Media - Forum 2010
Forum 2010: Communication is…
- Empathy, trying to understand what the other needs and ensuring that you explain and you try to convey to the other something that will be to the benefit of the counterpart.
Cristina Gallach, Spokesperson for the Spanish Presidency, EU Council
- Fun.
Katrin Muff, Dean of Business School, Lausanne, CH
- Breaking down barriers between people, number 1, and number 2, it’s also about persuasion, about using the skills you have in talking and in listening, and writing, to move people towards some kind of action.
Shel Horowitz, Marketing Consultant, Accurate Writing & More, USA
- Communication is about truth; communication is about hope; communication is about change… Communication is a bridge.
Yannis Freris, Head of Sustainable Development, GEFYRA, Greece
- Mostly listening.
Paul Holmes, Founder & President of “The Holmes report”, UK
- A dialogue.
Anton Nossik, Editor-in-chief at BFM.ru, Founder of whoyougle.com, RU
- For me, it’s fun.
Maxim Behar, Chief Executive, M3 Communications Group, Inc., BG
- Brain.
Rodrigo Moita de Deus, Senior Associate, NextPower, PT
- Relationships.
Rui Martins, Public Affairs Director, Associação Dianova, PT
- Relationships.
Melissa Keklak, Public/Celebrity Relations Manager, Casio, USA
- Two words to it: competitive advantage.
Jolyon Kimble, Director (Middle East, Africa, Asia): Sovereign Strategy, KW
- Risk management.
Daniel Holtgen, Head of Communications at EASA
- Depending on the social system.
Thomas Missong: President of EACA, AU
- Life.
Mohamed Al Ayed, Founder, President and CEO of TRACCS, UAE
Forum 2010: Interview with Cristina Gallach – Spokesperson for the Spanish Presidency, EU Council
Excerpts from her speech on “EU External communications”
Interview:
We live in a very complex communication world in the EU – we are communicating on behalf of a number of governments that agree on certain decisions that take time to be taken. The legitimacy comes from the local, but the problems will only be solved in a global manner. We have always to be balancing these two angles – proximity and the global. The EU can help, can encourage, can be present, can be visible, but we are at the top and the citizens are at another level. Their daily contact will not be the EU as a structure; the daily contact will be the public opinion leaders which are in their communities, the governments which are local, and the leadership in their individual countries.
Communicating to the different constituencies of the EU is a challenge. We have a number of issues: language – many different languages, second – public opinions are different: a country like Finland or the community in the UK or another community in Spain do have different priorities in terms of their daily lives, so we have to be always balancing what is the global message and what is the specific perception of the global message. I am very fond of adaptability and of trying to target specific messages for the specific communities, but without forgetting that now we live in a global village, and what you say to a specific community is always heard and maybe understood differently by another community.
Presentation:
Participant’s comment: If EU organisations focused on messages, very simple messages, that would help promote the EU.
Reply: Excuse me, but there are no easy answers to complex questions, and sometimes not event to the easy questions. You are demanding a clear message to a complex situation, which entails national sovereign decisions that are of member states that can only be put together after a long process of exchange of views: ministers, head of the state and government, companies, types of organizations that we have. We would probably be more understood, more legitimized and better liked through action, than with easy messages for very complex decisions.
Interview:
And the best way is action. I think the best manner to promote the EU is through the activities and the policies that the EU agrees and implements. We are not just going to have the people live in Europe for the sake of Europe. We are going to have people liking what the EU does, because it does a certain number of things, and it has an approach which is positive and which is perceived as being effective. The best manner to face this type of jobs is to be very active and to be very engaged, and to believe in what you do. I have been, for ten years now, for example, talking about the role of the EU outside the EU – in the promotion of stability, in solving crisis, in helping people out of difficulties, or in getting societies closer to the EU, for example in the Balkans, or in the Middle East, or with the people in Iran, etc. My first light-motive has always been accessibility and at the same time ensuring everybody that they know there are a number of countries which have joined together to do good. I think one of the biggest benefits of the last years in terms of the process of the stabilization and in particular the development of the countries nearby the EU has been enlargement. We now see economic progress in many countries which would be more difficult than it is, if those countries would have a state outside. I only see progress in the Balkan countries, for example, that enclose into the European Union. I only see progress in having tighter links between the EU and Russia, the EU and Ukraine, the EU and even Belorussia. Europe cannot stay as it is – a close club, or a closed group of countries, it has to be open. What we have to aim at is to ensure that we can open and we can get closer to, in particular, the people.
