Posts Tagged ‘International PR’

New International PR e-Book Just Published

January 24, 2012

I’m pleased to announce the publication of “Public Relations Around the Globe: A Window on International Business Culture,” an e-book for Kindle.  The Kindle file also works for the Mobipocket reader (which can be downloaded free and can be used on many mobile devices as well as on PCs).

“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

.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Podcast: PR & Marketing for Start-ups & U.S.-based Foreign Companies

November 4, 2011

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.)

Lucy Siegel

PLAY


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

How to Get Started with a PR Firm: Four Tips for a Fruitful Relationship

September 19, 2011

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.

Lucy Siegel


Tags:, , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 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 »

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 »

5 Key Facts about PR in the U.S.

August 5, 2010

…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.

by Lucy Siegel

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

9 Reasons I Love Doing PR for Start-ups

April 6, 2010

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.

By Lucy Siegel

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Anniversary Changes: Introducing BridgeBuzz

October 28, 2009

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.

cake2The 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.

Lucy Siegel
CEO, Bridge Global Strategies

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.