It seems we can’t get away from all things ‘Euro’ right now. The debate about whether Britain should stay in the EU, and on what terms, continues to rage on with politicians on both sides of the debate.

This idea of ‘One Europe’ made me think about the questions we’re asked from UK based clients on doing PR in Europe; how best to do this, what needs to be factored in and what kinds of budget should be considered. Of course we’re talking about a huge number of regions: there are 51 countries in Europe – with different languages, distinct cultures and different ways of doing business.

What does this mean for planning how to achieve a PR presence in Europe?
• Initially, the best strategy is to start small and keep it focussed. This may mean starting with 1 – 2 countries but it means that you can start to build a presence without spreading resources too thin and not achieving your overall objectives. This will, be defined by the marketing objectives and is dependent on what regions are of most strategic importance where you’re looking to establish a presence and where you have local distribution partners.

• Whether you work with a large global agency or a network of agencies, you need to tap into ‘on the ground’ knowledge. Local PR practitioners have the skills to understand how to work with and tailor stories in the best way for local press contacts, how to time announcements so that it fits with the wider press agenda- or simply avoid public holidays! As with any PR campaign, it’s important to define:

• What’s my Goal?
• What audience do I want to reach?
• What’s interesting about what we have to say for this region?
• Do the stories we want to provide, have any local relevance?

• Translating a Press Release is not enough: this really follows on from the advice above. A UK or US focussed press release translated and distributed in isolation isn’t really going to make much of an impact, unless it’s part of a wider campaign.
• One size won’t fit all. Global messaging and communications plans will determine the overall tone of the campaign, however these really need to be tailored to the needs and interests of the local audience. For example, do you need to provide more detailed product / technical information for press in certain countries? Is it possible to ‘sell in’ opinion pieces – or are these only available as paid for opportunities in your target country? How is Social Media used in that country and what local channels can be used to share your story?
Let us know about your own experiences of PR in Europe what’s worked and any challenges you came across.. ?

The post Vive la difference! appeared first on Eclat Marketing.

It was on this day in 1950 that the French foreign minister Robert Schuman presented “The Schuman Declaration”, which proposed the creation of a European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC).  The founding members of the ECSC; France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, were the first of a series of European institutions that would ultimately become today’s European Union. The ECSC was born out of the devastation brought by World War II and proposed that to prevent another war, pooling coal and steel production would “make it plain that any war between France and Germany not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible.”

During its time the ECSC created a common market, but sadly it could not prevent the decline of the steel and coal industries.

Fast forward 63 years and we can still see the direct effect the ECSC had on Europe, and with the ever increasing threat of cybercrime, once again European cooperation is leading the way.  With more than 150,000 viruses in circulation and with over a million people victims of cybercrime every day, European cooperation and coordination is needed to combat this threat.  With that in mind, the European commission presented a proposal to establish a European Cyber Crime Centre (EC3) on 28^th March 2012.

The Centre started operations in January this year and acts as the focal point in the fight against cybercrime across Europe, with the aim that it should serve as the European information focal point, as well as pool European cybercrime expertise to support Member States.  It also sets out to become the “Collective voice of European cybercrime investigators across law enforcement” as well as provide support to investigators in Member States.

Whether you’re a Euro-sceptic or staunch advocate, it is hard to deny that without a fully integrated co-operation between EU law enforcement agencies, the fight against Cybercrime is a far bigger task than any individual European country can deal with.

No one could have predicted just how effective Robert Schuman’s proposal would be when he brought it forward in 1950, but it set out the framework for countries across Europe to work together both politically and economically for mutual benefit.  Now, the European Union has over 500 million inhabitants and produced a Gross Domestic Product of 16.584 trillion dollars in 2012 (which represents 20% of the global GDP).

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Can you believe it? Twitter is celebrating its 7^th birthday today! It’s hard to imagine that the platform, which was launched back in 2006, has come all this way in such a small space of time. To celebrate, Twitter created a video as a recap to show its achievements and major milestones; the first ever tweet by founder, Jack Dorsey, the first tweet from Space and the #London2012 Olympic Games to name a few.

The famous hashtag (#) and retweeting functions, which were launched in 2007, still remains the social network’s prominent feature, with the recently acquired Vine paving the way for micro-video blogging. The limit of 140 character per tweet has also never stopped it from rivalling Facebook. In fact, you could go as far to say that it has completely changed the way people absorb information; short, concise and to the point.

As anyone at éclat Marketing will tell you, I’m a major advocate of Twitter. I joined back in 2006 as part of a social experiment at university and quickly got a taste for the quick, informative and exclusive content it provided me with. As a trainee journalist, I quickly followed (another thing Twitter made acceptable) other established journalists from a range of sectors and watched how they incorporated the micro-blogging platform into their everyday lives.

Not only did I learn about news stories way before others around me, but I was offered a platform to engage with people I would have never normally met on the street. It was through Twitter that I got my first job, secured my first interview with a national broadcasting house and launched my first venture; I have a lot to thank Twitter for.