Presentation:
Last week in Brussels, on Wednesday, commissioner A., who you know well – he is in charge of economy as of, next week he will be in charge of competition policy in EU, gave about an hour long press conference – extremely explanatory, accurate, the main objective was to ensure that what he said did not upset the markets, which were all watching how to pinch down the Euro, in particular, because that was a message to reassure on the Greek situation. And he made, in probably 2 sentences (generic, loud) some relationship between the Greek case and specific aspects of the Portuguese case, and the Spanish case – again. And now we are reassuring messages went through a pipeline of the – I’ll say it in French – “La Tritureuse”: the machine to chop down, and I can now tell you that the 6.down the market in Spain and then 9.down the market in Portugal and many of the places in the EU were, basically, originating in these two sentences, in the manner they were reported. And we are shaping our relationship with the media and with the citizens through very simple stereotype messages, which… the world is not like that.
Interview:
So there are a number of difficulties, and differences between all of us. But I think what matters is what unites all of us, which is: a set of values, and a number of attitudes, which make, what we call, the European way of doing things. With all these ideas travelling around the world, what I have perceived from the outside world is that they believe more in Europe than sometimes we the Europeans believe in ourselves and this is, probably, something that we have to put in value because the European way of life, the European way of doing things, the European attitude is liked, is respected, and it is well understood, and sometimes it is more liked and better understood than other attitudes of other individual countries and this is something that we have to ensure that people in our societies know.
I think in many occasions explaining well what you do will ensure the understanding and it will ensure that the situation of confrontation becomes a situation of cooperation.
I’ll give you an example: for 3 hours a year ago I organized a meeting with Mr. Solana and a good number of journalists form Iran, and the aggressiveness of those journalists was really even shocking to me at the beginning of the meeting, but after the answers were given in a polite, in a serene manner, we made lots of friends – lots of friends. Some of them, during the crisis in June, when there were demonstrations and people being killed, they send me SOS messages: please, tell Mr. Solana that this and this is happening in our country.
So I think definitely this was an example that through communication and engagement we could tolerate some aggressiveness, if not all the aggressiveness around, and we had people that didn’t understand what the EU and the international community was thinking about them, to become more familiar and to like and to be perfectly in line with our message.
The fragmentation of media is definitely better, but at the same time very complicated and makes life more difficult. Before, if I wanted to have a message across or I wanted to make an announcement, I would call BBC, or we would organize an interview with CNN. Now you have to call BBC, CNN, Al Jaseera, France Pancarte, and Russian television – all this media! And still, you have to ensure that it gets on the internet, you have to ensure that it gets in the print, so definitely fragmentation is a challenge and fragmentation is good, if you are able to pass very simple messages and very specific, but we live in a very complex world, where passing simple messages is not possible, therefore it becomes much more difficult. So fragmentation is, somehow, something that we have to handle, it is not going to be like before, it will continue – maybe it will be even more fragmented because of what we need… probably it’s going to do that. Therefore we have to understand that this is what it is and we have to be able to manage that.
I’m really pleased to be here, to have been able to participate in the launching. I hope I can get an invitation next year – I will be delighted to come, and I’m really impressed by all the work being done by the young generations coming from Central and Eastern Europe. I think this is basically the proof that all this process of stabilization had been successful and that, it’s basically, a good covering of Central and Eastern Europeans, all struggling in a very complex world and trying to make, through communication, Europe – a better place.
Yes, you have my blessing and I definitely will join you next year!
