Posts Tagged ‘Public relations’

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5 Reasons We Won’t Respond to RFPs

February 17, 2012

Not many things in my industry elicit the degree of anger and frustration as the Request for Proposal (RFP) process.

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”

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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

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Best Corporate Communications Tips for 2012

January 17, 2012

I was one of a wide assortment of public relations and corporate communications people who gathered at a holiday party last month hosted by Douglas Simon, President and CEO of D S Simon Productions. The company is a broadcast and social media video production firm with headquarters on West 36th Street in Manhattan. Doug decided to take advantage of the gathering of this motley crew at his studio by recording interviews with some of us with tips for corporate communications best practices in 2012.

Some of you may remember a blog post I did last year criticizing my own performance on a video interview Doug did with me, for which I was, sadly, not well prepared. This time around I was better prepared.

I’d welcome your own PR tips for the year ahead. I just read an economic forecast predicting that 2012 would be the turn-around year that people have been waiting for, so hopefully many of you will have bigger budgets for public relations, corporate communications and marketing communications. What are your highest priorities for spending those budgets in 2012?

Lucy Siegel

(Click photo to play.)

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Seven Small Business Owners’ Resolutions for 2012

January 1, 2012

New Year’s resolutions are easily made and just as easily broken. According to a Wikipedia entry on the topic, a recent study showed that 78% of the people who make New Year’s resolutions fail to keep them.

Research done by psychologist and author Professor Richard Wiseman showed that those who succeed have certain characteristics in common:

  • They are specific with their goal setting, not general. For example, instead of “lose weight,” a goal people can more easily reach is to lose a pound a week by cutting out complex carbs and exercising three times a week.
  • Successful resolution makers tell others about their resolutions.

My personal resolutions are just like everyone else’s – lose weight, exercise more, save more money. I also resolve to make my resolutions more specific this year, in an attempt to be one of the 22 percent who succeed in meeting their goals. But business resolutions are less predictable. I know, because I asked a wide range of other small business owners what their business resolutions are for the new year. I’ll get to mine, but first I’ll share some from other small business owners’:

1. Eric Brody, President, Trajectory (a branding and marketing company in Morristown,N.J., working across health, wellbeing and beauty):

Eric’s resolution is to more strongly focus. “To focus our passion, people, products, process, procedures to better deliver results in the industry verticals in which we provide the most experience and expertise to our clients.”

2. Elayne Kling, owner, ZP Auto (auto repair shop) and ZP Vintage Stuff (vintage fashion & home accessories ), Williamsburg, Brooklyn , N.Y.:  

Elayne comments that, after a move to a new location in 2011, she resolves to improve her company’s online presence. “I’ve also expanded to include a completely different business, so I’ll be working hard on tying the two together online with social media, blogging and coupon promotions.”

 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

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Don’t Make These Five Start-up PR Mistakes

December 20, 2011

Over many years of providing PR services to start-up companies, I’ve noticed a lot of the same very basic marketing and communications mistakes being made by one start-up after another:

1)      The goals for PR are unrealistic. Start-ups (and others) sometimes expect PR to sell their products. Public relations is not a direct sales tool. It can create awareness, educate the target audience about new technologies or solutions, build positive buzz, win over influencers, develop credibility and build relationships with potential customers. It can lead the potential customer to the company’s website or store or telephone sales force. These are not insignificant accomplishments; they are necessary steps along the way towards sales. But PR can’t always deliver sales leads. (You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.)

2)      The company’s founders don’t think they need PR (or marketing) because the products are so great they’ll sell themselves.  This relates to #1 above. It’s the “build it and they will come” philosophy that usually only works in a field of dreams! PR isn’t  a sales tool, but the PR and marketing are steps towards sales that can’t be skipped. Even if the products are as great as the founders think, there must be a process to let people know about them.

3)      The target audience is ill-defined or undefined. Sometimes when we talk to start-up executives about who they are targeting with their new products or services, the answer we get is, “Everyone. Everyone needs [or can use, or will like] this.”  This is a serious mistake and marketing problem. There are important reasons to identify the target audience, consisting of those who are most likely to buy. It is more cost and time-efficient to focus on that segment of the population than to try to appeal to everyone. Even big companies with brands like Coke, McDonalds, the iPhone and Victoria’s Secret have target customers and aim their marketing towards them very specifically. There’s a good reason why you don’t see iPhone reviews orVictoria’s Secret ads in magazines published for senior citizens. It’s imperative to do research to determine the best target audience.

