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!

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.

Ahmed Ranja undertook an internship with Action Global Communications for six months, working with the digital and social media team in the UAE office, from Sweden. Here, Ahmed recounts his experience…

My media management degree from Sweden was full of fascinating experiences but the most amazing learning during my master’s programme was the online internship with Action’s UAE office, its GCC headquarters. Over a six-month period I worked on my master’s thesis, which was ‘Promoting Tourism in Abu Dhabi using Social Media’.

I have always been fascinated by the culture, lifestyle and geographical location of United Arab Emirates. Although it is not a large country by land area, the cultural mix offered by this destination is one of a kind. Their renowned luxury lifestyle and warm hospitality had always been a major attraction for tourists.

When Action UAE’s Head of Digital, Meredith Carson, recommended this research topic I conducted a study and realized that opportunities for promoting tourism through traditional media are slimming down. These days, travellers generally prefer to collect information online from various websites and online networks, rather than walking into a tour operator or agency.

Once I decided upon the medium to convey my message – social media – the next phase was to turn to the diverse aspects of tourism. As I was thinking about tourism, a question popped up in my mind: why do people want to travel? What actually motivates them?  This forced me to look into consumer motivation theory, as it is considered especially relevant to tourism.

Thinking about how social media could be successful in exploiting the key strengths of Abu Dhabi, I conducted a thorough investigation and figured out that there are many boons. By using social media, would-be travellers can easily discover media-rich information (video, imagery, articles, opinion, stats and facts) about their intended destination. These platforms allow people to collect desired knowledge from several sources as well as glean insight from other people’s travel experience.

There were abundant experiences that I went through during my course, some were fascinating and others were exasperating. Lots of reading, writing and re-writing has been a vital practice during this expedition which at times was annoying but was the sole path leading to perfection. At times I did feel low but never let go hope and every rising challenge made me more determined.

For those who intend to pursue careers in social media, I would just like to say that it is a field where one needs to put in hard work and demonstrate smart work. One of the crucial lessons that I learned during the research work was that there are no shortcuts or substitutes to hard work. One has to put in utmost energy to achieve the desired results because, at the end of the day, the final outcome is equal to the amount of effort put in by you. Sincere devoted work does get recognition and this sense of achievement is worth all the sleepless nights and stressful moments.

August 31^st has (unofficially) been set as International Blog Day, an initiative of blogday.org since 2005. BlogDay is an opportunity for each blogger to recommend 5 blogs that he or she finds interesting, along with a short description and a link for each blog.

As blogs and bloggers are an integral part of how we all receive, process and use information, we wanted to pay homage to local blogs that stand out from the crowd in some our markets, and share them with you. Here are 5 blogs, by country, that our local offices reckon are worth reading (most blogs have a focus either on PR and communications, our clients’ industries, or are just plain interesting):

BAHRAIN Blogs

1. Mahmood’s Den (Political / General Interest)

2. Bint Battuta in Bahrain (Social)

3. Babbling Bahrania (General Interest)

4. Birding Bahrain (Wildlife)

5. Lost in Bahrain (Personal / Humorous)

BULGARIAN Blogs

1. Izbrano (Technology/ Gadgets)

2. Salted Lemons (Cooking)

3. Kreativen (Online Marketing & Social Media)

4. Auto Equipment (Automotive)

5. Lets Gym (Health & Sports)

CYPRUS Blogs

1. I Pellara en POLLON Logion (Financial / Politics)

2. Chrysanthos Tsouroullis (Politics / General Interest)

3. Sometimes YES Sometimes NO (Public Relations)

4. Sports Gazette (Sports)

5. Charalambos Theopemptou – Epitropos Perivallontos (Ecology / Environment)

GREECE Blogs

1. Athensville (City Life)

2. Fashion Architect (Fashion)

3. Enteka (General Interest)

4. A,mpa? (Lifestyle)

5. Iparhoume…Siniparhoume (Journalism / Society)

KUWAIT Blogs

1. 248AM (Social)

