1\You started your career as a journalist from 1981 to 1995 in Bulgaria ,Czech and Poland. How do you think this experience influenced you?

Especially in that time, back more than 20 years ago, this experience was priceless. And the reason is very simple. Traditional media were the only media and also the only “bridge” between our clients and their target audiences. My deep knowledge of media helped me a lot, indeed I started from a intern and grew up to a Managing Editor of the largest private daily newspapers in Bulgaria. This was meaning by default that I knew exactly what is happening in the “head” of each journalist, how to attract the media, how to write news in a way that professional journalists will immediately get them and put in their newspapers or will speak about them in the TV or radio channels. Without this deep knowledge, at least I think now, it would not be possible to make this “frog leap” in business and soon to become the most professional leader in the Bulgarian PR market.

2\In your opinion, with the great changes of technology and media environment, what changes have happened in the PR industry?

Public Relations business is today one of the most dynamic businesses in the world. The reason of the change is very, very simple. For the first time in the history, since this business exists almost 120 years, not only our clients, but also we as PR experts, own media. In the past it has been true true – we were creating our concepts to attract media and to get their interest to our clients and their products or services. But today we already have the media, our clients have them – these are the social media. And from a “bridge”, as I said, between clients and media, now must become managers of social medial we own. From a purely practical perspective this is already a completely different business, which requires different tools, approaches and even professional education and abilities. We should know how to run media, how to write into them responsibly, intelligently and attractively, how to promote them among the readers and – what is most important – how to respond to the online commentary. Because on the top nowadays we do not have a lot of time to react in social media and the faster we are, the more successful the project will be.

3\Could you talk about the key point of doing good PR services?

The three S, formulated by me many years ago are still valid even much stronger now – – Speed, Simplicity, Self confidence. First of all the speed is really crucial and extremely important. Secondly – the world is so sophisticated today, our tasks are so complicated, that we must have very clear priorities and a simple agenda how to achieve them – simplicity. And the third one, which even might be the first one – I do not know a single successful person who achieved anything without self confidence and desire to do the job perfectly and responsibly.

4\How the PR companies keep and promote key competitive strength in the background of homogenization in PR industry?
There is an obvious merge worldwide among the three main key elements of modern public communications – public relations, advertising and digital. In this merge, which even can happen in full much faster than we can expect. Each of those three businesses now claim they will be the leader of the future merged business. I simply believe that it’ll be public relations, not advertising or digital and have quite strong arguments for that. The main point of those arguments is that we, the public relations experts, are the masters of the real content, of the words, of the sentences and namely content these days is crucially important. And more – clients these days come to our office with two main important problems – reputation problems and crisis management. So, I do not think that advertising or digital can handle this, of course that public relations is the business, which can provide these services to the clients with the important support of the creative design (from the advertising) and proper social media promotion (from the digital).

5\In your opinion, which aspects are important in training PR elites?

Teaching them to manage the social media in the right way and to serve the clients 24 hours, 7 days a week. The rest they will learn by themselves.

6\You were announced “Business leader of the year” in Bulgaria in 2016 , and the Global Award “CEO of the Year in the World” in 2015. What’s feeling about these two award?

Often I say  – when you climb a peak you may see anything else then… the next peak. All those awards, which I have had throughout the years brought me new and higher responsibilities, but also the challenge and desire to achieve more new and interesting things. And to stay on the professional top.

7\What’s your opinion about public relations and media relations in future?

They will be more and more dependable on visions and short movies. And what is important – all public relations projects will be soon implemented only live in real time with the means of video transmission. Which will mean another change of our business – we must be ready to react at any second, personally and professionally. By the way – I really think that the name of our business – “Public Relations” is old fashioned and does not respond to the modern times. When the business was launched more than a century ago some 90 per cent of the relations were non-public, but the rest of 10 per cent were public and then the businessmen and politicians started to hire journalists to advise them how to behave with the media… Today all our life is public and to say “public relations” is very similar to say “transparent window”. Soon the name of the business will be different and the closest I can propose or guess now is “Live Relations”. Everything will be based on live social media and handling this communications will be the most difficult task.

