind-set of American journalists.
An employee at a big international management consulting company told me that his firm has two New York offices – one in New York, and one in India. I’ve also read that some medical centers have outsourced part of the work that local physicians used to do to doctors in India. They read the results of CAT scans and other such tests while doctors in the U.S. sleep.
If local news reporting, PR, management consulting and medical jobs can be outsourced to India, then just about any job can be.
I began to think about what kind of upbringing best prepares people to think critically and constantly reinvent their jobs. Certainly, growing up in an authoritarian culture can’t be helpful. Parents and teachers are stifling, not rewarding critical thinking when they tell children, as many do, “It’s not your place to question me, you do what I tell you!”. Quite a different message is communicated by adults who treat children with respect, feel that they deserve to be listened to just as much as adults, and are comfortable allowing them to deviate from the norm.
One formative experience that provides a lot of practice in adapting is spending some time working overseas. Those who learn another language and experience first-hand the cultural differences that affect business style not only differentiate themselves, they also learn that there is more than one “right way” to do something.
Marketing to the 18-25 age bracket, often called the Millennials or Gen-Y, can be a tricky task. Money can often be a touchy subject for broke college kids who live on Ramen noodles when they’ve used up the monthly balance in their campus meal plans. On the other hand, for the first time in their lives, they have free use of a debit card. Regardless, if a product or a service is represented in just the right manner, this age group definitely has the potential to bite the bait.
When trying to reach university and graduate students, the most effective marketing strategy is to go through the university itself. If the university deems something good enough to sell or worthy enough to represent, then the average student would likely find it automatically credible. Coming from someone who just graduated from college, I know from recent experience that students tend to put a lot of trust in their schools and have faith in the legitimacy of organizations, products and services that are presented on school grounds. This is true whether they are approached by a company that’s recruiting for entry-level positions, a product that will make their lives a little easier or a charity that’s seeking donations.Many marketing approaches can be used successfully, such as ads around the dorms and throughout campus, an informational stand in the school union or an email offer through the university’s email system. One of these approaches will be likely to catch students’ eyes and at the very least, allow them to consider the offer.
One campaign that sticks out in my mind is Victoria’s Secret’s PINK campaign at my school, Binghamton University. Victoria’s Secret launched a new clothing collection, part of their PINK line, geared towards teenagers and young 20s. The new collection was tailor-made for each school and included jerseys, sweatshirts, sweatpants and pajamas. However, in order for a school to be selected to have this new line of university clothing, the school would have to have more student votes to add the collection than other schools. Throughout the contest, there was an overload of school-based emails urging students to vote, as well as flyers around the student union and even PINK student representatives tracking down other students to vote to have the clothing line introduced at Binghamton. This school-wide campaign was also a way to teach students about promotion, marketing and public relations through a fun and rewarding learning style. The campaign was highly successful for Victoria’s Secret, since the campaign was ever-present for nearly a month, and students felt good in the end because Binghamton actually was chosen to be a part of the clothing line.
People in the 18-25 age bracket tend to be “early adapters” who are always up on the latest technology and are knowledgeable about current trends. They like to be among the first to buy or try a product. That’s why creating a buzz via social media about something new and innovative can be worthwhile.
Student representatives are also effective. If students see one of their peers endorsing something, they are more likely to be attracted to it rather than hearing a pitch from someone they perceive to be “an old man in a suit.”
Once an idea catches on, it spreads like wildfire. Marketers who try to think like students are more likely to be successful in making this happen.
I receive several hundred emails each day, many related to PR, marketing and corporate communications. That’s the bad news, because it’s a major time sink, I simply can’t read them all and my inbox is never empty because I’m a hoarder of emails with news and information I would like to read later (yet probably won’t get to). The good news is that I get immensely helpful news about marketing and PR without having to search for it.