2. Frankom (General Interest)

3. Q8 Black Market (Entertainment/ Events)

4. 4th Ring Road (General Interest)

5. Some Contrast (General Interest)

KYRGYZSTAN Blogs

1. Mirsulzhan Namazaliev (Social Media, General Interest)

2. Discovering of Environment of Central Asia (Environment, Science)

3. Kloop Media (General Interest, PR)

4. Bugulab (Design, Art)

5. Bektour Iskender (General Interest, Political)

LATVIA Blogs

1. Slava Se (Personal)

2. Telecommunication and IT, Juris Kaža (IT and Telecommunications)

3. Stuff-n-Style (Fashion)

4. Public Relations, Marketing, Ingars Rudzitis (PR, Marketing)

5. Ansis Egle (Tourism, Personal)

LITHUANIA Blogs

1. Dansu Dansu (Marketing & Communications)

2. Marketer.lt (Internet Marketing)

3. Uagadugu (TV News)

4. Mediana.lt (Sociology, market research)

5. Komunikacija Facebook’e (Social media news)

OMAN Blogs

1. Muscat Confidential (Current Affairs)

ROMANIA Blogs

1. Comanescu (Media)

2. Cristian Manafu (Social Media)

3. Puterea Comunicarii (Media, Communications & CSR)

4. Return to the com(m)unity (Media & Advertising)

5. PR Wave Blog (PR & Communications)

RUSSIA Blogs

1. Drugoi in Russia (Social & Political Photo/Video Blog)

2. Sergey Dolya’s Blog (Travel and Tourism)

3. IT Blog (Information Technology)

4. Medvedev in Russia (Political)

5. Mikhail Prokhorov Blog (General Interest)

SERBIA Blogs

1. Dragan Varagic (e-Business, e-Marketing, Online PR)

2. Basta Balkana (Lifestyle/ General Interest)

3. Svet Nauke (Science)

4. Veza Blog (Online Marketing)

5. Trzisno Resenje (Economy)

UAE Blogs

1. Informed Comment (Middle Eastern and Islamic Affairs)

2. Life in Dubai (Dubai Economy/ General)

3. Hellwa Fashion (Fashion & Lifestyle)

4. Something To Chew (Advertising / Design)

5. Arabian Money (Finance & Economy)

A big thank you to the contributors of this blog post: Rohan Shanker (Bahrain), Toni Stankova (Bulgaria), Dimitris Ioannides (Cyprus), Panayiotis Othonos (Cyprus), Angeliki Kiofiri (Greece), Amina Al Jarery (Kuwait), Elira Turdubaeva (Kyrgyzstan), Marija Makarevicha (Latvia), Jolita Jukneviciute (Lithuania), Camelia Cristache (Romania), Ruxandra Scortea (Romania), Grigory Lugovoy (Russia), Anna Vavilova (Russia), Srdjan Crnogorac (Serbia), David Baker (Oman and UAE), Meredith Carson (UAE).

Any blogs you’d like to recommend? Add them to the comments section along with their country of origin. Happy Blog Day!

The casual and topical Russian word for rain, дождь, became a top mystery for Twitter users worldwide yesterday.

The growingly hot weather in Eastern Europe was interrupted by a rainfall in region on Tuesday, July 20th. This event lead to the Cyrillic word “дождь”, which means rain, to instantly become one of the top Twitter trending topics. Every minute, 10+ tweets containing the word would appear. This is the first time when a Cyrillic word has been featured in Twitter’s trending topics.

Twitter Trending Topics Worldwide - 20 July 2010

As a result, Twitter’s English-speaking audience had an overwhelming interest for the unknown word, which resulted in rumors and funny guesses by more than 70 million users, with some tweets saying:

What is дождь?

