To get some insight into the changes taking place in South African media and public relations practices, I interviewed Marie Yossava, founder and owner of Grapevine Communications in Johannesburg. She was able to give us an overview of the communications landscape in South Africa and some of the changes in communications the country and people have experienced.  The firm is the newest member of PR Boutiques International, an international network of boutique PR firms of which Bridge Global Strategies is a founding member.

Bridge Global Strategies: How has the media landscape changed in South Africa since you started the company?

Marie Yossava: Vastly! The media consisted exclusively of print and broadcast outlets when I first ventured into the industry. It has subsequently evolved to include global social networks, which open up communication channels to the world within seconds. It’s significant that individuals in South Africa can now own their own media outlets online – not just big media companies. The immediacy is revolutionary. South Africa, compared to developed economies, already had a much smaller base of media to start with, but those traditional media – in particular, print titles – have seen a decline with the explosion of Web 2.0 media.

Bridge: What is your strategy for reaching the different age groups in different parts of the country (urban versus rural areas, and young versus older age groups)?

 MY: It is very important to understand the media with which different segments of the market communicate in South Africa. We still have many older people in our country who are illiterate. To reach an older audience in rural areas, broadcast (TV and radio) remains a powerful and effective means of communicating key messages.  That said, the cellular market in South Africa has more than 100 percent saturation, and even the elderly have mobile handsets.  While the mobile functionality may be limited and won’t always include a web browser, Twitter, and other applications, people can send and receive calls and text messages.  SMS and mobile website (“mobisite”) campaigns are also effective communications tools in reaching certain segments of the market.

In our country’s urban areas, the youth are all connected to the internet and social media platforms via their mobile phones, which makes it easy to use communications campaigns to alert them to new products and transmit important information. Mobile platforms are ideal for capturing the attention of younger audiences and for pulling them through to other platforms, e.g. a new edu-tainment TV series, or interesting articles.

Bridge: Please tell us how social media and smartphones have infiltrated into the marketing mix and PR in the country.

MY: At the outset of the digital era, companies, brands and agencies were slow to adopt social media, but as more and more of the population consumes daily information via smartphones, organizations are more readily agreeing to let PR agencies include the use of social media in their PR strategies and to make it an essential tool for messaging.

Today, social media can be regarded as an additional and important vehicle PR agencies can use to communicate key client messaging, urgent press statements and announcements at a speed that cannot be matched by any other medium, not even radio. From the outset, however, social media needs to be aligned to the client’s communication strategy and goals, and not seen in isolation or as an afterthought. It is also important to understand that it requires regular content updates to gain a following, and decisive, quick responses to build credibility.

To cite an example, local commuters were recently stuck in an underground train when it broke down. With a simple tweet, the communications representative of the rail company could have informed passengers as to what had caused the delay and how long they could expect to wait. Even if only a few of the passengers were Twitter subscribers, the information would have soon spread through the train via word of mouth.

Bridge: What has your experience been being a woman in the PR business in South Africa? How is it different or similar from other countries?

MY: When I arrived in South Africa more than 20 years ago, things seemed very different from what I had experienced previously, working in London. However I have had the good fortune to experience the very exciting progress of the new economy that has occurred since the turning point of our new democracy in 1994, which has fast-tracked women and advanced their progress. So much so that South Africa is now fourth on the list of countries with the highest representation of women in parliament in the world.

Secondly, I operate in what remains a female-dominated business sector in our country, so there are no barriers to dealing with clients, and we are well accepted and regarded in the profession.  I also believe it is the responsibility of leaders in our industry to continually raise the bar for our profession if we are to be accepted at a senior board/management level and be part of organisations’ overall business strategies.

Bridge: My final question: how has apartheid affected communications and PR? How has the landscape changed to adjust to the political changes?

MY: I am not able to provide an informed comment as Grapevine was established post the apartheid era, so our business has always operated in an open and free market.  We also operate in a democracy with freedom of speech so our media channels are open and transparent.

Market opportunities for all races are equal in our industry and this is reflected by the number of black practitioners.  Public Relations Institute of South Africa’s (PRISA) current vice president is Mr. Aaron Ngema, and our immediate past president was Mr. Victor Sibeko.

Alexandra Huebner

Get Lucy Siegel’s book at Amazon!  “Public Relations Around the Globe: A Window on International Business Culture”

In the public relations industry, Mike Wallace was one of the most respected and at the same time, most feared journalists ever. He could reduce public figures to blubbering idiots with just one simple question.  Even the rumor that Mike Wallace had a research crew investigating a company was enough to send executives and PR departments into a tailspin. ABC News’s George Stephanopolis commented that Wallace became more famous than most of his subjects by mastering the “in your face” interview. ABC News reporter John Donovan, in a story about Wallace, noted that Wallace “had a gift for making the unaskable askable.” Just one example: he had the nerve to ask Nancy Reagan how much President Ronald Reagan got paid for visiting Japan after he left office.