Comparative Analysis via Twitter Behavior
Here are 10 examples of recent in-coming news that I found helpful, educational or eye-opening (or all three):
1. You Are What You Tweet: this is an infographic I created as a test of a not-yet-launched online service called Visual.ly that will create infographics from information you provide. (Each time you click on the first link above, you’ll see a comparison of my use of Twitter with a celebrity’s – a different one each time. You will see the software’s not-necessarily true conclusion that my Tweets are totally uninteresting compared to Jimmy Fallon’s, Brittany Spears’s and Conan O’Brian’s! Hmmph.) I was intrigued with this and Googled “Infographics tools,” only to find that there are several chart- and graph-makers, cool tools, but Visual.ly sounds like it will be really super. By the way, infographics is a new buzzword in the communications industry that I see as a fancy word for “charts.” Below items #2 and #3 refer to infographics, also.
2. The CMO’s Guide to the Social Landscape: this is an infographic from CMO.com about nine major social media channels, distinguishing what’s good and what’s bad about each of them from a marketing viewpoint. It also shows how each site dovetails with customer communication, brand exposure, traffic to a company’s website and search engine optimization (SEO).
3. What CMOs Want in an Agency: this chart shows the results of research done by The Horn Group and Kelton Research, called “The CEO Challenge.” I found it interesting that two-thirds of CMOs surveyed said they prefer working with smaller agencies. Also noteworthy is the bar chart showing that “ability to execute” is twice as important to a CMO as cost.
5. Doug Simon announced that D.S. Simon, his video production company, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. In a video clip on his vlog, he said,“It’s not what you’ve done in the past, it’s what you do moving forward [that counts], and that’s why you have to be continuously getting better.” Not a bad piece of advice. He’s following his own advice by opening a new office in Washington, D.C.
6. Clifford Mintz, founder of BioCrowd, a social media site developed specifically for bioscience professionals, wrote a blog post for BlogNotions, a life sciences blog, advocating the increased use of social media at scientific and medical conferences. He believes that conference organizers in this field try to control the flow of information from the meetings too tightly, and social media can be used to loosen that control and get more information out to both the public and conference attendees more quickly and efficiently.
7. A story from a member of the marketing group I belong to, MENG, on how closely brand positioning and pricing are connected to each other. The writer gave a concrete example of how low pricing negatively affected the branding of an upscale hotel.
8. An op-ed piece in Bulldog Reporter’s Daily Dog by Guy Gilpin, the founder of Mother Tongue Writers, noting that many major global brands with a presence on Facebook don’t think beyond English. This includes Coca Cola, which has a Facebook page but posts in English only.
9. An announcement from LinkedIn that its search tool, Company Buzz, has been turned into a new service called LinkedIn Signal. (Since I’d never heard of Company Buzz, I guess I won’t miss it.) You can use this app to search people’s LinkedIn updates and find out what’s being said about you, your competitors, trends, etc.
10. A quote in Forbes.com from St. Louis PR pro Aaron Perlut about Congress’s PR failures. He called Congress the “world’s biggest and worst PR machine” and wrote, “[Members of Congress] continue to make the same PR mistake after mistake in scuffle after scuffle, disenfranchising the very swing voters they wish to ultimately sway.”
When they’re trying to get your business, many PR companies will not tell you that:
1) Your company may be better off spending a very limited budget on another form of communications (such as direct marketing or online advertising) instead of hiring you. PR is not always the best solution to meet communications needs.
2) They don’t actually have media contacts in your area. Media contacts are ephemeral these days, with the high rate of layoffs in the journalism world. Chances are high that half the journalists a PR person has worked with in the recent past are no longer with the same media outlet, and/or may not be covering the same area. Agencies use media databases to find the right journalists to target, anyway, and personal contacts among journalists are overrated. Either you have something worthy of being covered (and it doesn’t matter if you have contacts because the media will respond whether they know you or not), or you don’t (and contacts are unlikely to help because the media won’t cover something with no news value whether they know you or not).
3) What you want them to do is really not what you need from them. Clients should look to PR companies who will consult with them and develop strategies, rather than just do as they’re told. After all, aren’t you paying for expertise?