#дождь is a time when the vodka falls from the sky and polar bears begin to walk on the red square with AK47

дождь is Putin’s new pet name

I know what is Дождь! Follow me!)

Rumors that “дождь” is a new Russian nuclear bomb or a new phone which is better than iPhone 4 had also started circulating.

By the end of the day, the word дождь had a viral flashmob-like effect in Twitter.

Even the Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, posted a tweet containing the word дождь:

Translation: Just landed in Finland. Was it raining in Moscow?

Evening news on one of the central TV channels in Russia even reported on this funny case.

So why was a plain subject as the rain such a popular topic among Russian-speaking twitterers? Well with so many people being as exhausted by the unusually hot weather, they were so ecstatic to see some rain coming to cool things down and so started to instantly tweet about it as soon as the first rain drops hit the ground. And with more than 200,000 Russian-speaking Twitter users tweeting about it at the same time, it made the other 69 million and 700,000 Twitter users take notice.

FACEBOOKCAFE is a relatively new café in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The idea of this café-club is to connect friends from Facebook, but in an offline space. The only requirement is to have Facebook friends from Plovdiv or Facebook friends who visit the city.

This unorthodox Facebook café community is able to exist because of the specific urban culture of Plovdiv, which is one of the oldest cities in Europe and the second largest city in Bulgaria. As an unwritten rule, Plovdiv is a place for artists and people who love to entertain. It is therefore natural that people prefer to communicate face to face, instead of spending time online.

Plovdiv’s unique culture led to the idea of ‘offline Facebook communication’ through the FACEBOOKCAFE.

The owners of the café club are young guys who have adapted Facebook applications perfectly to the ‘real’ world. Just as an example – If you’re hungry you can order the YoFarm salad (a tribute to Farmville)! J This really is an unusual place, and it’s proving a success with customers.

The café club opened its doors at the end of last year and is continuing to develop new ideas. Every regular customer will receive an e-card and when they enter the venue, it will automatically show on his/her Facebook account! It sounds cool, doesn’t it? You’ll get to show off to your Facebook friends that you’re having coffee at the Facebook cafe. Furthermore, if you want to use Facebook while at the café, it’s easy since an intelligent system allows all messages, photos and videos, to show on a screen at the table you are sitting!  There are apparently many other ideas in the pipeline, which the owners are currently keeping to themselves.

This is a really innovative concept which links today’s digital culture with traditional face-to-face communication.

According to data published by the software and marketing company Komfo Bulgaria, over 1 million Bulgarians use Facebook, the largest social network in the word at the moment. The data also shows that the number of Facebook users in the country increased ten-fold from January 2009 and almost one third of all Bulgarians who use the internet are registered on the social network. According to Komfo Bulgaria, Facebook is used for both personal and business purposes.

Images Source: http://yurukov.net

With the world in the midst of a social media revolution, it is more than obvious that «the times are e-changing». And that agencies are facing a new, intriguing reality: Social media as a communication tool.

Social networking sites are now seen as a promising means of publicity, which every ‘brand’ must embrace.

But is social media really golden?

Michael Trenerry in SPAMBOOK – Is Facebook becoming the next SPAM medium?, an article at brandrepublic.com, expressed his disappointment in the fact that brands ‘invade’ popular social networking sites without following a specific long term strategy. And he warned that if people don’t start looking at Facebook with the required responsibility, soon we’ll be talking about Spambook.

Is this view exaggerated or realistic?

How should brands act in order to be successful when making use of social networking sites?

First of all, they have to consult and trust experts in the field. Next, they should realize that social media isn’t necessarily as simple as it seems. Brands shouldn’t be fooled by the relative technical simplicity and think that creating a group and just forwarding their message to 1.000 people will be enough to succeed in their goals!

They need a well planned strategy, a long term business plan, incorporation of the social media plan into a wider pr and advertising campaign, analysis and targeting of the audience, and an estimation of many other parameters. Brands should follow a slow and attentive course. A smart concept and a well implemented strategy is what they need to convey their message, and to eliminate the risk of being listed in the eternal “spam list” prevailing in the mind of every consumer.