Forum 2010: Interview with Paul Holmes – Founder & CEO of “The Holmes Report”, initiator of the SABRE awards
Excerpts from his speech on “PR’s Golden Age. Seize the opportunity or perish”
link to video with Paul Holmes part 1
link to video with Paul Holmes part 2
Interview:
Тhe world has gotten much more complicated and much more difficult for co-operations and over-organizations. There’s a much higher level of transparency than ever before, there’s more information and misinformation out there. It travels around the world far faster than it ever did, so today a crisis in a small country becomes a global crisis very quickly.
Social media out there – that means that customers have more power to share their views than ever before. So customers, and employees, and shareholders, and communities have more communications power than they ever had in the past. That creates a very difficult environment for co-operations: one in which their reputations are constantly under threat. As a result of that, PR people need to get involved in decision making and in handling communications at a much earlier stage than they had in the past. Bad public relations can hurt a company much more quickly and much more severely today than it ever could in the past.
I don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t continue. Well, if we’re in an environment where the information out there continues to expand, where transparency continues to expand, where democracy and freedom of choice continue to expand, then I think public relations will continue to expand also.
Presentation:
I think that the words “Public Relations” describe perfectly what it is that our job should be. Our job should be: managing the relationship between an organization and all of its publics. You do it by how you behave, not by how you talk. You do it by what your actions are, rather than what your communications is; and I think that for PR to be generally more effective, it has to be about organizational behavior first and foremost, and only about communicating that behavior as a last step in the process. And sometimes the best PR activity might be: not to communicate at all. And I think what happens when you define this business purely as communications, is that other people make decisions, and then a PR person is called to communicate them, which really means to tell the company’s story, to explain the company’s position. I think the PR industry has to be involved in setting a policy, not really into communicating it. I think that if we’re talking about building relationships with the public, that’s a fairly obvious part of it.
Interview:
The only problem I see is that the PR industry is not very good at a couple of things:
- It’s not very good at recruiting the best talent;
- It hasn’t done a very good job, ironically, at building its own image and reputation;
- It’s also not very good at research, and evaluation, and measurement, and ROI, and it needs to get much better at those things;
Last year was very clearly a very difficult year for everybody – for public relations people and advertising people. The global economic crisis created a very difficult environment for everybody. I think PR will bounce back very quickly from that. I’m not sure that advertising will, but I think PR will. The only potential problem that I see going forward is that I think there will be more competition for PR people, for management consultants and others, who think that they can do the job just as well, and if the industry doesn’t address some of the big pressing issues, then I think we could have some problems.
We try very hard to nudge the industry in the direction we think it needs to take, but there is an English and American phrase, it says: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” And the PR industry is very reluctant to drink.
Presentation:
I think that 5 years ago it was quite possible to believe that your brand was everything you’ve told people about your products and services. So your brand was defined by your advertising, by your sponsorship, by your events, by your corporate identity, by your logo, by your press releases. That was your brand 5 years ago – or that’s how the marketing was doing it. Today your brand is all the conversations people have about you, when you’re not in the room. Your brand is all the things that people tell each other about your company, your organization, your country, your government – when you are not listening. And that’s what makes up your brand. And in that kind of world, if your advertising isn’t authentic, if it isn’t honest, if it doesn’t have integrity, if your PR isn’t authentic, there’s nothing that it can do to overcome the brand messages of being communicated by people who know your organization.
Interview:
I think that social media in particular are much less forgiving of the kinds of corporate behaviour that we’ve taken for granted. So if you put out a statement that sounds as if it was written by a lawyer, for example, you’re going to be criticized very heavily for that in social media. If you are slow in responding, you will be criticized much more severely, so things will happen much more quickly. And because we are not depending on reporters for information any more, we are depending on ordinary people – it only takes one or two angry people to create a huge problem for a corporation. And I think the penalties for getting it wrong are going to go through the roof.
Presentation:
There are employees out there blogging about your company, and if you are telling a lie, they will tell the truth. There are customers out there whose experiences with your company are being shared every day on the internet on blogs in social media. When I talk about social media, the most obvious thing that I’m talking about is in the digital ground, but the fact of matter is that people are holding conversations about your products and services all the time: over their backyards, in the street, at conferences like this one, coffee breaks – I go to tea with some of the people in this room, and I was going to say how stupid TOYOTA is, during the coffee break, because that’s the hot story of the day. You know these conversations take place at the real world as well as our life, and it’s very important to remember that that’s happening.