4) Your expectations and goals for PR are too high. Of course you think your company and products are media- and buzz-worthy, but it’s very hard for you to be objective. It’s not at all unusual to hear a prospective client say, “We want to be in the Wall Street Journal [or on the ‘Today’ Show, or to create a record-breaking buzz about our product on Facebook]. It’s certainly possible even for startups and small companies to reach that kind of goal, but it’s not probable. Rather than managing your expectations from the outset, some PR firms will keep quiet and not tell you that kind of exposure may be very unlikely for your company. They figure they’ll educate you after you’ve signed the contract.
5) You don’t have enough budget to “move the needle.” In every situation, there’s a minimum amount of budget that’s necessary to get good PR results. Rather than telling you that you’re budget is inadequate, some PR companies will take whatever you can pay for as long as you’ll pay it, until you realize that you’re not getting the results you need. This isn’t a smart way to do business, because the client will assume that it’s the agency’s inadequacy that’s to blame, and not their own lack of resources.
6) Your company has to spend time and effort working with the PR firm to make a success of PR. For starters, the agency PR team has to be briefed thoroughly on a regular basis. It isn’t possible for an agency to do great PR for your company if your executives won’t make themselves available for interviews, or don’t get back to the agency in a timely way to answer media questions.
The way public relations firms bill for their services seems a mystery to many clients. Since mysteries in billing are neither good nor necessary, I’m going to answer questions we frequently get from clients about this. There are some variations in billing methods by different PR companies, but the basic principals are the same. Varying too much from these general billing rules is unwise for any PR company that wants to stay in business.
1. How do you charge for your services?
We charge based on the length of time it takes to do the work, and the level of difficulty of our services. I assign an hourly billing rate to each staff member at Bridge Global Strategies. The rates are based on the salary and amount of experience of each individual.
2. What are your hourly billing rates and how do you come up with them?
Our hourly rates range from $120/hour to $350/hour. We do not charge clients for the time spent by interns. (This is not at all universal, since many firms do charge for intern time. In addition, we pay our interns, which is not widespread in the PR industry.). We take into consideration the tasks that are being performed and not just the usual hourly rate of the person performing them. For example, sometimes I do work that someone at a much lower level could do. We have a small staff, and if more hands-on work is necessary to meet a deadline, everyone pitches in. I don’t charge my usual hourly rate of $350/hour for lower-level work.
I learned from my management experience at other agencies how to calculate hourly rates so they will cover overhead, pay salaries and leave some profit after our expenses are paid. Not every hour spent by our staff is billable to a client. We have to allocate time for administrative tasks, training, holidays and vacations, etc. All of this non-billable time has to be calculated into our billing rates along with our rent, equipment and other costs that are not billed directly to clients. We are able to charge lower rates than larger PR companies because we don’t support the kind of overhead they do. Bigger agencies have layers of non-revenue-producing staff that we don’t. Public companies have to set aside revenues to pay shareholder dividends.
3. These rates sound like law firm rates! Why are they so high? We could do it ourselves for a lot less.
We hear this sometimes from people who have never worked with a PR firm before. Our rates are not high. Larger agencies in the northeast of the U.S. charge considerably more for people at every level. (And law firms charge $600 or $700/hour and up for partners’ time and a couple hundred dollars an hour for newly minted lawyers.) As for doing PR internally, my blog post about the hidden costs of in-house PR shows that it’s a lot more expensive than most people realize.
4. Do you charge a monthly fee? Is it a flat fee? How do you come up with it?
We charge a minimum fee every month that includes a certain number of our hours. It is not a flat fee. If the amount of work ends up taking more time than is covered by our monthly minimum fee, we charge for the extra time.
Before we start working with each client, we develop an estimate of how many hours it will take to do the work to accomplish our goals for the client, and we base our monthly minimum fee on that estimate. However, sometimes our work has to be adjusted for changes in the environment or changes in our client’s plans. We ask a client before we go over the budgeted amount of time whether they would like us to or not, since there is extra fee involved. We can’t work without being paid, and have to charge for the time we spend.