4)   There are  no key communications messages chosen to be communicated.  What do you want your target customer to know and think about the product? Unfortunately the answer we sometimes get to this question is a very long, complex litany of attributes, facts and figures. It’s very difficult if not impossible to get across long and complex series of messages. We work with our clients to identify three or four of the most compelling messages and to repeat these over and over until they are well-communicated.

5)      The company expects splashy media coverage just because it (or its product) is being launched. If there’s not much new or different to offer, when there is no important differentiation from competitors, there’s no news. If there’s no news, there’s no compelling reason for media coverage. We can offer the media interviews with company executives to discuss industry trends or current events, and the resulting media mentions help the company build credibility and visibility. But we can’t deliver a lot of coverage about a company and its products if there’s nothing new or different about them.

Most entrepreneurs don’t come from marketing or communications backgrounds, never had to be proficient in those areas and are not natural-born communicators. We’re there to help, by advising and educating. With a good, well-differentiated product, some education about the basics of marketing and PR – and a little luck – a small start-up can take giant strides in establishing itself.

Lucy Siegel

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

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The Specialist vs the Generalist: Who Wins?

December 14, 2011

Marian Salzman, CEO of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, on a PR Week Webcast this week, forecast what’s coming next in the PR industry.  Her outlook for 2012, which was covered in an article by Matt Wilson on Ragan.com, included a prediction that people in the PR industry will have to become generalists, taking on a wide variety of tasks, including but not limited to media relations, developing “content” (a communications industry buzzword that means written, audio or video materials for use online) and serving as experts on transparency.Wilson reported that her explanation for the need to be generalists was, “The media is really being redefined by the second.”

Here’s the thing: some of us saw this coming years ago and refused to be pigeonholed as specialists at a time when the common wisdom was that you had to be a specialist to climb the communications career ladder.

When the dot com bubble burst and the technology sector crashed in 2000, people who had differentiated themselves by specializing in tech or internet PR were being laid off left and right. The situation got much worse after 9/11, when budgets were being cut drastically by PR agency clients in every industry. We learned at that time that it was risky to be specialists in one narrow area. Agencies with general PR practices stood a better chance of survival in a downturn than specialist firms. At that time it was tech that was the weak spot. But at other times health care, financial services, fashion and other industries have been the danger zones.

It’s not unusual for someone who has been a corporate communications professional in one industry to move to a totally different industry. I’ve watched colleagues move successfully from telecom to insurance, from television to the automotive industry, from the automotive industry to a non-profit.

One very nimble friend has gone from the corporate communications department at a Big 5 accounting firm to a beauty products company, a tobacco company, a financial services company, an educational institution, and she now works in the green IT and smart grid sector (and she’s excelled in each position!). Over the course of her career she’s also had a wide variety of roles within communications and marketing, including writing, magazine editing, internal communications, marketing communications and sales promotion.

This demonstrates that good communications principals are much more important to success than deep knowledge of a specific industry. Once we learn the basics of the communications profession, we can apply them to a wide variety of clients. I would argue that broad experience over different industries is a positive influence on creative thinking. You can leverage what you observe in one industry and apply it to another industry in a way that PR insiders in that industry would never think of doing. To be a good communications generalist, it’s crucial to be able to pick up the basics about a new industry fast, and to be able to distinguish between what you need to know and what you don’t.  You don’t need a Ph.D. in physics to be a PR superstar for a laser manufacturer, or a CPA to head the corporate communications department at an accounting firm.

All of the above is why a liberal arts education is so important for a communications professional. In college, it’s much more important to learn how to learn than it is to learn the specifics of any particular profession.

Lucy Siegel

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How Do We Become Indispensable?

November 30, 2011

I just read an article in the Harvard Business Review about how to make yourself indispensable. The author describes an employee that has done a terrific job, done everything right. He applied for a promotion and was stunned when he didn’t get the position. It went to someone else. He asks, “What did I do wrong?” and his boss says, “Nothing, you’re doing a great job.”

