The 2013 Calendar - where to hang your PR campaign hat

The illustration for the 2013 Calendar is by Kevin ("KAL") Kallaugher, The Economist's editorial cartoonistAll good public relations strategies look at the timing of campaigns. Just think about the planning needed by your local fine-dinning restaurant and jewelry store to prepare for valentines, or the toy manufacturer to plan for the holiday period.

And, it has been known, for brands without too much real news, to latch hold of an event on a calendar and milk it for all it is worth. 

So what can we look forward to in 2013? Well, with a little help from our calendar, and a recent article in the Economist, we present you options for the upcoming year:

JANUARY

• Ireland takes over the presidency of the European Union. Sláinte.
• Britain takes over the presidency of the G8 club of industrial powers. Cheers.
• London marks the 150th anniversary of the world’s first underground passenger railway, running through King’s Cross. Mind the gap.
• In Washington, DC, the US president is inaugurated, beginning his four-year term.

FEBRUARY

• South Africa hosts football’s 29th African Cup of Nations. ag man.
• New Orleans stages the 47th Super Bowl. Touchdown.
• Hollywood lays out the red carpet for the 85th Academy Awards.
• Chinese around the world welcome the Year of the Snake, associated with grace, intelligence and material gain. Say 'red envelope'.
• It’s carnival season, from Rio de Janeiro to Trinidad and Tobago. Woo Hooo!

MARCH

• Smile, please, on March 20th for the inaugural UN-sponsored International Happiness Day; and from March 27th at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
• China’s parliament holds its annual session, and formally appoints the country’s new president and prime minister.
• Kenya is due to hold presidential and parliamentary elections.
• Marbles-enthusiasts flock to the Greyhound pub in Tinsley Green, Sussex, for the 79th World Marbles Championships. Reall... marbles?
• Boston hosts the 44th World Irish Dancing Championships. It's actually a Feis.

APRIL

• Download “Happy Birthday to You”: Apple’s iTunes Store is ten years old.
• Ecuadoreans vote in the presidential run-off.
• The First Tech Challenge world championships take place in St Louis, featuring lots of robots.

MAY

• Finland and Sweden host the 77th World Ice Hockey Championships. Dive!
• America’s grandest horse race, the Kentucky Derby, takes place in Louisville; Europe’s biggest football game, the UEFA Champions League final, kicks off in London.
• The Indian film industry marks its centenary: the first full-length Indian feature film, “Raja Harishchandra”, was released in 1913.
• The Peking to Paris Motor Challenge begins. First organized in 1907, this is the fourth time the race for vintage and classic cars has been run.

JUNE

• Iran holds a presidential election.
• Cyclists begin three weeks of agony as the 100th Tour de France starts for the first time in Corsica.

JULY

• Croatia becomes the 28th member of the European Union; Lithuania takes over the EU’s presidency.
• Watch out for flying saucers on World UFO day; and for raging animals during the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Which is more strange?

AUGUST

• Fans of the King head to Memphis for Elvis Week. "Thank you, thank you very much".
• Arts-lovers, meanwhile, go to Edinburgh for its annual festival. Slàinte mhath.

SEPTEMBER

• Germans, Austrians and Norwegians vote.
• Artists and athletes from 86 (more or less) French-speaking countries gather in Nice for the Francophone games; the International Olympic Committee meets in Buenos Aires to announce the host of the 2020 summer games. Parlez-vous Français?
• Yachtsmen (and billionaires) compete in the 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco.
• The annual Mask Dance Festival is held in Andong, South Korea.
• Russia’s Vladimir Putin welcomes world leaders to St Petersburg for the G20 summit. Budem zdorovy.

OCTOBER

• Leaders from Spain, Portugal and Latin America meet in Panama for their annual summit, the Cumbre Iberoamericana.
• Azerbaijan holds a presidential election.
• British aristocrats take to the countryside for the start of the pheasant-shooting season.

NOVEMBER

• Mystery and conspiracy theories linger on as America marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John Kennedy; Americans also mark the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
• NASA hopes to launch the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (Maven) spacecraft on its year-long journey to the red planet.
• More than 50 countries compete in the World Cheerleading Championships in Thailand. Book early for this one!
• Commonwealth heads of government gather in Sri Lanka for their biennial summit.

DECEMBER

• The latest deadline arrives for a high-speed rail link between France and Spain; construction of a much-delayed high-speed rail system in California is due to have started.
• The crossword puzzle is 100 years old.

If the list above doesn't work for your PR planning needs, then at the very least it should act as a pretty good vacation planning sheet to ensure you're in the right place at the right time. Enjoy!

Strategy, Tactics, Execution, Reputation, Persistence, Desire and Fear

Thanks to Seth Godin who summed it up so nicely today for us.

We can outline a strategy for you, but if you don't have the tactics in place or you're not skilled enough to execute, it won't matter if the strategy is a good one.

Your project's success is going to be influenced in large measure by the reputation of the people who join in and the organization that brings it forward. That's nothing you can completely change in a day, but it's something that will change (like it or not) every day.

None of this matters if you and your team don't persist, and your persistence will largely be driven by the desire you have to succeed, which of course is relentlessly undermined by the fear we all wrestle with every day.

Bottom line - you need to find an international PR partner that is strategic in outlook, knows how to build taactics in different countries, has a team that is persistent and will be relentless in gaining results for you.

NettResults is all about implementing the best international PR campaigns, so this is central to what we think, do and how we act.

Taking a Stakeholders Approach to Public Relations

Who’s your target?  A vitally important question, and not asked nearly enough in the world of PR strategy.  Sure, we often find out their geographical target, languages spoken, what industry they are in, job position or even social-economic indicators, but there is another, possibly more beneficial, way to view this.

