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Now in San Francisco too

June 7, 2010 in BondPR, Business, Marketing, PR, Technology by Tom Burgess | No comments

As mentioned before, my unexpected extended trip to San Francisco in April, gave me time to conclude a deal that has significantly strengthened our presence in the US. So we have officially announced today that we are merging our US operations with SF based PR and communications agency – Rainemakers. Rainemakers was established a little over a year ago by Debra Raine, former GM of Waggener Edstrom‘s Western Region, EVP Weber Shandwick’s Bay Area, and PorterNovelli in Asia. She has a tremendous track record driving US and international campaigns for companies such as IBM, HP and Amazon; and she’s already grown a strong client base for Rainemakers in what is a difficult and highly competitive market.

For US clients particularly those tech companies in Silicon Valley, we can offer strong domestic PR capability integrated with seamless and scalable international campaigns without the high cost associated with traditional multinational PR firms or the hassles of managing multiple agencies. For clients based outside USA we can now offer strong US public relations capability covering consumer, corporate, digital, IR and technology, all as part of their international campaigns. Read more

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Clash to the Titans

May 20, 2010 in BondPR, Business, Marketing by Tom Burgess | No comments

Part of our role is to make ordinary things interesting.

So what is interesting about Disk Storage? Well, a London-based visual effects house Cinesite, a Kodak company, carried out artistic rendering of animation and scene development for the  Warner Bros blockbuster “Clash of the Titans” using a storage system from BlueArc. Also Cinesite is currently working on the following forthcoming releases, “Marmaduke” (Fox), “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” (Fox/Walden) and “John Carter of Mars” (Disney/Pixar), all of which are being produced on the same BlueArc system.

And other customers include: Double Negative Visual Effects (the FX studio behind movies like “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” and “Batman Begins“), Eidos Interactive, Mill Film, Photon VFX and Redchillies.vfx. Most recent success in the sector was when four-time Academy Award® winning New Zealand based visual effects creator Weta Digital relied on a BlueArc storage solution for artistic rendering of groundbreaking animation and scene development for the film “Avatar.”

So its not that you think you have a great product but who is using it and what for that can make it interesting. More on this story

Global campaigns just got easier

January 5, 2010 in BondPR, Business, Marketing, Media, One World by Tom Burgess | No comments

Happy New Year everyone. So a new year, new hope, new opportunities.

For successful international PR campaigns, it is very important to have PR professionals who understand the local market, know the local media, live the local culture and speak the local language. But this does not have to mean you have to have a retained PR firm in each country.  Much of the management can be handled at a regional level,  for instance campaign coordination, creating regional content and measurement of success.  So  in-country teams focus on personal media outreach and monitoring.

There are also benefits for certain campaigns that may only need to reach an English speaking audience such as in South East Asia,  Middle East or Southern Africa where there are number of regional media in English or in Latin America where Spanish and Portuguese dominate.

Now that we are working in 50 countries and with Regus in 30, it was time to move forward with our plan to establish 10 regional hubs that can cover the whole world. These regional hubs will be

  1. London: Western Europe
  2. Paris: Southern Europe
  3. Munich: DACH region
  4. Prague: Central & Eastern Europe
  5. Dubai: Middle East
  6. Johannesburg: Africa
  7. Singapore: Asia
  8. Sydney: Australasia
  9. Buenos Aires: Latin America
  10. San Francisco: North America

Apart from London and Paris, which are owned offices, BondPR regional hubs will be joint ventures with independent local PR firms or experienced professionals who are already working with us. Where possible we will concentrate resources and activity at the regional hub level and bring in any of our established team of local delivery partners in over 80 countries as required.

The aim is to offer one point of contact for the world or the region, so reducing the hassle of coordinating multiple agencies or managing separate campaigns at a country level. This means clients retain control centrally or regionally, ensuring consistent messages, topical content and cost effective use of budget.