Also, a change in thinking is considered crucial. The most important thing to realise is that a company cannot have full control of their ad campaigns. The success of a campaign depends increasingly on the participation of the audience and companies should respect that. A change of thinking requires an effort to become acceptable in a large group, such as social media, and to be ready to react at all times.

Last but not least, social media as a medium of promotion contributes, through its immediacy, to a healthy and direct relation between brands and their public in an online environment. This immediacy offers the public the ability to be present, to communicate, to influence and retain a stronger position towards brands.

Social media enables users to approach new clients who would be difficult to reach through traditional media and permits ready interaction with them in order to show interest, answer their questions, and prove that they are not “just another company”. By encouraging dialogue and suggestions, companies have a unique opportunity to improve their products and services, and to be immediately informed of any problems they might have with the public, thus making it easier to meet the public’s expectations.

And all of this at a smaller cost than traditional media.

Are you still wondering if social media’s worth it?!

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!

Some food for thought for communicators is to know and learn about new trends that will shape the years to come, especially consumer trends. A great read on the topic is trendwatching.com (@trendwatching on Twitter), οne of the world’s leading trend firms, which specializes in scouting for, identifying and explaining trends.

Whatever they are, trends influence consumers’ behaviors and as communication people it’s essential to have an edge and keep an open mind. While a trend alone cannot be the basis for brands strategies, they play their part in devising communication activities that are current and appealing.

Now and Forever

Two mega-trends of 2009 – Nowism and Foreverism –are seen as powerful for coming years and both relate to the ever evolving online world.  Nowism reflects the (now established) need for instant gratification, knowing what everyone does at all times and sharing experiences instantly with the world.  While this has lots to do with everything digital, a sub-trend that emerged is enjoying things ‘live’, off-line, with ‘warm bodies’.

American Airlines shows this best through this campaign:

Foreverism builds on Nowism showing how, from now on, we will always rely on the fact that people can be found, they always interact and information lasts forever in the digital world.  Many brands understood this will be business as usual rather than a trend and joined the 2.0 conversation.

Key trends for 2010

Urbany is a trend we’ll be hearing more and more of during this year. From developing regions like Asia which will become increasingly urban, to designers who theme products after mega-cities, it’s all about being a global citizen.

A new definition of luxury is also coming as the concept evolves from the material to the less tangible, defined by Fluxury (flux luxury). We establish what luxury means for us and perhaps it will be beyond ‘more expensive’ and quantified in time, access, perspective, [.........] – you fill in the blanks.

Anything limited fuels the need for feeling special and unique for many people and the Limited Locations trend is spot on. One of the easiest to apply in consumer communication that we have seen evolving in the past years (not so much in Eastern Europe though). Something is sold in just one location for just a limited amount of time. Shops even appear in the middle of parks for a weekend!

If timeless and trends can be in one sentence, they must refer to things ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘giving back’. These two trends, Eco-Easy and Embedded Generosity have a wider audience to address each year and such elements can be easily incorporated in communication programs.

Among the top 10 trends, Maturalism (mature materialism) taps into how far brands and people will go in moving with the global culture. Sorbets tasting like wine and boutique ice-creams are just some of the more diverse marketing stunts. A more risky take, but as the creators say, not one to ignore for brands who consider the future, less-uptight generations of customers.

Click to read the entire briefing on the “10 Crucial Consumer Trends of 2010″

Finally, not all trends relate to everyone and every trend can generate an anti-trend in the run for individuality and being different. When something is of mass-interest it becomes ‘now’ to have exclusivity, snack food turns to slow-food and hyper-tasking gives in to ‘simply ordered’.

It ultimately means that shaping or even creating trends is up to people and brands that have an influence as long as, a) – they understand what is now, b) – can give it a spin and c) – more people realize it.