From Public to People Relations: Re-designing the world of PR for the Conversation Age.

P. Beucler Communication Challenges before the Change Opportunity 2012, Novi Sad November 29, 2012

The future does not fit in the mindsets or containers of the past.

The world is changing, fast, and our clients are facing huge transformations. There is a strong call for change, in our industry like everywhere.

Too many PR agencies are still organized the way they were 10 years ago
and deliver the sort of services they used to deliver before the Social Turmoil started.

> A recent Forrester Research, presented at the Global PR Summit in Miami last month, says the agency of the future will: >Think less about channels, >Develop a holistic approach, >Integrate channels and services, >Help drive both brands and corporate reputation.

During the Holmes Global PR Summit, Marc Pritchard, Global Marketing & Brand Building Officer, P&G, invited PR companies to take the leadership role the discipline deserves , in the Conversation Age. Are we ready for this challenge? What are the power shifts we need to address, to make it happen? This is the debate Id like to introduce through the following presentation.

10 Power Shifts >Ideas: Solidly grounded into insights & foresights >Data: What we need to extract the value from >Purpose & People: Helping businesses drive positive change >Reputation: The tree and the shadow >Content: Remarkable, liquid and linked >Emotional connections: Lefty-righty >Integration: Be holistic >Diversity: Be truly Global, not just Globalized >Storytelling: Be The Narrator >Value creation: Moving up the food chain

1. The Power of Ideas

Insights-grounded Innovation.
CEOs around the globe say that: > the key to survival is innovation, > the key to innovation is to get the best insights from people

Peoples Inside Solutions

The Now & The Next.

Insights are about now, while foresights are about next. You need both the Now & the Next, to help clients anticipate:
Insights provide you with the capacity to gain an accurate and deep understanding of contexts, situations, issues and peoples expectations. Foresights give you the ability to predict what will happen, or be needed in the future, to help your clients succeed in their business strategies.

This is how you help a brand or a company articulate community engagement and their business need > Connecting the business context and the conversation dynamics.

Are we already there, as a PR industry? Not yet, obviously. The Forrester Research shows that clients give low marks to PR firms, when it comes to delivering big, strategic ideas, solidly grounded in insights & foresights. Whether on the Consumer PR side, or on the Corporate one, its first of all about understanding whats in peoples mind, where the society goes.

The power of collective intelligence: the world's most valuable brands use crowdsourcing.

Open Innovation at P&G.

One of the greatest challenges facing companies and their leadership today is the range and depth of innovation required to drive both top and bottom line growth. How can we deliver one without a trade-off on the other? For P&G, open innovation has been critical to resolving this dilemma: an innovation strategy we call Connect & Develop.
Dr. Mike Addison, P&G Global Business Development

Power to the People.

2. The Power of Data

Data Equity.
The value of social data to businesses cant be expressed by a single number. But when companies take the right social data and apply the right analyses to improve decision-making, they create social data equity. Data is the currency of the Information Age.

Understanding People.
Invest in extensive social listening capabilities to crack the sentiment code in real time. People are talking, we should be listening. People are taking action, we should be commenting, concluding and then counseling our clients on how best to respond.
Whether on transactions, interactions or content creation, data is what's helping us understand the behaviour of people. (Jon Iwata, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications, chairman of the IBM Strategy Team, at the Global PR Summit in Miami).

 Visualize, communicate, utilize the data .

The future of data will not be in acquiring more and more of it. The value to be liberated for Clients is in the storytelling around data, a wholly creative endeavour.
The ability to take datato be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate itthats going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades... ...Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it I think statisticians are part of it, but its just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google.

3.The Power of Purpose & People

The goal today is to rewire and reconnect Purpose, Performance & People through Participation and Collaborative Social Innovation.

Purpose Driven Marketing.

In order to thrive in a social network world, companies need to better express and understand their purpose and recognize they are both economic and social engines of their communities and countries. Areas such as sustainability, community service and contributions to a greater good will be how Brands will be increasingly evaluated. Good business is better business.

Sweetness in the mouth, kindness in the heart:

The example of Alpenliebe Perfetti in China. Weve created with the brand an integrated year-long initiative to: catalyze a kindness movement inspire millions of Chinese youth to appreciate, share stories about and engage in everyday acts of kindness.

Source: http://acandy.renren.com http://page.renren.com/alpenliebekindness

4. The Power of Reputation.

Character is like a tree and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it. The tree is the real thing.
Abraham Lincoln

Building & defending our clients reputation.

D. Roman, SVP & CMO Lenovo, talking about brand & corporate reputation: When people buy a product today, they buy or not the company behind (Miami Summit). Taking care of the beliefs or opinions that are generally held about an organization, a brand, a product, is definitely our core business. Reputation is our clients most valuable asset, which were taking good care of in challenging times.. Whats challenging today is that the frontiers between mainstream media and social media are blurring, as online influencers are linking to media stories, while news organizations are quoting online influencers.

Every crisis is global, viral, social.