8\What’s your hobby in your spare time? Please make a self introduction.

Golf, playing drums, traveling, fitness, reading, reading, reading… In the modern world if there is a day without at least one new interesting article or book, then it is a wasted day. And if I hate something, then I only hate to waste my time.

 Blog post by Russell Goldsmith, Founder, Audere Communications

 Blog post by Russell Goldsmith, Founder, Audere Communications

In Part 2 of Show 30 of the csuitepodcast (starting at 20:05), recorded at the Global ICCO PR Summit, I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with Pascal Beucler, Senior Vice President & Chief Strategy Officer, Global, MSLGroup (and someone I could have happily chatted to all afternoon), on the topic of ‘Brand culture in the conversation age’, which was the title of the presentation he had given at the conference earlier that day.

Brand Culture in the Conversation Age from MSLGROUP

Pascal said that his talk was based around how PR has evolved from Public Relations to People Relations, creating relationships through content that is full of emotional connections.

He explained this further by talking about how the z-generation, born between the 1990’s and 2010, or those a little older, born between the 1980’s and 2000, have a relationship to brands that is based on mutual respect and parity – that is not top down or intrusive but based on choice, desire, attraction, seduction – and if it is like this it works, otherwise it doesn’t work.

The example of a campaign that MSLGroup had worked on recently that Pascale said was viral video rather than an advert that creates a dialogue between [the brand and] the target they want to address, was the superb Always #LikeAGirl campaign, one that I personally love and continue to feature in my own Using Video in Social Workshop.

Pascale believes the genius behind the campaign is that P&G and Always are saying they deliver much more than protection every month but they deliver a vision of young girls based on the understanding they have a strong desire to be free of the chains that society and men put them in.  This for him, is an example of New Age relationships between brand and people.  It’s not about telling you my product is better than another one, but instead saying there is an issue and so why don’t we discuss it and find a solution. 

Another area Pascale touched on in his talk was that of gamification, which he sees brands using in two ways.  Firstly, gaming is a huge trend for millennials but also for older people, mainly because the smart phone is always in our pocket and so when we have free time, as well as using it to communicate, we use it for gaming and so it provides a perfect compatibility and convergence between the device and the will to be gaming.

The other reason Pascale said gamification is important is due to the power of data created by millions of people on the way they play that you can use to your advantage.  He used the Deutsche Telekom “Sea Hero Quest” as a great example, which, as quoted on their website, was “designed to create the world’s largest crowd sourced data set benchmarking human spatial navigation, helping bring scientists one step closer to developing new diagnostic tests for dementia.”

Pascale believes this kind of activity gives gamification another dimension, something he calls, Brand Utility, where the brand becomes something useful in your life.

There were so many things we spoke about, too much to write about here, and to be honest, it’s much better listening to Pascale explaining it all, but he finished off with what he saw as the main drivers are for brands in the conversation age, which were:

• Start conversations based on creativity of the mind
• There is no conversation unless there is equality, equity and parity between the two sides. It has to be two ways. If it is a dominating conversation, it goes nowhere.
• Conversation is a continuum

#ad – Many thanks to global media intelligence provider CARMA for supporting the series of shows I produced from ICCO.  Please do visit their website to find out more about how they can help you deliver actionable insights through media monitoring and PR measurement.

All previous shows of the csuitepodcast series are available on Soundcloud or itunes and please, if you subscribe, can you give the show a positive rating and review on itunes in particular.  You can also now follow the show on Twitter and Facebook – please get involved!

Blog post by Russell Goldsmith, Founder, Audere Communications

Show 30 of the csuitepodcast was the first of three shows recorded at the Global ICCO PR Summit that took place in Oxford at the start of September.