Much has been written about this legend of TV journalism in the last few days, but from a PR perspective, the best piece I’ve read was by Larry Thomas, president of Latergy, a video services firm. I direct you to his article in a communications industry publication CommPRO.biz, “Remembering Mike Wallace: Lessons from a Master Interviewer,” which summarizes the influence Wallace had into five key lessons for public relations, corporate communications and investor relations professionals .  Thomas ends his blog by saying, “RIP, Mr. Wallace. I’m glad I was able to see you (on TV, not at my office door).”  I can certainly echo that.

He wrote, “Over the last few years PR firms have become increasingly aggressive in pushing editorial ‘collaborations’ for their clients, many of whom are nowhere to be seen from a publication advertising support perspective!”  His message:  companies that don’t advertise in a particular publication shouldn’t expect to be covered unless what they’re offering is groundbreaking news. Implied in his statement was that advertisers do deserve the  right to be covered, whether or not they have anything newsworthy or of interest to say.

As a PR firm owner and practitioner with many years of experience, preceded by journalism experience (both newspaper and trade media), I maintain that journalists  have no obligation to cover anyone – advertisers or non-advertisers. The only obligation they have is to inform their readers/viewers in an honest and timely way. If this means they end up not covering an advertiser because the company has nothing worthwhile to communicate, then so be it. If the advertiser doesn’t like this, there are always other media to advertise in.

Non-advertisers deserve the same balanced editorial coverage as advertisers.

It’s our policy as an agency to decline pay for play offers.  Sometimes a media outlet will approach a client directly and offer the opportunity to be included in a special issue of a magazine, or to be interviewed by a news broadcaster, or take part in a film, if the client would just pay a certain amount to “cover expenses.” On a few occasions clients have been tempted by these offers.  Generally, a little research on the publication or TV production company has demonstrated that the offer isn’t the great opportunity it was cracked up to be.

A couple of years ago, one of our clients received a call offering an interview on national TV, “Inside Business,” with Fred Thompson, the Republican politician, columnist and radio host. Our client was told there would be a fee of about $20,000 to cover the production company’s costs, but still thought this would bring some valuable visibility. We did some looking around online and found websites with discussions from other businesses that had taken the bait and were bitterly disappointed and angry at the outcome. Their biggest complaint was usually about the distribution of the video that was produced. Their interviews were aired at some ungodly hour when nobody would be watching TV – say, 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning. When we showed our client these discussions, he thanked us for stopping him from wasting his company’s money.

Years ago when I was a journalist I fought with publishers who constantly pushed the editorial staff to cover advertisers. The battle between advertising and editorial has only intensified over the years as both ad revenue and readership have declined, bringing tough financial times for many media companies.  However, good, balanced journalism is what attracts readers and builds circulation, not pandering to advertisers or demanding quid pro quo for media coverage.

It’s the job of the PR professional to understand and counsel clients about what’s news and what’s not. If a company hires a PR agency to “get ink” and yet has nothing special to offer the media, it’s the agency’s responsibility to manage the client’s expectations while seeking news nuggets and finding innovative ways to create news, if necessary. Let’s be clear: pay for play is not media coverage, it’s advertising.

Lucy Siegel

Get my book at Amazon!  “Public Relations Around the Globe: A Window on International Business Culture”

Today’s New York Times has an article about an MIT professor, Jonathan Gruber, who convinced both the Massachusetts government under Governor Mitt Romney and the Obama administration that it was imperative to their health insurance plans to require that everyone buy health insurance. He showed calculations to demonstrate a “terrible spiral:”  when healthy people can opt out of the plan, it leaves the relatively sick in the plan. This causes costs for premiums to rise, which in turn causes the least sick to drop coverage, sending costs even higher, and making healthcare unaffordable to all but the wealthy.