According to the classic writings of Edward Freeman, Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, there are three types of stakes:

1. Equity stakes: have a direct ‘ownership’ in the company, such as shareholders, directors or minority interest owners.
2. Economic (or market) stakes: held by those who have economic (but not ownership) interest in the organization, including employees, customers, suppliers and competitors.
3. Influencer stakes: from various groups (economic or moral in nature) for example, consumer advocates, environmental groups, trade organizations and government agencies.

Right from the offset it is clear for any PR pro to see that these different stakeholders require different, often specialized, public relations (such as internal communications or public affairs).

At NettResults we like to consider a simple stakeholder analysis (or reflection) to make communications more efficient:

1. Who are the organization’s stakeholders?
2. What are their stakes?
3. What opportunities and challenges are presented to the organization in relation to these stakeholders?
4. What responsibilities (economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic) does the organization have to all its stakeholders?
5. In what way can the organization best communicate with and respond to these stakeholders and address these stakeholder challenges and opportunities.

Next, to aid tactical priority, we look at the stakeholder salience. In other words, how visible or prominent a stakeholder is to the organization based upon the stakeholder possessing one or more of three attributes:

1. Power: the power of the stakeholder group upon the organization.
2. Legitimacy: the legitimacy of the claim laid upon the organization.
3. Urgency: the degree to which stakeholder claims call for immediate action.

The more salient or prominent stakeholders have priority and therefore need to be actively communicated with.  Smaller or hardly salient stakeholders have less priority and it is less important for an organization to communicate with them on an ongoing basis.

Without getting all MBA’ish on you and drawing out a Venn diagram (remember those three overlapping circles?), it’s probably evident that with three saliency variables there are seven different types of stakeholders – the stakeholder that falls in the center which has power, legitimacy and urgency is clearly the priority and where the PR effort should be focused.

Target your stakeholder.

6 Surefire Signs of Good Public Relations

There is good public relations and there’s bad. 

Let’s face it, some organizations, people and agencies are good at it, and some are not. 

But when you are in the thick of it, when you’re spending the money, how do you know?

Oh, that’s quite simple, you wait five months and then look at the coverage you achieved.  Wait a minute, did someone in the back utter that they move quicker than that and they don’t want to wait five months?  What, you actually want to know now if you are spending time and money wisely?  OK, well in that case, there are six sure fire signs of good public relations.

1 – First up, you better have a strategy.  A clear, concise strategy.  Can you (or the person/agency in charge) define in half a page:
- the target market that needs to be reached
- the media used to reach it
- the message that needs to be communicated
- the desired action of the target market
- the media tools that will be used to achieve that
- and when they will be used?

If you can’t then you’re running your PR strategy in an ad-hoc manner, which is not going to give you the results you need.  The number one tell-tail signs is inconsistency… in regards to when coverage is achieved, who it reaches or the messages it conveys.

2 – How are your relationships? It doesn’t matter how great your strategy is if your PR team doesn’t have the best media relationships to get it delivered.  This is where larger teams have the advantage. I’ve yet to meet one person who gets on with everyone.  So it stands to reason that if you have a one-person team or freelancer on your PR they can’t have relationships with all the core media.  It takes a diverse team of people at various seniority and experience level to be able to hold all the core relationships.

This is doubly important if your target includes multiple social-economic targets or possibly more than one language.  Look at the make up of the journalists and editors you are trying to reach and make sure your team are similar.

3 – Responsiveness and consistency rules.  PR is not a tap you can just turn on or off as you feel.  It’s more like a snowball pushed down a hill - once started it will keep on rolling and growing if you treat it right (and if you don’t treat it right it’s like putting a tree in front of the snowball). To keep that snowball rolling and growing you need to be ever responsive to the media (never leave a man hanging) and you need to ensure you fuel the media machine with consistent, newsworthy and relevant information. 

Tell-tail signs - if your PR team can’t respond to you within a coupe of hours, then they are not responding to the media quickly either.  And if you don’t have a constant funnel of news and ideas being worked on, then it’s akin to your snowball rolling over concrete.

4 – Reporting and feedback. At NettResults we make it simple for all our team members: for a successful client/agency relationship there are two things that drive success – media results need to be obtained and there needs to be constant reporting with the client.  A campaign that has great results, but there is little client/agency interaction or lack of reporting, will fail. 

Media relations is a constant feedback loop.  Multiple minds need to plan it out and everyone needs to be watching what is working and what is successful. This is the only way that momentum can be gained and we can drive a higher return on investment.

5 – Business acumen.  Look at it this way - there’s this funnel.  At the bottom of the funnel is PR, above that is marketing and above that is ‘the business’.  While I’ve had bosses that have said to me they can write a press release about anything, irrespective of whether they understand the subject, you can’t play in the PR space successfully unless you understand business.

Much as we would like to think that media and PR teams are the bees-knees – there is always a higher being that is driving the business. The PR team needs to be aware of this and have a true understanding and respect for when PR plans need to be modified due to a business requirement.  Tell-tail signs – have a conversation with your PR team about your business, not the latest PR news, but about the actual business.  Do they talk sense?

6 – Is there a level of trust?  What this all comes down to is trust.  A client needs to be able to trust that their team/agency is proactively working on their behalf.  There has to be bilateral trust between the PR team/agency and the media. 

More than most industries I have witnessed, trust is central to PR success.  Like all professional service business, we’re talking about a professional’s time.  How it’s being used and how efficient it is.  We’re talking about abstract terms.  We’re talking about things that people get emotional about.  Wrap that all up and the lubricant that keeps the cogs turning is trust.

These six simple concepts will give you good insight into how successful your results will look in five months.