Interview:
I think to a certain extent you are seeing it right now. We have TOYOTA, where TOYOTA is trying to communicate about its crisis through regular channels – through mainstream media, through official organizations. And what you’re seeing is that all of the commentary is happening online. TOYOTA owners are going online and telling their stories about what happened with their car. And it is incredibly difficult for the company to control. But there have been particularly in the US and the UK a lot of cases, similar cases. DELL, who had problems with its computers and found that the problem had become huge in social media, even before their PR people knew what was going on. McDonald’s ran into a problem where it was boycotted in China, because some students from China had found an add in Germany that they didn’t like. This kind of problem is going to become universal and companies need to be alert.
I’ve been writing about public relations for 25 years, I have now been writing about PR for more than half my life, which is very, very sad. It’s a strange way for a grown man to make a living.
The PR industry has become more global and we realized about 5 years ago that we couldn’t effectively serve the PR industry, if we were focused exclusively on North America. If you live in New York, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of believing that all of the interesting developments are happening, you know, in the US. And the reality is that, as I travel around to China, to Eastern Europe, to Western Europe, to the UK, there are very sophisticated, very advanced public relations, companies, firms, people, and ideas in all of those markets. And I think that by focusing on the whole world and trying to make sure that ideas from one place are translated into others, we’ve really helped broaden the view of PR. But I think, actually, that moving to Europe did more to help the American readers, than it did to help Europeans, in a way.
Presentation:
And I remember growing up in the UK – one of my first jobs after high school was as business reporter on the Political Poster “Echo”, which was one of the larger regional newspapers in the UK. This was about 25 years ago. We wrote about whether the SHELL price went up or down, and we wrote about whether anybody was on strike. Fortunately this was during the Thatcher era in the UK, so there was always summery on strike, otherwise it would have been a very boring resistance. But as a business writer, those were really the only things that we cared about.
Interview:
I think there are 2 ways to respond to crisis like this:
- One is to see it as an opportunity to innovate and offer new products and new services, and try and grow your business that way;
- And the other way is to, sort of, hide, to hunker down and wait for it to be over;
I think that those firms that decided they were going to innovate, that there was an opportunity, have performed much better during the recession than those firms that decided to sort of dig themselves a whole and hide.
And certainly I think that we’ve tried to expand; even though it was a difficult year. We’re looking at new products and revise our website, in general, with a broader scope of what we’re doing.
Presentation:
Today, if you are a business writer, the list of things that you care about is almost infinite: you care bout where a company’s forces throw its raw material and how much of the environment it destroys; you care about the supply chain and how many factories in Indonesia are employing 7-year-old children, to make sneakers, or footballs, or any other product; you care about how many women there are on the board of directors; you care about how many minorities work for the company and whether they are well-treated; you care about how the company disposes of its waste materials; you care about everything – you care about product safety. There’s literally no end to the number of things you could write about.
Interview:
What I and how I work is: I try to steal ideas form as many different places as possible. So there are probably 40 or 50 blogs about public relations and reputation and business that I go to almost every day. And those are my authorities. There are people who are doing and thinking about public relations on a regular basis and they are the people that I try to get information from.
I think that the strongest examples probably come from the sort of public sector education campaigns about diseases. If I go back, one of the best that I ever saw was about 10 or 15 years ago in Germany – a massive communications campaign to raise awareness about AIDS. And it saw a lot of the top agencies in Germany working together; the communications materials were very frank, they were very open, they were very honest. And I think they had a huge effect on sexual activity in Germany – condom use, but a whole host of other issues, so that was a very eye-opening case study for me.
I’d love to see more events like this (Davos). As I travel to developing markets, particularly Eastern Europe and Asia, there is a huge hunger for knowledge, the people are very eager to hear best practices, and to absorb and analyze them. You know, I’m sort of interested in what people accept and what they reject. And I think Eastern Europe in particular is in the process of developing its own model of communications that’s, you know, not the US model and not the western European model, but the best elements of both.