So if you want to talk to the world, talk to us, global campaigns just got easier…….. more info

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Regus work with BondPR in 30 countries

December 14, 2009 in BondBuzz, Business, Marketing, PR by Tom Burgess | No comments

Great news here, Regus has said it is OK  for BondPR to publicly announce that we won the contract to handle international PR campaign across 30 countries. It was good to read the story in PR Week UK . Actually we finalised the deal back in October but we all agreed not to talk about it until some results had been achieved.  But now that results are coming in from around the world we can tell you all about it.

As Regus grew to operate in over 75 countries, so too did the number of PR agencies and it became a  management nightmare. Regus still maintain agencies in 10 key markets  such as UK, USA, France…., but for 30 countries where there were 20 agencies, there is now one. Regus wanted the best support in local markets but through a single point of contact, they selected BondPR, as we offer “a unified cost-effective and results orientated approach, as well as good chemistry and significant global reach.”

The campaign is being built around Regus’s key messages which are particularly relevant at this time of globalisation, cost review and changing work patterns.  Regus  already generates a significant amount of content in the form of news, articles, briefing papers, surveys and research reports. BondPR is tailoring, localising and translating this content to meet the needs of key business and management media around the world.

So being in PR we wrote a news release about this.

We  were already a customer of Regus and look forward to making a significant impact on their further success.

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Making multi-country campaigns even simpler.

June 5, 2009 in BondBuzz, BondPR, Business, Marketing, Media, One World, PR, Technology by Tom Burgess | No comments

Now any PR  firm operating in the tech market can say they have a global reach of 80 countries. No more fluff and pretending, it is real. BondPR  is opening up its international network to other PR firms under the brand of BondPRNet.

Actually we have been handling international PR campaigns for PR firms in the UK, USA and Germany for a while but now want to extend our partnerships and also offer white label service if required.

BondPR only has direct employees in three countries but has put in place delivery partners in a further 77 countries and is currently active in 30. We add value by making multi-county campaigns simple. We manage the international team and take care of consistency and quality of service, offering one point of contact. However if a PR firm wants just one country we may put them in direct contract with our local office.

As more clients look to manage international campaigns centrally partially due to budget constraints, then this option makes sense, they have their main PR firm whether it is in USA, UK  or wherever and they can use BondPRNet to deliver the campaign and the message as if it was their own team. Yes, it makes multi-country campaigns simple.

Be heard and not seen?

May 14, 2009 in BondBuzz, BondPR, Business, Marketing, Media, Podcast, Politics, Reputation, Responsibility, Social Media, Technology by Tom Burgess | No comments

I think podcasts are great, listen to what you want when you want, especially when you can’t effectively be doing anything else like travelling to work/meetings, exercising, walking the dog and so on. That’s got to be an hour or so a day for most people. It is not intrusive and often much more inspiring than listing to the radio. Ok, listening to Bruce Springsteen fires me up but there are so many great podcasts out there especially in our field of marketing/PR/communications. But companies/organisation/governments are still not sure where to start or some think it is a great idea, yes, but why? It was similar with blogging, companies thought they had a have blog but not sure why, now it has settled done a bit! So first, you need to work out who and what you want talk to, what message to you want to send, who do you want to influence.

So we thought we would help here, to get you started Bond-i has set up its new Bondcast service, driven by our very own Neville Hobson, who has got to be one of the most experienced podcasters on the planet, having presented a show called “For Immediate Release” for four years and also co-written the definitive book on Podcasting. Corporate podcasting should be an integral part of any organization’s PR mix, it’s a valuable medium for communicating your message to a targeted audience - whether that’s customers, prospective staff, media or other key influencers. So listen up, podcast your message……now, you may be heard and eventually seen by the people you want to influence.

Press releases are dead, long live the news release

May 10, 2009 in BondBuzz, BondPR, Business, Marketing, Media, PR, Reputation, Social Media by Tom Burgess | No comments

The press release is no longer just for the press. In today’s online world it is a way of communicating directly with your audience (customers, partners etc…) by supplying the online news services with content so that people will find you when they are looking for companies like you. In fact, the “press” release is a pretty bad way of communicating with the press, most journalists ignore them as they get too many and they know everyone has received the same one.

