Posts Tagged ‘Bridge Global Strategies’

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Top Four Questions About PR Billing Practices

August 29, 2011

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.

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Six Things Many PR Firms Won’t Tell You

August 16, 2011

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.

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 16 Comments »

10 Tasty Tidbits about Marketing and PR from My Inbox (or “You Are What You Tweet”)

August 4, 2011

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.

4. Concise explanation about Google’s new Google+ social media network from eWeek’s Cloud Computing Digest (newsletter). Bloomberg wrote this week that, although Google+ is still in beta, it has over 25 million subscribers already, a number it reached faster than any other social network.

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.”

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

You May Have to Invent Your Next Job, Says Tom Friedman

July 19, 2011

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.

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Being an Entrepreneur: Five Things I Love, Five I Hate

June 27, 2011

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?

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Media Cutbacks Hurting Local News Coverage

June 22, 2011

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.

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Diary From Japan: Ongoing Failure to Build Institutional Trust Takes a Heavy Toll in Crisis

March 18, 2011

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.

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

Does Size Matter in the PR Industry? You Bet!

March 4, 2011

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.

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

10 “Must Haves” From Your PR Agency

November 30, 2010

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.

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

The Hidden Costs of In-House PR

September 24, 2010

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!

Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.