I will follow up on this post with a second one on billing that will cover several additional FAQs, such as:
If you spend less time than you estimated for your monthly minimum fee, do you refund the minimum fee that wasn’t used?
Do we have to sign a contract for a year, or can we make an agreement for less than that? Do you work on a project basis?
What about expenses? Do you pass them along at cost?
When do you bill us and what are your payment terms?
I hope this explanation of our fee billing is helpful. It’s important to be transparent about how fees are calculated. I don’t want to accept any engagements that are going to be financially upsetting for either the client or to us! If you have additional questions about how PR services are billed, please comment here or send me an email and I will be happy to answer them.
In my last blog post, I listed the top four questions about PR firms’ billing practices. I promised Part 2 to elaborate further on this topic. Here are the other “must-knows” about how public relations companies bill.
If you spend less time than you estimated for your monthly minimum fee, do you refund the fee that wasn’t used? Different companies have different policies about this, but generally speaking, no, most agencies do not refund the unused fee. As for Bridge Global Strategies, we budget in blocks of three months’ worth of time. If we estimate that the work will cost $10,000 worth of hours each month, and in the first month we have to go over that amount of time by $2,000 (with the client’s approval) the extra time can either be subtracted from the following two months’ time, or if the client doesn’t want us to cut back during the other two months, then at the end of the three-month period we will bill the extra $2,000.
By the same token, if we spend only $8,000 the first month, we will still charge for $10,000, and $2,000 worth of time will roll over to the second month. The rolled-over time can be used in the second or third month. Then we start fresh with the next three months’ budget.
If you spend more time during those three months, you charge more, but if you spend less, you don’t refund the fee. That seems grossly unfair! It may seem unfair, but please keep in mind that if we take on your company as a client, we have reserved staff time to work for you, and we’ve given up the opportunity to work for one of your competitors. We make an agreement with you for a certain amount of work over a certain amount of time, and we have to pay our staff.
Do we have to sign a contract for a year, or can we make an agreement for less than that? Do you work on a project basis?
Again, different agencies have different policies about project work. All PR companies, including my own, are happy to work on a project basis. The differences from agency to agency lie in the minimum amount of fee charged for working on a project. Our minimum project fee is equivalent to our minimum monthly fee.
For ongoing work that flows from month to month without a finish date, a one-year contract is not necessary. We can make an agreement for six months, renewable automatically unless cancelled by either the client or us. Sometimes a six-month contract is a good idea in the beginning. It gives us a better idea of the actual time we will spend so it can be adjusted at the end of that time for the next six months. It also gives a client the chance to see some results, and gives us time to prove our value to the company so that ongoing spending can be justified.
What else besides your fee do we have to pay for?
We generally have outside expenses for services of vendors we hire on behalf of a client, and those are billed in addition to our fees. These could range from electronic wire services for distributing news releases, to printing, hotel space and food and beverages for an event, travel on behalf of a client, media monitoring fees, AV production fees, graphic design fees, and more.
Some agencies markup these outside expenses. Why? What is marked up and what is not? What is the common mark-up percentage?
Mark-up of outside vendors’ costs started in the advertising industry and found its way into the public relations agency world many years ago. We mark up services that we purchase and then spend time supervising. Example: we mark up news release distribution services and media monitoring services. We do not mark up travel expenses or office expenses.
The percentage of markup varies from agency to agency. Some do not mark up at all, and some agency owners mark up as much as 30 percent. It’s very common to see a 17.65 percent markup. Many clients wonder where this odd figure comes from. Actually, 17:65 percent of a vendor’s cost billed to the client as markup is the same as a 15 percent commission from a vendor. Traditionally the ad industry received a 15 percent commission on the cost of clients’ advertising space. If the amount charged to an advertiser was $1,000, the media outlet would pay the ad agency $150 as a commission. This is the same amount of return that the agency would receive from markup of an outside vendor bill by 17.65 percent. (If the actual cost of an outside vendor’s charge was $850, and the agency added a 17.65% commission to that when billing the client, the total client bill would be $1,000.) Both methods yield 15 percent of the combined total of the vendor expense and the agency commission.