The author argues that it’s much easier to improve your performance (and your position in the corporate world) if you haven’t been doing so well, but much harder when you’ve been doing a great job. He concludes that incremental
improvements don’t help as much as developing other, complementary strengths. For example, an engineer who indisputably does a wonderful job for the company would gain a lot less by becoming an even better engineer than by improving a skill such as writing or people management.

The article stimulated a lot of comments and debate. How do you make yourself indispensable: by keeping on top of the
ever-changing needs and wants of your bosses, and then working to meet those needs? Or by determining how you could become more valuable, based just on your own strengths?

This led me to think about how public relations practitioners can be perceived as indispensable by their clients or, in the case of internal PR staff, by the top management of their companies. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing a client, or not winning a client, due to a decision not to have an external PR firm because top management feels that PR isn’t a high enough priority. In these situations, when we are considered dispensable, the marketing department or the internal communications staff may disagree, but they’re overruled.

So how do we, as PR practitioners, make ourselves indispensable? Unfortunately, just as explained in the HBR article, simply doing a great job isn’t enough. The answer isn’t to provide even better results. If what we do is really that valuable to a corporation, then the onus is on us to make senior management understand that we are, indeed, indispensable.

It helps if we set measurable goals in the beginning of a project or a year and then actually do the measurement. However, this is a lot easier said than done, and a lot of attention has to be paid to what kinds of goals are set as well as how they are measured. Otherwise, who’s to say, for example, that it was the PR, not some improvement in the product or services, the sales methods or the distribution methods, that helped sell more?

It’s very hard to measure the impact of PR in isolation from other factors. It’s crucial to agree on goals that we can, without doubt, take credit for reaching.  Often even if we can suggest appropriate, measurable goals, our clients don’t have the budget to spend on measurement.

In my most cynical mood, I’d say that very often it’s the people who have to be indispensable in order to sell senior management on PR, not the actual contribution PR makes. The most successful people in the PR industry (as everywhere) are those who have strong personal charisma as well as the ability to cozy up to the decision-makers in an organization and win them over. Sometimes indispensable means a bond of dependency.  That kind of relationship trumps PR results every time.

I wish I had the answers to how we can make PR indispensable. Maybe you do. I’d like to hear what you think about this.

Lucy Siegel

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Five Reasons for Public Relations Professionals to Be Grateful

November 23, 2011

I read an interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times about a study done by Robert Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, and Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami on “the attitude of gratitude.” It seems they have evidence that when people are grateful, they are healthier, sleep better, are less anxious, and act more kindly to others, including their “significant others.”  In the spirit of providing readers with a calmer Thanksgiving weekend with family members, I’d like to list some reasons for people in public relations to be grateful:

  •  PR people have become the go-to professionals for social media relations.  In order to keep up with the fast pace of change in communications in general, we had no choice.
  • Our need to keep up with what’s happening online has actually made many of us who were previously considered technologically challenged into technology early adopters. (I would have laughed at anyone who predicted this 20 years ago!).
  • Unlike our brethren in the communications industry with advertising backgrounds, we have been holding up fairly well in this weak economy.
  • Our profession has never had more potential for growth than it does now. I’ve been hearing anecdotal evidence of public relations being elevated in many companies to report to the CEO.
  • It has become easier and cheaper to measure the value of what we do. That surely must be an important factor in the previous reason to be grateful.

Professors Emmons and McCullough advise people to start cultivating an attitude of gratitude by keeping a journal listing five things they are grateful for. These can be small things – a turkey that was neither dry nor undercooked, a winning football team, etc.

Five things I’m grateful for today:

  • We have great clients from whom I learn something new all the time.
  • My two sons flew home from the west coast to be with their family for the holiday.
  • I’ve been able to be my own boss and keep my company running, even in tough times.
  • My staff members are smart and often funny.
  • The rain stopped; the forecast is sunny and relatively warm for November.

How about you? What are you grateful for?

Lucy Siegel

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Inc. 500′s Social Media Growth Bigger than Fortune 500′s

November 21, 2011

In a provocative article on Entrepreneur magazine’s blog this week, columnist Mikal Belicove, a social media specialist, reported there is now research showing that big companies are less social media conscious than small companies. Why are big companies less social media conscious? And, on the flip side of this question, what motivates smaller companies to use social media more aggressively?