Part 1 of this episode was on the topic of Talent Creation, Recruitment and Retention within the PR & Communications industry.

Joining for this first section of the show were Mohamed Al Ayed, CEO and President of TRACCS, Tanya Hughes, President of SERMO, Talk PR’s global network of independent communications agencies, and Susan Hardwick, Co-Founder of Global Women in PR – all three had just been part of a panel session at the conference.

My guests all agreed that the critical issues that were being discussed around this topic were global and as Tanya explained, a key theme in her own Group’s international conference was not just on finding the right people, but keeping them happy with job satisfaction and work-life balance too.

When I spoke with Weber Shandwick’s Colin Byrne in Cannes, he said the big issue was the fact that PR agencies’ approach for talent has been to steal each other’s staff and that actually PR needs to recruit the kind of people who are currently going to work at Social Media Platforms or the World’s top Advertising and Digital Agencies, something Karen van Bergen, CEO of Omicom Public Relations Group also touched on in her opening keynote at the ICCO Conference.

Sarah agreed.  She explained that her Spanish agency’s Head of Digital came from an advertising agency and in their Hong Kong agency, they’ve just recruited a creative from a Film Production House.  However, she warned that it works both ways as she’s seen her own talent recruited by Ad and Digital agencies too.

Given Susan’s role in Global Women in PR, I asked her if one way of keeping talent in the industry was to tap into the growing freelance network, particularly in encouraging mums back into the industry.

However, Susan said that whilst freelancers plug gaps, do project work, add value when necessary when you don’t need to employ somebody for 52 weeks in the year, or offer specialists to balance out the team, the difficulty, particularly in relation to mums coming back to work, is in dealing with is the very big gap between leaving work to have children and coming back, as our world changes very rapidly.  She therefore feels there needs to be work on both sides, i.e. perhaps offering retraining to allow returning mums to get up to speed.

Sarah added that in her experience, she felt employers are actually fairly flexible, certainly in her agencies, particularly in creating work-life balance and ensuring people are happy at work.  However, she said that recent experience for returning working mums, particularly after having their first baby, can be a bit of a shock and given the PR industry is a service industry, even if people are working part-time, they are expected to be available to service their client and do longer working hours.

H+K Strategies’ Richard Millar previously said on this series that that the make-up of his agency had fundamentally changed over the last two or three years and that he couldn’t remember the last time he interviewed someone with a typical PR background.  Mohamed made an interesting point on this as he talked about the evolution of the word talent, where it has evolved from ‘employees’ through ‘resources’.  He agreed in that those people who PR recruits don’t need to be PR people by education.  However, in his view, talent is defined by the organisation’s recognition of the skill and the personality of an individual that will suit and best serve their purposes.  At TRACC, Mohamed actually has engineers, a doctor and a psychologist in the team.

One aspect we touched on was retention of as much as attracting new talent and one of the ways Sarah looks to achieve that at Talk PR is in the organisation’s ‘Learning & Inspiration Programme’, which consists of 52 Masterclass workshops, each geared around personal development for everyone in the agency, from junior to board level.  They include everything from helping people to present or run meetings, to handling conflict and business and financial management.  They also aim to inspire the team by getting external speakers in and organising cultural trips plus development for the team’s client relationships too, including measurement and evaluation or helping to pitch great stories to the media and influencers.

When summing up, my guests offered the following advice between them when it comes to attracting the best talent to the industry:

• Create a great environment in which to work, i.e. a place where people will be banging at your door and want to be part of your team
• Do great work and promote the hell out of it
• [ensure] Transparency, Ingenuity and Integrity

#ad – Many thanks to global media intelligence provider CARMA for supporting the series of shows I produced from ICCO.  Please do visit their website to find out more about how they can help you deliver actionable insights through media monitoring and PR measurement.

All previous shows of the csuitepodcast series are available on Soundcloud or itunes and please, if you subscribe, can you give the show a positive rating and review on itunes in particular.