The key question is why agencies mark up expenses in the first place. Some agency owners would answer this candidly (not publicly), “Because we can.” PR agency executives think of this amount as gross margin and build it into the agency’s billing systems as a way to assure overall profitability. I believe most agencies would forego the markup if they could charge for every hour spent on a client’s behalf, including negotiating vendor costs each year, checking each bill, and doing the bookkeeping to pay the vendors and then bill the clients. But it’s impossible to capture all of that time and assign it fairly to each client.
There is also the issue of cash flow: we receive some bills literally the day after we incur a charge. We collect all outside expenses and bill them to clients once a month, and our clients typically take 30 days to pay us. By the time we get reimbursed, it could be eight weeks after we pay the vendor. Many agencies offer to forego the markup if the client will receive and pay the bills from vendors directly. But most companies don’t want to do that. We get a better deal on the rates we pay because we have a bigger volume of business for these vendors. Also, corporate staff aren’t the ones dealing with the service companies, we are.
When do PR agencies bill and what are usual payment terms?
Typically billing is done once a month, and most firms bill “net 30 days.”. For projects, most firms bill some of the fee and estimated expenses up front, some in the middle, and some at the end after work is complete. It isn’t unusual for an agency to bill monthly base fees for ongoing work in advance, so that the payment is due while the work it covers is still being done. We do this at Bridge.
I hope that this Q&A will be helpful the next time you negotiate billing with a public relations firm. Often clients don’t know what questions to ask prior to starting a working relationship with an agency. The unpleasant surprise of getting charged for something unexpectedly can be damaging to the agency/client relationship.
Frequently new clients don’t really know how to work with us when they first hire us. There are a few common problems, and start-ups (our specialty), whether domestic or from overseas, are more likely to experience them.
A steakhouse appetite on a fast-food budget
The best marketing directors we’ve worked with are excellent at prioritizing what’s essential now versus what can wait until they can afford it. Most marketing directors at start-ups worked for companies with bigger budgets and more back-up internally in previous jobs. They’re very needy when it comes to PR and marketing communications. They want a lot of help, but can’t afford a big budget. Prioritizing is essential in that environment.
A winning formula in one country may not work in others
The first common mistake business people from other countries make is assuming that the market here can’t be that much different from their own. Companies from outside the U.S. often start a relationship with a PR company here by asking for the same services they received at home: “Here’s what we want from you. We need you to [choose one:] “set up a press conference,” [or] “arrange Wall Street Journal and New York Times interviews and get our CEO on the ‘Today’ show.”
They don’t know how the U.S. media works and how different it is from their own country. We have to explain that press conferences are rarely held in the U.S. to make a corporate announcement – unless it’s Steve Jobs announcing the launch of the iPad or BP trying to manage the communications after an oil spill. They aren’t aware of how social media is being used in public relations and marketing communications in the U.S., since social media is mostly just social (so far) in a lot of countries. The size and diversity of the United States is just an intellectual concept to them and not something they’ve experienced, so they think PR will cost about the same here as it does at home.
We’re consultants. Ask us what to do, don’t tell us what to do.
The second mistake is telling us what to do instead of asking us what we think should be done. In many other countries, public relations doesn’t garner as much respect as it does here. Some of you are snickering, reading this, because the PR industry has its own image problems in theU.S., and we often feel we don’t get enough respect. Nevertheless, we have it good compared to PR people in many parts of the world. It’s not uncommon for the most senior PR person in the company to report directly to the CEO and sit on the senior management committee. That’s respect.