The research data came from the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth’s’ Center for Marketing Research. The Center’s study, ““The 2011 Fortune 500 and Social Media Adoption: Have America’s Largest Companies Reached a Social Media Plateau?”, was based on data from the 2011 Fortune 500 list of companies, the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private small companies, and also the largest charities and institutions of higher education.

The researchers looked for blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter followers at all of the institutions. The companies were deemed to have blogs if they had “a public-facing corporate blog from the primary corporation with posts in the past 12 months.” The research repeated similar studies done annually since 2008. The researchers concluded that the use of blogs, Twitter and Facebook has grown very little in the past year at these large companies. Moreover, the Fortune 500 companies came in last among all the groups in adopting social media every year for the past four years.

In his blog post, Belicove suggests that big companies are risk-averse because they want to protect their top market positions, and are deliberately slowing down their adoption of social media because they believe they have more to lose than to gain from encouraging consumer/customer participation.

Why are smaller companies using social media more than big ones? Neither the researchers nor Belicove answered this question. My guess: the absence of big corporate bureaucracies and legal departments gives the marketing people at small companies more flexibility. Of course, small companies also have less money for marketing than big ones. Social media costs less than advertising and many other forms of communications (although it is not free, as many seem to think – the people costs involved in social media program development and maintenance are considerable).

The results of this study are heartening for small businesses. Small companies are able to be more flexible and nimble than big ones, and those attributes may well be giving them an edge in the use of social media for public relations.

There was a comment on Belicove’s blog post that big companies may be slowing down on their use of social media because it doesn’t produce sales results. This isn’t true, however, since the use of social media to find and attract prospective clients is one of its most important business applications, in my opinion. The ability for a company to obtain data on customer preferences and to build closer relationships with customers is a huge sales advantage.

In addition, the advent of the internet and social media in particular has changed the sales process for most companies by enabling a switch from “outbound marketing” to “inbound marketing.” Hubspot, on its excellent “Inbound Internet Marketing Blog,” defines outbound marketing as pushing the marketing message out, via trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. These methods are less effective than they used to be because prospective customers are inundated with marketing messages and have found ways to shut them off or screen them out.  With inbound marketing, in contrast, says Hubspot’s CEO and Founder, Brian Halligan, “you help yourself ‘get found’ by people already learning about and shopping in your industry.”

Inbound marketing provides warm leads and eliminates the need for cold calling. I don’t know about you, but anything that cuts down on cold calling is fine with me!

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PR Can’t Create Thought Leadership

October 27, 2011

…But It Does Help Magnify It!

There are trends and buzzwords in every industry, and “thought leadership” is currently on everyone’s lips in the world of public relations.  Actually, this has spread way beyond the PR industry and is often heard now in the business world as a whole.

According to Wikipedia, a thought leader is “business jargon for an entity that is recognized for having innovative ideas.”  The business media have featured articles ranging from how to “engage” [another buzzword] thought leaders, to how thought leaders can engage employees.  Among many articles on thought leadership, the Harvard Business Review (HBR) weighed in with “How to Become a Thought Leader in Six Easy Steps.”

Thought leaders stand out.

If you read between the lines in the HBR article, you see that the headline is a little misleading. The article really tells you how to leverage the thought leadership you already have, rather than giving lessons on becoming a thought leader. The truth is, the  best PR in the world can’t turn a follower into a leader. PR can, however, help people who actually are thought leaders to be spokespersons for their organizations, to draw attention to and build credibility for their companies.

Thought leadership doesn’t have to come from big company executives. Entrepreneurs in start-ups can leverage  it to build their companies into “challenger brands” (companies that give brand leaders a run for their money).   Steve Jobs was one of the most famous thought leader entrepreneurs. Although he ended up CEO of one of the biggest technology companies in the world, he started as an entrepreneur working in a garage.

Bridge Global Strategies has had the pleasure of helping entrepreneurs in a variety of industries to make waves by communicating their innovative ideas.  Public relations can really make a small company soar when there’s a truly innovative thinker at the helm who has a good product or service to offer. With a good PR program,  start-up companies can change their industries.

Lucy Siegel

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