In this week when we celebrate our 40th anniversary, I look back to 1971 when I set up Action PR. At that time the world was a very different place; no internet, no mobile phones and certainly no iPad! Times were challenging but exciting and my vision was to build a business that was to become the first full service public relations consultancy in the emerging markets.  Now those same emerging markets are not only the focus of global attention but also drive the global economy. As the company grew we found that, while we offered our clients effective communications combined with strong local knowledge, we also had to help educate local media and other influencers to understand the value of what we were doing. At first and in some countries this was quite a struggle, especially with highly regulated, even censored, local media. Now digital communications and social media have cut through these obstacles taking us into a new world of openness and change. There are still challenges to be faced, some of a very different kind to those we faced 40 years ago. But the difference now is that the Action team of professionals in over 40 countries have never been more effective, more professional or more committed. We should be proud of what we have achieved over the last 40 years, proud of our long standing client relationships and proud that we work with some of the world’s leading brands and organisations.  I salute all the Action team whether you are working in the heat of the Middle East, the cosmopolitan cities of Eastern Europe or the heady political world of Brussels. Here’s to the next 40 years of Action!

I’m sure most of you have heard of the recent instance of JC Penney’s new line-up of T-shirts, which landed the brand on the RidicuList (http://edition.cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2011/09/01/ac-ridiculist-jcpenney.cnn). The story is worth attention as it tackles three important elements that a big brand, such as JC Penney should have given better consideration:

1.   Brand image

2.   Corporate social responsibility

3.   And at a later stage: issue/crisis management

We’ve seen that JC Penney seems to have ignored all three elements and while we are still watching to see how they will clear things up, we can learn lessons about how big brands should “care more”. They need to care more not only about the society in which they do business, but also about doing  business in a smarter way to ensure that they don’t make any more mistakes.

It’s not all about the attractive new designs. When launching a new line of T-shirts for the ‘back to school’ season, a designer should think how this would attract customers and improve their brand image. More carefully considered text on the T-shirts could have made them bestsellers in clever ways. T-shirt text along the lines of…,  “I might not be the best in Maths but Einstein wasn’t either” or “I never scream, I’m patient and good looking…everyone tells me that I should be a teacher”, might have helped.   

The ‘back to school’ season is one of the times of the year when it should be easy for a retailer to show their commitment to society, but JC Penney managed to achieve the exact opposite.

After the T-shirt story had broken and had everyone talking about it, a company spokesperson told ABC news, “We’re reaching out to our customers who are unhappy to apologize and to let them know that the T-shirt is no longer available”.  This was a very weak response as the story was all over the web and nothing significant was done to counter the negative coverage which had been created.

A big brand with more than one thousand stores should have been more careful and aimed to avoid such negative coverage.

As an example of a better way to maintain brand image, Jacky’s Electronics, an Action UAE client and  a UAE retailer with 9 stores in the country, worked hard during the summer to be involved in Dubai Care’s charity campaign – ‘Girls’ Education Campaign 2011’. The charity aims to increase awareness and funds to enable girls in poorer countries to be educated, thus improving their lives and empowering them to play effective roles in society.

The irrefutable power of blogs to keep the Greek public informed was confirmed recently during the country’s nationwide four day media strike. With all outlets from newspapers and magazines to radio,  television and news websites participating in the strike, the country was left in a total media and news blackout.

Seeking to take advantage of the clear gap in information provision to the Greek people, the government sought to exploit the situation by attempting to pass a number of bills that would otherwise have gone through different political channels to be passed and which may have resulted in greater political cost to the government. Furthermore these bills would have certainly generated significant discussion in the media and among the general public had the country’s media been in operation.

In protest against the media blackout and the government’s attempts to take advantage of the situation, Greek MPs rejected the passing of these bills, with the dialogue between the MPs played out on the nation’s blogs. Members of Parliament claimed that the country would plunge into great social and political unrest if the media strike was not brought to an end.

However while the country’s media remained steadfast, the power of blogs was cast into light, being the only source of information and regular news updates.  For the Greek market – in its current state of turmoil and where strikes are rife – blogs have emerged as an important communication tool and a way out from the political and economic chaos that has threatened  to leave the Greek population uninformed about the very events and issues that affect their daily lives.

Once upon a time, when people actually used to ‘read’ magazines, they were really good value for money. Of course, they were mostly printed on cheap woodfree paper and they weren’t glossy. But editorial content was surprisingly diverse, with well-researched in-depth articles and features, lifestyle tips, short stories and a balanced advertising to editorial ratio. What happened?