We can’t help if we don’t know what’s really going on
When companies get started with a PR firm, it’s really important for them to brief the firm thoroughly and answer questions honestly and openly. The PR industry’s code of ethics requires that confidential client information be kept confidential. A company that is nervous about this can require its PR firm to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
If a company is secretive with its PR firm, the PR firm can’t help position the company favorably among competitors. If there’s a big problem the PR firm doesn’t know about and it comes out, the PR team is in a very awkward and difficult position of receiving media calls about an issue they didn’t know exists. Delays in responding and hesitation about how to answer difficult questions cause the client to look bad to the media.
When a company hires a PR firm, there’s a learning curve on both sides. We have to learn about a client’s company, products and/or services and goals, and the client needs to find out the best way of working with us. A good client/agency relationship and a satisfying outcome (for both the client and the agency) are much more likely if we can get started the right way.
Social Media’s Growth and Influence in Marketing and PR; Its Impact on the World and People’s Lives
Social media has become the 21st century’s fastest growing means of communication. On September 22, 2011 the whole world was interested in the f8 conference where Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook’s new functions and applications. Two days earlier, Google formerly introduced its new Google+. These two companies are fighting for dominance in social media while the whole world is watching.
We enjoyed the following infographics on social media and thought you would, too. First, however, take a look at this simple graph we created to show the results of a poll we did of social media network preferences in the 18-25 age group in the U.S. versus Europe. An equal number of people were polled in the U.S. and Europe (Hungary and France).
We polled ages 18-25 in Europe and the US about their preference in social media.
This infographic is a good overview from Mashable showing some of the statistics behind social media marketing: http://on.mash.to/oTC1ri
The importance of Facebook profile photos is something marketers should be aware of. It may seem like just one more thing to think about, but the statistics on this infographic show the need to build a strategy around your Facebook profile photos: http://bit.ly/mXnb0b
The hottest question in marketing today is just how effective social media marketing really is, and how one can measure the ROI. Here’s some data on this topic: http://bit.ly/rh3axo
Sometimes the growing number of social media choices make it hard to know which ones best suits your needs. Here’s Guy Kawasaki’s decision tree to help you out! http://bit.ly/nSqH4o
Social Media has grown tremendously over the past five years. The Huffington Post published this Infographic showing the demographics of that growth: http://huff.to/oIFI3J
Ten or 15 years ago, my answer would have been, no, go into marketing or management consulting. But I feel much better about the industry’s future these days.
Ten or 15 years ago, ad agencies were very much in ascendance and they had pocketbook power (i.e., the overwhelming majority of most companies’ marketing and communications budgets). Public relations, then considered the poor cousin of advertising, was dominated not only by the ad industry, but by men at the highest levels of the profession. At the lower levels, PR was considered “a “velvet ghetto” overrun by women. That might explain why PR salaries were (and still are) pathetic compared to advertising.
For many years, the public image of public relations has been negative. The predominant (and inaccurate, unfair) stereotype of a PR practitioner has been someone who engages in twisting the truth (described by the pejorative terms “flaks” and “spin”).
Today, however, ad agencies are often bypassed by clients who see the costs as out of proportion to the benefits, and who look to PR as not only more cost-efficient, but also as generally more effective in disseminating most corporate and product messages. Salaries are still not great, but there’s no salary growth anywhere right now (according to the New York Times, salaries have been dropping across theU.S.). I don’t know the statistics, but it seems that young men are entering the profession in greater numbers, and (speaking cynically) that should help bring about better salaries for everyone in the industry.
What’s brought about these changes is the advent of online social interaction, which has provided a means for consumers to influence each other more than they are influenced by ad messages or even media coverage. PR has always been about two-way communication; listening to people and interpreting their attitudes in order to better position an organization and communicate its messages. These skills are of paramount importance in a social media context. With new skills to master and novel online tools to harness, the PR profession has been changing rapidly. It’s an exciting time for PR, which has taken on much greater importance in this environment, a fact that marketing professionals and the C-suite have acknowledged.
