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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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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.

Playing for Change

May 8, 2009 in BondBuzz, BondPR, Media, One World, Politics, Press for Peace, Responsibility by Tom Burgess | No comments

No matter who you are, no matter where you go in your life at some point you are going to need somebody to stand by you. We are one world. Here is a moving performance of street musicians around the world playing the classic “Stand By Me”, produced and coordinated by the organization Playing for Change: Peace Through Music. Hope you all enjoy it as much as we did, and may it inspire you. Listen here

Who knew that naming your dog could cause such a cultural divide?

February 3, 2009 in Marketing, Media, PR, Politics, Reputation, Responsibility by Helen Bannigan | No comments

We’ve had our beloved chocolate lab for 8 years now and I only just recently learned from a random Muslim cab driver in Paris that her name is highly offensive and insulting to Islam.

And that made me think about how much our choice of words matter.  Hidden meanings can communicate a message completely different from that which we wish to convey.  As a PR person, I ensure our client’s message is received in the way it was intended, and help to “translate” the words to diverse cultures outside of the client’s comfort zone.

And yet here I was, making a mess of naming our furry friend and insulting a number of my not-so-furry friends in the process.

I originally chose the name Aisha because I love the song by Algerian Rai artist, Khaled, called Aicha. I’ve always been attracted to Arabic culture, fascinated by the Islamic religion, and when living in Paris I fostered very close and dear friendships with some wonderful Muslim people.  Naming my dog Aisha was – in my mind -  a show of respect and honor, as our family pet is very much a revered part of the family.

When a Muslim friend of mine expressed her surprise, saying I shouldn’t name my dog Aisha because it’s a girl’s name, not a dog’s name.  I thought it’s just because it was a little silly, the equivalent of naming a dog Tom or Susan.

What I didn’t know was that it’s relatively unheard of for Muslims to even have a dog as a family pet.  Canines are considered not just unclean but downright vile and contaminated.  It is said that angels do not enter a house which contains a dog.  Calling someone “a dog”, while odd in Western culture, is amongst the worst insults you can give to someone (up there with throwing your shoes at someone’s head ).

Not only that, but Aisha was the favorite wife of the Islamic prophet, Muhammad’s, and referred to as the “Mother of all Believers”. Amongst the most prominent of Muhammad’s wives, Aisha became an educated spokesperson for the teachings of the Prophet and has been revered as a role model by millions of women.

 Had it not been for that lovely Parisian taxi driver, I never would have known how offensive my innocent act was perceived in the very culture I was intending to honor.

A useful reminder of stuff I already know (but apparently need to be reminded of!):

Know your audience. Know the cultural translation of the words you chose to use.

Words matter.

Ana aasif !

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President Two-Dot-Zero

November 10, 2008 in Fascinating Facts, Marketing, Media, Politics, Social Media, Technology by Shannon Wolfe | No comments

In a brief op-ed piece published on November 5, Robert Solé of France’s daily newspaper Le Monde qualified the election of Barack Obama as “The first worldwide good news since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989” (“La première bonne nouvelle planétaire depuis la chute du mur de Berlin en 1989”), and judging from the conversations I have had and the front covers of just about every magazine I have seen in my travels through France, the UK and Belgium since last Tuesday, it seems like that could indeed be true.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing for us to study about Mr. Obama’s victory is how extremely well he used new media to motivate his supporters, convince his skeptics, educate, inform, parry criticisms, and raise money.

His official campaign website was universally hailed as being a next-generation model of the genre.

From it, supporters could easily download logos, printable posters, signs, flyers, website buddy icons, computer desktop backgrounds, and more. And much has already been written about his campaign’s record-smashing fundraising: Obama collected donations from some 3.2 million individuals via the Internet.

But beyond providing campaign tools and gathering money, Barack Obama was also incredibly savvy about using social media. His campaign used text messages and e-mails to communicate directly with voters. He had profiles on Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. He Twittered. He published photos — including personal “behind the scenes” shots of his family on election night — to Flickr . His campaign’s YouTube channel has had more than 19.5 million views. He even placed virtual billboard advertisements in popular X-box Live games.

And it doesn’t seem like Obama intends to stop this sort of Internet-based communication now that he’s been elected. Check out http://change.gov/, which is, in its own words “Your source for the latest news, events, and announcements so that you can follow the setting up of the Obama Administration.”

Smart money is on President Obama having a game-changing, highly interactive website, live and operational on January 20, 2009.

How do you think President 2.0 might change our world and our activities?

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Journalistic Terrorism

August 17, 2008 in Media by Tom Burgess | No comments

Looking at the media here in the UK, it seems that some of our journalists have a death wish. Continually finding new angles on economic downturn, reporting new surveys and anecdotal evidence that suggests the world as we know it is coming to an end.

An example is a full page article in today’s Sunday Times in London that has many quotes on how bad it is and how bad it is going to get. Sure the evidence of drop in demand in some sectors is there but not everywhere. Surely in an article like this it would be right to ask what they think could be done to make it better or recommendations for government and business to work together to reverse the trend, but absolutely nothing, it was all negative. When I worked as a journalist we were told about balance you could not give just one side of the story, you had to ask an independent authoritative person  not just take one company’s view on things, Yet this article asked just two companies, one closed and the other laid off staff but both were linked to construction sector. Even the quotes from the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development was all negative, surely they could have some recommendations for the government, may be they may it was edited out or maybe they were not asked?

The concern is that this style is akin to journalistic terrorism, destroying business by words not explosives, undermining confidence  so that indeed the slow down becomes a self fulfilling prophesy and gloom covers all and the media can then remind us that they told us so. A lot is at risk for the entrepreneurial community.

I wondered whether other countries displayed this same death wish. Certainly a quick glance at the business headlines of CNN & BBC, CNN had more balance and offered hope and answers where as BBC was negative.

Come on, lets be positive, there is a way out. seek out success, look at how companies are diversifying, coming up with news ideas, developing new markets, using technology to cut costs, meeting the demand for products that have potential in current times, making peoples lives more satisfying then perhaps we will have confidence again and that will become a self fulfilling prophesy.