During a recent trip to the hairdresser I was offered a glossy and very weighty international women’s magazine to read. Great, I thought – but I should have known better. After wading through page after tedious page of perfume/jewellery/fashion advertisements, all offering highly Photoshopped images of incredibly surreal models, I finally came across a very long list of contents. Alarm bells were ringing – how can it possibly include so much? It took me less than 10 minutes to go through the other 200 or so pages to discover why. Liberally interspersed with yet more advertising, boring paid-for advertorial and the occasional detailed description of someone’s sexual fantasies/experiences (which would have shocked my mother to the very core of her being… I think!), no feature was more than one or two pages long and most were just a hotchpotch of fashion, society and paparazzi celebrity images, thrown together on the page. The editorial consisted mainly of a 25-word intro and a few somewhat pathetic catchy captions. I was left wondering why I hadn’t brought a good book to read.

A quick scout round the newsagent’s magazine racks confirms it – this is the norm. With so many publications offering such similar content, it’s hard to believe they can all survive. But alongside the glossy women’s monthlies is something even worse …the scandal rags. It’s incredible to even think that people actually buy these, take them home and leave them lying around for their children to read. Do I really want my 12-year old reading lurid articles like, “I had sex with my stepfather while Mum was washing his socks” or, “I stole from my blind Gran to feed my drug habit”? What sort of moral values do these instill into the vulnerable minds of our kids?

Is the collective IQ of western society regressing? Are we becoming so self-involved in materialism that we no longer have any interests outside of fashion, sex, drugs and scandal? I, for one, certainly hope that’s not true but I suspect it is, because even though every issue of a magazine that comes off the press is subsidized by a small rain forest and the per copy price is equal to the cost of a good home-cooked meal for a family of four, it sells like hot cakes!

Of course, I know that publishing is all about making money and that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to survive in what is now a highly competitive market. After almost 35 years of publishing experience I am left with the feeling that all my efforts to produce interesting, informative, casual reading material have been in vain. I am in a dilemma – I know that everything we produce on this planet should have a worthwhile purpose and that includes publishing magazines. So, should I shoulder what must be the social responsibility of all editors and continue doing what I know is right, or throw in the towel, follow the trend …and live unhappily ever after?

The economic recession is making PR people work much harder to get the same results as two or three years ago.

Harder for us, PR experts, means not that we always have to work added overtime (although this, of course, happens too), but that we have to be even more creative than before.

Well, perhaps now you will stop me by saying that this is nothing new – PR people always had to be creative in what they do! Yes, you’re absolutely right, but …. Nowadays we have to be more creative not just in using traditional PR tools. We also have to think “outside the box” and be creative in finding new PR tools, methods and activities, which can help us – in this dynamic and constantly changing world – to satisfy our clients, fulfill their expectations and reach their communication goals.

Here in Lithuania, for example, print media has suffered in the economic crisis: newspapers and magazines went bankrupt, those who are still here survived only by decreasing their circulation, reducing the number of pages, and cutting down staff by almost 50 % if not more. The after-effects are not heartening. For example, we have only one business daily in Lithuania at the moment. Moreover, reporters hardly attend media events, and newspapers got rid of foreign news columns. Print media is interested only in news of national importance. Furthermore, media badly hungers for advertising money, so it is very hard to get coverage about products or services without advertising budgets.

Media relations – one of the traditional PR tools – has become a real challenge for PR people in Lithuania. If we want to get a publication to mention a client, we need to be twice as – or four times as – creative as before, because on average only one topic out of 4-5 attracts the attention of a journalist. Which is why I am talking about the need for other, more direct, maybe not traditional PR tools to attract attention to our clients and to communicate their messages.

Social media and digital PR are becoming more and more popular in our country and give us great potential for new possibilities to reach the target audiences of our clients and to communicate their messages directly to their target groups. Of course, in using a new PR tool such as social media we need to be creative too.

While exploring the question of creativity in today’s public relations I found one very interesting post. I think it might be interesting for you too, so please, take a look. This post made me think about what I believe creativity is in social media. In my experience, creativity in social media is the ability to stay interesting, useful and engaging, so that your fans follow you in social media networks, and become your messengers – spreading your messages to those who still do not know you, or at least those who still aren’t part of your social networks. And I truly agree with the idea that creativity in social media is about getting others to tell our stories for us.

Ultimately, it is all about creativity!

Toyota’s back on course, but damage control an uphill battle was one of the story headlines in ragan.com, with footage of the interview of Toyota’s head of U.S. operations, Jim Lentz on NBC’s The Today Show. International news today shows that Toyota is definitely not back on course with the news of some of its cars having faulty accelerator pedals and still has massive reputation management work to do if it survives this crisis.

I polled our team and asked whether they felt that the interviewee did a good job in convincing us that Toyota has been honest and trustworthy… what do you think? Does the CEO do a good or average job?