PR has come into its own, and it’s attracting new college graduates in large numbers. I asked our fall semester intern, a senior communications major atCityCollege, why she chose PR. Here’s her response.
When I was young I never aspired to be a public relations professional. What I had in mind was a career as a lawyer, doctor or teacher, the kinds of professions that my parents imagined for me! So how and why did I get into public relations?
To start with, I never knew this profession existed until I was in high school. At the time, I aspired to be a top-of-the-line reporter covering the latest news. However, the more I learned about journalism the more I realized it was a very intense and competitive field. While there’s nothing wrong with competition, I didn’t like the idea of competing with my co-workers to have my story chosen for publication over theirs.
In addition, my perception was that journalism is all about relaying cold, hard facts. I knew that journalists are not allowed to be subjective. In PR, however, I sensed that I could allow my creative juices to flow. PR allowed me to think outside the box, voice my ideas and help turn those ideas into reality.
One of the things I look for in my career is versatility, and PR fits the bill. The work is ever-changing, and so is the field of public relations. I come into work knowing that each day will be different. I’m able to stay connected with the world through social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. I can also plan events, meet new people and network all at the same time. There’s so much variety that I know I won’t be bored.
Don’t get me wrong – PR is not all “glitz and glam.” It’s necessary to put in time and effort and be really dedicated in order to succeed. Client needs have to be met accurately and efficiently. It takes a strong work ethic and an outgoing personality to make it, and I feel I have both. I’ve chosen this field because I expect PR to be a fulfilling, meaningful and challenging career. That’s why I’m here!
Does every organization deserve PR? My answer: No, but…
This has been debated in the public relations industry for many years. Some feel that just as everyone has a right to legal counsel, organizations have a right to PR counsel (even the governments of countries such as Iran and Qaddafi-ledLibya). Others disagree on the grounds that it’s morally wrong to provide bad guys like Qaddafi with the tools of persuasion we can offer. I don’t believe everyone has a right to PR. But the line between those who don’t deserve PR for ethical reasons and those who do isn’t always a clear one.
I just read an article published by the conservative American think tank, The Heritage Foundation, chastising the U.S. State Department for conducting an information campaign aimed at American students. When it comes to doing PR for the U.S., the State Department by law is only allowed to target people outside the U.S., and communications aimed at U.S. citizens is forbidden. The Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 actually prohibits this for convoluted and complex reasons that are now being questioned in Congress.
I find it ironic that an important branch of our own government is denied the right to public relations outreach to U.S.citizens when foreign countries have that right. Among those exercising that right (by hiring U.S. lobbyists and/or public relations professionals) are Afghanistan, Iran, Russia (with no fewer than eight lobbying and PR organizations on its payroll, including Ketchum) and China (which has 11 on its payroll, including DDB Worldwide Communications Group, and Brown, Lloyd James, the PR company that once represented Libya).
Just after 9/11, the World Economic Forum (WEF) decided to move its annual meeting usually held in Davos to New York, to support the city. I was working at Publicis at that time and the company, which represents WEF, had the monumental task of moving a meeting with thousands of participants with a just a couple of month’s notice. Publicis in New York was asked to help. My group was given responsibility for handling public relations for a delegation to the conference from the Council for Saudi Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Because Osama bin Ladin and all but one of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis, sentiment here was extremely hostile towards the country and its people, and the Council’s goal was to improve American attitudes towards the Saudi Arabian business community. My team was charged with setting up interviews for members of the delegation with national business media and leaders of the business community, and arranging speaking engagements.
Since it wasn’t fair to blame the acts of Al Qaida on the entire Saudi business community, I felt the Council had a right to be heard in the U.S. I put aside my own feelings about 9/11, and about Saudi statements on Israel and Jews over many years, and worked with the Council.
I’ve represented several other clients over the years that were considered morally repugnant by most people.