The more events that there are like this (Davos), the more information the people have – the quicker that will develop, and the better it will be for everybody. Yeah, I’d love to see it become a tradition. And, frankly, if you can get an attendance like this in a very difficult year, I think next year, when things get better, it will grow and grow.
So, certainly, you have my blessing, you know, and I’d love to come back next year and the year after.
Forum 2010: Interview with Garrett Johnston – Strategic Marketing Group Director at MTS Group
Excerpts from his speech on “Pervasive connectivity and ubiquitous computation - key catalysts of the 21st century Renaissance”
link to video with Garrett Johnston
Interview:
The technological singularity is basically a point in time when the speed of growth of artificial intelligence overtakes the speed of growth of biological intelligence or human intelligence, in this particular case. Even artificial intelligence is built which passes what’s called the Turing test. The Turing test was a test to determine whether or not an artificial intelligence had become truly human-like or not: if you’re speaking with an artificial intelligence, do you know, can you sense, can you feel, whether or not you’re speaking to a human being?
Singularity is basically the point in time when that level of intelligence, so – the level of intelligence predicted by the Turing test, is realized in a completely artificial way. Theoretically, such intelligence could reproduce itself in micro-seconds. So, from that point on, artificial intelligence just goes like this (up), and human intelligence is still going like this (horizontally).
Cataclysmic event – you had pre-humans, so, on the Darwinian scale: quadrupeds, like this (the sound of chimps: “hu-hu”), now you have human beings, and then you have post-humans: a combination of artificial intelligence and human intelligence. People already have artificial hearts, and artificial limbs, and so on.
Various people have given various data as to when the singularity will happen. Many people say it will never happen because they say that recreating the human brain is something that no artificial intelligence will ever be able to do, or that its effect will be so staggered, that it will not feel like an event arising.
I think it’s more like in 2050-ies, and the 2020-ies to the 2030-ies… I think it will come, but it won’t come all at once, it will come gradually, but if you look backwards at that gradual happening, and you look at it from a macro perspective, where a decade is like this (a centimeter), it will seem like one event.
Presentation:
What we… what we’ve tried to do is – we’ve recognized, in our business at least, we’ve recognized that we’re selling internet capacity, we’re selling minutes of traffic, minutes of voice traffic, or text messages. As a commoditizing business – with its price revolts all the time, it’s… we are still making further profit, because the entry barrier wasn’t high, but the entry barrier isn’t going down. It’s… Even it’s suicidal to focus only on our core tent relations products, we’re trying to understand the reasons why people consume minutes of traffic and text messages, and, I was speaking to somebody outside, I said: we’d be like Coca-Cola, yet not focusing on the drink, but focusing on why people get thirsty, or trying to create ways that people get thirsty.
Interview:
The real question about the consumer is: Does he have to be creative? I think if the… I think the only creative consumers are consumers who haven’t really thought about what’s available or what could be cool. It’s even better: most of the “marketing industry” has been built on the promise that you have 3, or 4, or 5, or 6 variations of something. And that’s it. But if you have consumers who are being recommended things that are so rare that they would never be on a shop shelf, you can never go to a physical shop and buy them, because they… it’s like they occupy place under 3 million, or million and 22 thousand on the best-seller list, but they’ve been sent directly to you, then you become much more demanding in terms of what you want. So, it’s just a question of making the choice easier and more accurate for the consumer, because that actually is more profitable for the… for the other side. They’re not giving discounts to people who do not need discounts; they’re not, they’re not… they can forecast how many dog-food packages they need in the shop, because they’ve thought about the customers, so you know how the dog-food they have to sell is just gone at the end of the week. That works for everybody, I mean – it reduces friction.