So just take the “news” release for what it is, a release of news to everyone. Craft it carefully so your key words and phrases are included and get it out online. so when a real journalist or blogger is researching your field, they find you by hitting on the content you created. And don’t just do one release a month, write more short pieces, even very week, just updates on your company, comments on the market, agenda setting thoughts on your sector. Also make sure your international offices get them too so that it gives ideas they can adapt and amplify locally. But don’t send them unsolicited to journalists, just the online news sites, journalists deserve the personal approach. So create the buzz, then you may get the bang.

Reaching out to the world

May 7, 2009 in BondBuzz, Business, Marketing, PR, Technology by Tom Burgess | No comments

Most tech firms operate internationally in order to survive and indeed grow. However this global presence is not matched by the biggest PR firms that serve them. We did a check on the top 20 PR agencies that specialize in tech produced by O’Dywer, it reveals that only half of them have an office outside the USA. Of the remaining 10, six only have an office in the USA and four are members of networks. The top three in terms of global reach are Edelman with a presence in 24 countries, Text 100 with 23 and Lewis in 20 which may explain why they collectively hold 70% of the listed total revenue of $216 million. Only 5 agencies make any significant reference to international, none seemed to indicate it as an integral part of their offering.

So it was interesting to note that BondPR is currently handling campaigns for tech companies in 30 countries through its team of offices and established delivery partners. So does that make us Number One for global reach!

Annual reports are rarely read

February 24, 2009 in Business, PR by Mathias Miller-Aichholz | No comments

Alarming study: the communication via annual report fails the target group in large part.

 

A study carried out by the German Institute for Share Promotion (Deutsches Aktien Institut DAI) gives quoted companies a bad certificate: only 44% of private investors read annual reports and even only 32 % quarterly reports. The survey was conducted among 470.000 smallholders.

 

This is “a catastrophe for stock corporations” states Bernhard Pellens, one of the authors of the study and professor for economics at the Ruhr-University Bochum.

 

Two factors are specified as reasons by the private investors: the huge amount of information and the bad comprehensibility of the texts.

 

The length of the reports probably can hardly be reduced – but the improvement of the texts provides a high potential. Here lies the key for the optimization of the communication between companies and their private shareholders.

The Perfect Client

December 22, 2008 in Business, PR by Piers Finzel | 1 comment

Little over a month ago, a friend and ex-colleague of mine who nows runs her own PR agency in Madrid, launched an innovative new campaign to find the perfect client. The campaign consists of a competition that potential client companies could participate in so as to try and win the first prize of 3 months free PR. All they had to do is supply a good briefing and explain concisely what is required of the agency. In order to be considered the ‘Perfect Client’, they also had to fulfil at least 3 of the following criteria, which I will share with you here because they are something that, after so many years in the business, we can all relate to highly.

The ‘Perfect Client’ is hence one that:
- Knows how to provide a clear briefing
- Congratulates the PR agency when a job is done well
- Doesn’t look to be on the front page of a national daily come what may, because it knows that sector specific media are or can be more important
- Doesn’t ask over and over again before a press conference: “How many journalists are coming?”
- Doesn’t want to hold a press conference every fortnight and distribute a press release per week (unless it can be justified)
- Doesn’t expect journalists to drop everything to cover their event, because no matter how important it might be, sometimes other breaking news stories take priority
- Can be flexible with budgets so that, although not limitless, they allow for a creative or newsworthy action that makes the agency’s work easier
- Looks upon the agency as a member of it’s own team and not an external supplier of solutions to problems
- Doesn’t prolongue to approval of materials until editorial deadlines have passed and the opportunity has been missed
- Is willing to do interviews, and if not, then doesn’t complain because the media never publish interviews with them
- Trusts the agency to do what it does best - COMMUNICATE on its behalf - and doesn’t leave it to find out important things about the company from third party sources
- Is realistic about the budget and what it can do with it
- Has an open and fluid relationship with the agency and doesn’t squeeze its time with the agency into the five minutes between sales meetings.

As soon as I find out who the winner was, I’ll let you know.

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