I have to say that our team was not convinced but gave the interviewee an average rating for trying really hard!

Add your opinion in this Twitter Poll or in the comments section below.

“A good PR person sentences investigation to death”, stated the director of the local Centre for Independent Journalism (CJI), when results of the “Media Transparency and Media Practice in Romania” survey were debated during PR Week in Romania.

The survey was conducted online by the Oklahoma University and US Institute for Public Relations, together with some media related Romanian NGOs. While the response rate was low overall, 127 PR practitioners and 66 journalists answered 67 questions about the Romanian media and PR environment.

One of the survey findings is that journalism has become more professional than PR in Romania. The official opinion of the CJI, is that a high professional standard of PR in Romania is not desired by journalists as they believe that good PR blocks access to information for journalists, especially in the public sector.

As a former journalist myself, I understand both sides of the story and I find myself advocating to former colleagues what PR is really about.

By simply looking in the dictionary we can find that a PR person is “a person employed to establish and promote a favorable relationship with the public”. So if “bad news is good news” works for journalists, it obviously does not work for a PR person as per the definition. Journalists tend to think that good PR equals easy direct access to the General Manager. And to their surprise, the PR person gives them “commercial stories” instead, while the “real” story lies undiscovered.  The objectives of PR and journalism are not the same and exclusive stories do not come alive from press releases, they need to be explored by an investigative journalistic mind and not expected as a default ‘from the other side’.

Another aspect that journalists ignore about PR is that Public Relations is much more than media relations. PR consultancy also includes corporate and brand communication, internal communication, CSR and so on. Let’s not forget that PR does not only deal with the bright side of things. And that PR’s role in a crisis situation, for instance, is crucial – for both the company and the media.

Perhaps many aspects of PR would be clearer for journalists – who tend to regard PR persons as manipulators of people’s minds rather than conveyors of the truth – if an ethical code of PR specialists was issued in Romania. Just as journalists in Romania have recently done.

It is true that PR people often don’t put themselves in the journalists’ shoes, which further widens the gap, and that there is room for improvement in our camp as well.

The professionalization of PR has to go hand in hand with that of journalism, both camps have to adjust and create a dialogue between them, otherwise misunderstandings between the two will only continue.

Photo credit

The Blogpaper vs Traditional Media

The first issue of the Blogpaper was distributed in London on November 20th 2009 by theblogpaper.co.uk news community.

This project is aimed at providing an opportunity for bloggers, photographers and young journalists to reach new audiences. Also, the paper is supposed to give a weekly overview of the most important content submitted by the online community.  The Blogpaper intends to develop into a free weekly, but only a beta version has been published up to now, with an ePaper version available at its website.

“Instead of a few people controlling the majority of what is being published and therefore read, the blogpaper aims to put the majority in charge” the authors of the idea note. Although the new paper is aimed at a specifically targeted community, it does do some justice to Rupert Murdoch’s claim that “Readers, not owners, determine news”. Today the readers are not only determining the content, but they are as well eager to create it.

How is the Blogpaper created?

The Blogpaper is a free paper, composed of bloggers’ stories. Anyone can upload their stories and photo to the Blogpaper website, and then readers can determine their favorite stories by discussing and rating them. Those which get the highest ratings are then printed in the paper version.

Obviously, life is speeding up rapidly and new technologies enable anyone to make their own thoughts public with just a click of a mouse. Journalists are now working 30% more than they did 10 years ago and 1-2 pages per day is now an average quota for a journalist. A new trend of creating a newspaper within 1 day has become a popular way of entertainment among the new generation of Ukrainian journalists. But in addition to all their efforts they are now facing competition from their own readers.  This speed up of information flow creates new challenges for PR professionals also: offering readers, who are becoming the journalist as well, more and more targeted content.

But how many of us are willing to barter away exquisite chef’s specialties for fast-food snacks?

According to a leading media expert, Piet Bakker, traditional media would not disappear with the spread of social media, same as theatre still exists after the cinema was invented. Highly professional newspapers and magazines, offering analytics and exclusiveness, will never lose their audience.

About 70% of readers of printed news editions in Europe read other sources of information simultaneously, including Facebook, Twitter etc. Printed editions are not losing their audience, Dr Bakker says, giving an example of one of the most widely-circulated newspaper in Spain 20 Minutos with 270,000 offline readers daily and only 810 online visitors monthly. The same situation is observed with the Spanish Marca, El Pais and many other popular printed media in the world, which are not likely to lose their print version readers.

I’m looking forward to finding the Blogpaper in Kyiv one day. I would also be interested to know what its circulation and target audience would be. Your thoughts on this are welcomed.