I’m not sure why this issue hasn’t been well-explained. It’s not that complicated. I’ve done it here in eight steps that a child should understand:

1.  Health insurance companies use the income from premiums to pay for healthcare.
2. If everyone participates in a health insurance plan, whether young or old, healthy or sick, the premiums paid by the young and healthy subsidize the costs of healthcare for the old and sick.
3. If the young and healthy can opt out of the plan, the premiums they would have paid are no longer available to subsidize the healthcare costs of the old and sick. Therefore, in order to stay in business, the health insurer must charge larger premiums to the old and sick.
4. The increased cost of premiums then force the healthier sick people to opt out of the plan because they can no longer afford the premium costs.
5. That sends costs up even more, leaving the really sick and very old in the plan. Their costs of healthcare will then become higher still.
6. This is the downward spiral that makes health insurance less viable as time goes on unless everyone is covered.  Only two things can prevent this downward spiral:

• If everyone is required to pay for health insurance, the cost burden isn’t just on the old and sick. Some say this is unfair to the healthy, who are forced to subsidize healthcare for the sick.  They should remember that at some point, we all become old and sick.
• The only other way of preventing the downward spiral is to withhold healthcare from those who don’t pay premiums.  Of course this won’t happen, because as a society we feel a moral obligation to provide at least a minimal level of healthcare whether or not people are insured. Emergency rooms don’t turn away victims of car accidents just because they don’t have health insurance.

7.  Therefore, without a mandate that everyone must be covered, the downward spiral makes health insurance cost increasingly more, so eventually it becomes unviable for all but the wealthy.

Actually, this is happening in the U.S. right now. The number of uninsured has grown to one out of six Americans. As costs for health insurance have grown, companies have cut back, shifting costs to employees. This, as well as the high number of uninsured unemployed, has led to annual growth in the number without health insurance coverage.

Health insurance premiums on average have doubled since 2001. Americans pay a larger percent of their own healthcare costs than people in any other industrialized country in the world.

As costs go up and less people receive preventative care, Americans’ health grows worse, which causes costs to go even higher.

Is this simple enough to understand?

Lucy Siegel

Flexibility

Lord knows, start-ups have plenty of disadvantages (never enough money, limited staff to do all that needs to be done and low visibility compared to established competitors, to name just a few). However, there’s no point in looking at a half-empty cup when there is, after all, still half a cup left. Start-ups have some important advantages over Goliath competitors, many of which involve the ability to be more flexible. Small companies love to talk about flexibility as an asset they have over larger competitors but seldom explain why it’s an asset. Here are some of the advantages of flexibility:

1. It’s easy for start-ups to change direction. Making a big change can be done quickly and far more efficiently than in a large company. Think of turning around a small motor boat compared to an ocean liner.

2. As small businesses, it’s easier for start-ups to respond to employees’ needs by allowing less rigid work rules. If someone wants to work at home one or two days a week or come in a couple of hours early and leave a couple of hours early, there aren’t layers of bureaucracy and paperwork to go through to make this possible.

3. The founder of a start-up doesn’t have to live by anyone else’s rules. Start-ups begins with no rules and no well-established business structure, and can make up their own rules and business structure.

4. Let’s say you have a revolutionary idea, and if your company is successful, you’ll change your industry forever. Chances are that someone in a big company somewhere has had the same idea, but big companies can’t be as flexible about making revolutionary changes. They have a lot more to lose than you do: market share, customer trust, brand recognition, public preconceptions about what they stand for. Meanwhile, you’re starting from scratch and can create something revolutionary without worrying about what you’ll lose in the process.

5. The communications and management infrastructure at start-ups are much more informal and allow more flexibility to individual employees to make themselves heard and have an influence on the overall company. There’s nothing more empowering to employees than the knowledge that what they do really counts, and that their ideas and input will be listened to by senior people (who may be sitting in the same room they are) and can have a big influence the success of the company.

6. The definition of success is up to the entrepreneur. It is not predefined as generating shareholder profit. Founders of start-ups can set their own goals. There is flexibility that comes from not having to worry about short-term shareholder benefits. Some civic-minded start-up founders place heavy emphasis on the goal of helping their communities. Some founders are determined to stay small enough to allow themselves the satisfaction of doing hands-on work with clients.

Lucy Siegel

Yesterday I opened about 10 emails from colleagues at other agencies on this topic.  All of us belong to Counselors Academy,  a group of PR agency owners and top executives. Counselors Academy’s most active members are smaller and midsize companies, not the largest agencies. One of the members, a colleague of mine who owns a boutique agency in Washington, wrote an email to the group describing an RFP fiasco he had just been through and asking how other
agencies handle RFPs. With few exceptions, the consensus was that RFPs are a waste of time and energy and most of my colleagues at the small and midsize agencies refuse to participate in the RFP process unless they have a relationship with  someone in the company or have worked for the company before.

Let me sum up the main reasons:

1. RFPs are often the result of a requirement from company purchasing departments that bids be obtained from several vendors before a purchase is made. More and more over the last 10 or 15 years purchasing departments have been given approval power over PR agency hiring by the corporate communications and marketing departments. The internal marketing or communications team knows already which agency it wants to hire, but puts out the RFP to satisfy the purchasing department. In these situations, the bids are really rigged from the outset and the RFP process is a sham.