Presentation:
We had a… we had a meeting in MTC about a year ago, and there was a big discussion going on about whether MTC, as a mobile operator, should get into the music business, and the discussion seemed to be going like yes, MTC should, MTC should enter the music business, with its own ground. And after that I said: How many people in the room know the difference between SMS and MMS? And, of course, everybody put up a hand. I said: OK, how many people in the room understand the difference between deep house and electric trance? And nobody did. In the room. Well, if we don’t know the difference between deep house and electric trance, then I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to get into the music business.
Interview:
The crisis, right? The so-called crisis – we can see that in this crisis, companies who have learned to talk, even in a very primitive and un-precise level, to the segment of one customer, are doing very well in the crisis, and the companies that have not learned to do that, are not doing well.
Presentation:
I drive down “Prospect Mira” in Moscow, in December, and they have this huge banner across the roadway, saying: “2009 Jaguar, for sale, 20% discount”. Why is the Jaguar for sale at 20% discount? Because it’s a colour that nobody wants. Why did they make that colour that nobody wants? Because they messed-up on forecast. Would it not be better, if they were able to build a car quickly that never needs to be on the sale price, because it’s, right down to the last detail, exactly what you wanted. It’s… Consumer is happier, manufacturer is happier, everybody is happier.
Interview:
And the retailers that can understand or even forecast what you might like are going to take a lot of the work from the consumer to try to, himself, forecast what he likes or doesn’t like. And if you knew, for example, the consumer doesn’t want to bother to forecast what he likes or doesn’t like. It’s amazing. Now, I do bother to forecast in music what I like and I don’t like, and I know quite a lot about music, and I was still amazed at some of the stuff that came through – I would have had no interest in it whatsoever, I started listening to it, and I got hooked. You understand then that you’re… you see that you become a person whose tastes and interests actually may be quite different from other people’s, you are not as much of a standard or… person as you thought. It will drive a whole new generation of consumer thinking that says: “I’m different.” There’s something very powerful in that.
So, I think for the very advanced consumer, the person who has already been to Rome and Paris and knows their… knows themselves very well and talks to themselves a lot, even for those people that can “throw up” amazing things, for the lazy consumer or the uncreative, whatever you wanna call him, it’s a Revolution! And that’s something you can see today, already, for sure.
Presentation:
A guy comes up to your apartment in Moscow, presses the door bell, downstairs in the apartment. You are inside Africa – you are not home. He is a burglar and wants to see if anybody’s home. What it does, it takes the door bell press, converts it to a mobile call, sends it back to you inside Africa – now you can answer, and for the guy, he doesn’t know if you’re into the apartment or not. If he is a legitimate visitor, I can allow him into the apartment. I can see him on the camera, a very cheap camera, but still I’d love to see if someone’s there or not. If he’s in the apartment, like a tradesman or whatever, and – I can make sure the door is locked and I can reset the alarms, actually, and I can do all this from inside Africa.
Interview:
Time travel - the crazy thing is that it has already been done. They put up an SR-71, an American very, very high speed jet aircraft – they put an atomic clock on it, and they put another atomic clock on the ground, and they measured the passage of time on board the aircraft versus the passage of time on board the ground. And they found the time had slowed down on the aircraft. So the first, yeah, but that’s already happened – the measurable time travel has taken place. Does that mean people will do time travel? May be, may be not. But it’s happened!
There’s a lot of progress going on in all these areas at the same time. And then works are getting faster, the ability of the brain-scan to be non-invasive is getting more sophisticated, the range of thoughts and emotions that we cover – a little wider, the devices are getting smaller, and the communication network is going cheaper and more powerful. I mean, it’s all happening at the same time.
So, for me, things like that become more a question of “when”, than “if”.
And should it become a tradition? – I think it’s good for… I think it’s good – any form that allows people to meet outside their home country: we are in Switzerland at the moment, and interact with lots of nationalities, as we see here, and discuss things that are of very high importance, both… you know, both morally and economically, I think that’s a good thing to do.
And if I wanted to make this a really unique event – I would make it something that has more attraction to people who are outside this narrow sphere of communication.
So, I wouldn’t call it “Communication on top”, I would call it “Communication on the bottom”, because communication is in the neighbourhood that allows all the better stuff to happen.