One was a company on the verge of bankruptcy due to extreme wrong-doing by several senior executives. People were dying because these executives had approved the sale of a product they knew to be harmful. We took on this client because the thousands of employees at the company who had nothing to do with the incident were in danger not only of losing their jobs but also of not finding new ones because of their association with the company. In addition, we realized that if the company went bankrupt, it wouldn’t be able to pay court-ordered damages to victims. Our work wasn’t intended to whitewash the executives’ crimes, it was geared towards the economic survival of the company so it could meet its obligations.
I would never force an employee to work with a client if it violated her personal values. We each have to follow our own moral compass.
Occasionally I hear about PR firms taking on assignments to “rebrand” terrorist or totalitarian countries, including organizations that are known to engage in mass murder or torture. I would never work with clients of that kind. I won’t be put in a position where my skills are being used to exonerate wrong-doing. Those who accept such assignments find ways to rationalize their decisions, but I couldn’t.
I’m embarrassed by the totally unprofessional, unethical and childish behavior this week of the so-called leaders of my profession, the board and staff of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).
I’ve been a PRSA member for many years and have paid dues and event fees for employees who’ve wanted to participate (something that most large agencies don’t do any more – score another point for PR boutiques). This week
Jack O'Dwyer
PRSA is holding its annual convention, and the organization has been all over the industry news - not due to the program, but because of its discrimination against one industry journalist, Jack O’Dwyer, publisher and editor-in-chief of the eponymous Jack O’Dwyers Newsletter.
O’Dwyer has been in a nearly 20-year-long vendetta with PRSA’s national staff and board. He scrutinizes PRSA’s finances every year and has been a thorn in the organization’s side by making extremely negative editorial comments about its expenses, staff and board. As a result, PRSA has singled O’Dwyer out for special treatment: last year he was charged full attendance fees at the convention while other journalists were invited free of charge. This yearhe was barred from attending altogether.
Here’s the thing: O’Dwyer is entirely right about PRSA’s expenses (and the behavior of the staff and board have proven him right about them, too). PRSA national has lost over $850K in the first nine months of this year. The association’s operating income vs. expenses barely broke even for 2010, and showed a loss of close to half a million in 2009. Meanwhile, I’m paying a total of $500 in annual dues. Of that, PRSA national gets $225 for general membership, and Counselors Academy, a PRSA special section, gets $195. The chapter gets only $80. Yet the chapter’s frequent and widely varied programming is every bit as good as what the national organization provides. Most of the PRSA services provided in the NYC metro area come from the chapter, not PRSA national. Yet PRSA forces people to be national members in order to be chapter members.
I served on the board and as an officer of PRSA’s New York chapter for many years. I’ve visited PRSA’s national headquarters in downtown Manhattan on several occasions. There’s a ton of office space and a large staff down there. However, it’s volunteers who do all the program development. It’s not as if the money we members pay in dues is being well-spent on developing a positive image of the profession. It’s apparent to everyone that this industry association has done a miserably poor job of PR for PR for as long as anyone can remember. So where’s the value for our money?
I feel an obligation to support the local chapter with my membership dues because of the important service it provides to the entire NYC PR community. I’ve also received value from PRSA’s Counselors Academy. Yet it galls me to pay those national dues every year.
No matter what PRSA’s national board and staff think of Jack O’Dwyer’s editorial coverage, their discrimination against one journalist is an embarrassment – not just to me, but to the entire public relations profession.
chapter was originally developed as a Bridge Global Strategies article or blog post by our staff and me or as a bylined contribution by an international public relations executive. The book is divided into geographical sections and topics, including Europe and the Middle East, the Asia/Pacific region, the BRIC countries and a section with observations, insights and advice about international public relations. There are chapters on communications in Australia, Japan, China, Brazil, Spain, Germany, England, India and the United Arab Emirates.
The newsletter has been a pet project of mine, due to my years of journalism experience early in my career, and I have personally written a lot of the content and edited each issue. Our Bridge newsletter has focused on international communications. Past issues and articles about international communications are in our web site’s 