2. Many companies just don’t know how to conduct an agency search. Some of them send RFPs in writing to a huge number of agencies without talking to them or screening them in any way first to focus in on a small but appropriate group. Responding to this kind of “cattle call” is a waste of an agency’s time.

3. Some companies that put out RFPs have NO INTENTION of hiring an agency, and use the process to gather ideas to help the in-house communications team.  Of course, nobody admits to this, but it’s pretty obvious when they end up not hiring an agency at all after the RFP process and then start implementing thinly disguised versions of the proposal ideas.

4. Many RFPs ask each agency for a strategic plan to meet the company’s PR needs. However, very, very few RFPs offer to compensate the agencies  for this work.  Law firms aren’t asked to submit their plans for dealing with a company’s legal situation on spec. Doctors charge for their time and expertise when consulted about their treatment opinions. Why should communications companies be expected to give away their intellectual property? I wrote an entire blog post on this subject a couple of years ago. Some in-house marketing and communications executives claim that this is the only way they can separate the good, bad and mediocre. But that isn’t true. A decision can be made by asking for examples of past work and references from clients, holding several interview sessions, and even, if necessary, requesting the agencies for a PR solution to a theoretical situation.

5. As a small public relations company, sometimes we are given an RFP as an alternative type of firm to bigger agencies. The decision-makers will swear up and down that they’re open to selecting the best agency team irrespective of agency size. We’ll be encouraged by the prospective client to participate, the chemistry will be great, we’ll hear compliments on our proposal and be told that we’ve been selected as a finalist. And then we’ll be told that a much larger firm won the business. Sometimes the prospective client will even tell us, “In the end, we just felt more comfortable with a larger agency.” Or, “we love your team but we were afraid of what the CEO would say if we hired a small agency like yours.”  This is shorthand for, “Nobody gets fired for hiring IBM.”

Some of my colleagues will read this and say, “You just have to qualify the lead before you respond to an RFP.” This is true; you do have to ask questions upfront to find out whether your company is a good fit for the prospective client and to try to determine if there is really any chance of winning the business. But unfortunately it’s hard to get honest answers sometimes.  This isn’t just a problem for small PR firms. When I worked for a large multinational, we had the same problem. The thing is, there are more resources at large PR firms than at small firms like mine for pursuing new business. We can’t afford to waste our time on RFPs when experience has shown us that the chance of winning, for one or more of the above reasons, is extremely remote.

I don’t want any of you to think that we don’t want to compete for business. That isn’t the case. We expect and welcome competition. It’s just the bureaucratic and often rigged RFP process that we’ve opted out of.

Lucy Siegel

Read my e-book –  ”Public Relations Around the Globe: A Window on International Business Culture”

MIT bloggers wrote on a “Physics arXiv Blog” post this week that computer scientists at HP’s lab in Palo Alto, Calif. did research that showed they could test news articles to see whether or not they would spread widely on Twitter. Since Twitter buzz about news stories has been shown to be a predictor of general interest beyond Twitter,  the ability to

test an article in advance could have major implications for journalism, and, of course, for public relations as well.
The HP scientists used an automatic online news aggregator to collect news stories for a week. Then they scored each story on four different criteria: what news organization published the story it, what category the story fit into, how subjective the language used in the story was, and what people or things were included in the story.  They tracked these stories on Twitter to see how far and how fast they were spread. They were able to use the data to identify what levels of scores in each of the four criteria were correlated with the popularity of a news story on Twitter. Then they used these criteria and their scoring formulas to predict in advance how popular a story would be on Twitter.

The MIT bloggers speculated that it probably wouldn’t be long before someone would use this type of data to develop a “popularity checker” tool, similar to the grammar and spelling checkers that are built into word processing programs. They commented that it might be detrimental to journalism to have such a tool, since journalists would surely be pushed by their employers to write for the tool.

But think of what a boon to PR a popularity checker would be!

PR industry newbies would be able to test their news sense to get objective feedback on their news releases and media pitches. PR team leaders could use the checker to demonstrate tactfully to their employers or clients that promotional language really does not work in a news release, or to point out the lack of newsworthiness of an announcement proposed by senior management without having to argue about it.

If anyone hears that such a tool is under development, please let me know so I can sign up as a pre-release beta tester and invest in whatever company is behind it!

Lucy Siegel

Read my e-book: “Public Relations Around the Globe: A Window on International Business Culture”

“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!

Lucy Siegel

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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?

Lucy Siegel

(Click photo to play.)

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.”

 3. William A. Regen, Partner, Regen, Benz & McKenzie, CPA’s P.C. (an accounting firm in New York City):

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.”

5. Lee Weinstein, President, Weinstein PR (a Portland, Oregon-based boutique PR agency):

“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 Strategies is 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!)

Lucy Siegel