A good reputation is a solid asset, in case of crisis. It helps a lot, globally and locally. Of course, no crisis is truly local in this highly interconnected world, as memes or hashtags can spread globally in seconds on the social web. Content Intelligence, Community Management and Contact Strategies will make the difference, if well mastered, when it comes to efficiently engage with people and communities, here and now. Its critical to plan and prepare for crisis scenarios, Its also important to respond to emergent crisis situations authentically, without over-reliance on scripted messages and workflows.

 Corporate Character , the next boundary to Corporate Reputation?

What makes you unique is your beliefs, your values, your purpose. You need this first.
Jon Iwata, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications, chairman of the IBM Strategy Team, speaking on Corporate Character at the Miami Global PR Summit).

Iwata: We must become "Chief Collaboration Officers" and Curators of Corporate Character.

5. The Power of Content.

Social is Contents best friend.

Liquid & Linked.

Coca-Cola can no longer rely on 30-second-TV-centric brand communicationswe must instead create the most compelling content in the worldwe have to have fat and fertile ideas at our core. (Jonathan Mildenhall, VP Global Advertising Strategy & Creative, Coca-Cola). Cokes Content Marketing 2020: Liquid & Linked
Liquid : consistently creating content so remarkable that it goes viral and wanders endlessly around the web . Linked : ensuring that their content remains close to the heart of their underlying business goals.

Remarkable content has the power to go viral, and viral content brings tangible results in terms of social shares, visibility,

6. The Power of Emotional Connections

Reason leads to conclusions. Emotion leads to action.

 Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors

Markets are conversations.Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It cant be faked. Human communities are based on discourse on human speech about human concern The community of discourse is the market Companies that do not belong to a community of discourse will die >12 years later, the Utopia turned real.
Levine, Locke, Searle & Weinberger The Cluetrain Manifesto

Be Lefty-Righty.
How can brands earn emotional connections to people through social? By finding the right ways to connect with them as theyre connecting with others and the things theyre passionate about.

Brand Essence and a Model for Emotive Engagement.

The fabric, the spirit, the persona, the sheer imagery is whatever you make it. So when you think of your brand, what is it that you think or feel? If you had to use just one word to describe your brands essence what would it be? It is this answer that should inspire you to think about how it relates to a new genre of connected consumers or Generation-C.
Brian Solis: Your Brand is more important than you think.

7. The Power of integration.

Creatively engaging with People & Communities.

Clients are expecting a deeper level of integration : they want global solutions, not partial, siloed , disciplinary-centric, answers. They expect us to provide them with the appropriate accross-theboard Engagement strategies. The industry could be more assertive and aggressive about staking its claim. Theres so much that the PR industry has to offer in terms of engagement with consumers in their communities and making brands part of those conversations , as Marc Pritchard stated it in Miami.

Creative Connected Content.

The future of PR is in the fully holistic solution clients are expecting today: Content Creation + Communities Engagement + Contact Management. M. Pritchard: Content Creation and Brand Integration is what PR should mostly contribute to, today (Miami Summit).

8. The Power of Diversity

Being truly global, not just globalized

Being truly global, not just globalized (with teams of expatriates sent abroad) is not an option today: you need to be Indian in India, Chinese in China, Brazilian in Brazil, to deliver effective strategies and PR programms. Global clients expect you to be able to operate across time zones, within different political, economic, and social systems and with varying media constraints .

Viva La Difference!
Diversity is also essential in terms of Talents management: Deeper understanding between an organization and its publics, Stronger employee attraction and retention, Better performance and increased innovation with diverse talents, Stronger corporate reputation. > The challenge is: how to ensure that every member of the staff knows exactly how to contribute to the greater diversity of the organization every day

9. The power of a good story

Dont underestimate the power of a good story!

Telling a good story is whats creating attention, interest, empathy. M. Pritchard: Reporters, bloggers, consumers are all looking for a good story, and that's the message PR need to bring to the CSuite (Miami Summit).

Chanel has created a public domain which shares the story of the companys history, as well as the biography of its founder and namesake, Coco Chanel. The site is divided into a timeline of the biography of Coco and a history of the Chanel company, as well as a video history of its famous perfume, Chanel No. 5, entitled For The First Time.

10.The Power of value creation.

Move up the food chain

We need to move up the food chain and improve our ability to

create inspirational brand experiences: the future of PR is to become the intimate voice of the people in the boardroom, as Marc Pritchard suggests it.

Elevate and liberate innovation across our organizations, to

become our clients trusted advisors on a long-term basis.

People are less likely to listen to what you say but how a company
acts. If they see signs of hype or being misled the social network or what we call The Peoples Network will spring into life.

From Agency Service Providers to Value Creation Partners

What clients expect:

Expert and senior talent on the front line Flexibility A genuine people focus Data and analytics that reveal opportunities and elevate
work Fresh and surprising creative ideas Creativity applied in the broadest possible sense - across strategy, data analysis, media, and creative execution

Merci.