As a company, éclat has also utilised Twitter to not only push out our messages and goals, but those of our clients too. Back in November, éclat organised BlueCoat’s Cybergeddon campaign and tweeted live from the event. Not only did it allow our client and the speakers to reach a wider audience, whilst still making the event exclusive, but it allowed journalists who couldn’t attend to follow us each step of the way.

Tweeting also helps us forge and maintain our relationships with journalists. As with normal everyday life, it’s hard to keep in contact with people while you’re working hard from the office, and Twitter enables us to share our news and help our journo friends whenever it’s needed.

But what’s next for the micro-blogging platform? It would be nice to see a variety of video options, rather than a six second promo; consider live feeds connectivity or augmented reality content as a possibility. Perhaps it may follow in the footsteps of other social networking sites such as Pinterest or applications like Evernote and allow for mood boards. It may even start notifying us of another user’s birthday, enabling users to engage on a more personal and sincere level.

Regardless of the direction it has taken and will take in the years to come, you can’t deny that Twitter has certainly changed the way we absorb information, engage other users and push out content. You can follow any of the éclat Marketing team here or follow our corporate account: @eclatmarketing to keep up-to-date with the latest news and issues from the technology sector.

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I’d like to have a £100 for every company that’s told me it wants to be a ‘thought leader’ and another £100 each time a client has told me that they don’t have a product to flog that fixes the issue, so they don’t want to comment.  Becoming a ‘thought leader’ means becoming an industry expert who is prepared to comment on an industry issue without there being any immediate commercial benefit: It’s less about generating sales and more about building the brand.

So here are my top tips for becoming a media spokespeople that the press will actually want to speak to:

1. Choose your spokespeople wisely. The top qualities for a ‘thought leader’ are:  personality, charisma, being a great/colourful communicator, having a good knowledge about the industry and an appetite for pushing boundaries.  This doesn’t automatically go with seniority!
2. Stop thinking about selling products and focus on selling opinions and ideas.
3. Figure out what topical issues you really know about and genuinely care about – ‘thought leader’ means just that, not ‘thought follower’.  Rather than trying to comment on everything – carve out a few industry topics to focus on.
4. Have the courage to stick your neck out a bit.  Don’t just say the obvious and avoid marketing/sales hype at all costs.  Be ready and willing to back up your claims/assertions with real evidence or examples.
5. Follow some of the key journalists that are the ‘agenda setters’ and use social media to stay current on industry discussions.  Offer informed and edgy comment on breaking news stories as well as suggesting angles/stories yourself.
6. Timeliness is everything.  If you have to get your comment approved by legal and/or a committee of executives before it can be submitted – chances are you’ll be too late to get involved in the discussion!
7. Make sure that you have the backing and trust of your seniors and that they know enough about how the press works to understand that you can’t control what appears in the press.  Building a trusted relationship with the media means not constantly requesting changes to copy (unless of course it’s blatantly inaccurate or damaging).
8. Make yourself available and prioritise media interactions.  Nothing is more of a ‘relationship’ killer than having to regularly reschedule press briefings (because something more pressing has cropped up).  Make sure you get back to journalists quickly if they request a comment or interview.   After all if you won’t talk there are always plenty of others that will!

Please feel free to share your own thoughts on the secrets of becoming a ‘thought leader’.

The post The Secrets of Becoming a ‘Thought Leader’ appeared first on Eclat Marketing.

Over the past months we’ve seen an increasing demand amongst our client base for video content that can be used on their website as marketing collateral, and when looking for video advice, we are often the first port of call for our clients. Historically, we’ve tended to use freelance video professionals, and point our clients in the direction of people who we know offer good services at a reasonable cost, but after a few testing experiences we begun to realise that there’s a fundamental gap in the market that’s not being filled by the ‘jack of all trades’ video professional, and that’s industry knowledge.

As a Technology PR Agency with over 14 years of experience specifically in the B2B, Hi-tech and Telecoms sector, we know exactly what key messages our clients want to communicate in any of their marketing materials, including video. Therefore, we are in the best position possible to provide relevant and compelling video content for Technology B2B organisations which will appeal to prospects, customers and the press.

With this in mind, we decided to set up our own multimedia division of éclat Marketing which specialises in video production, and also works alongside our social media team so that we can consult our clients on how to promote videos to the fullest extent. The fact is, PR is moving into a new era, and being an agency that focuses solely on technology, it would be almost hypocritical if we did not keep up with the times ourselves. Therefore we understand the importance of offering our clients not only a full range of traditional PR services, but digital PR services as well. So watch this space as we foray even further into digital marketing and PR, and become a multimedia, multifunctional Tech PR Agency of the future!

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It was interesting to see how the big brands reacted to some pretty alarming news last week that a routine food test had discovered horse DNA in burgers sold from their shelves. The scandal opened the floodgates to a stream of horse jokes on twitter and, more seriously, left the supermarket chains with a big PR challenge on their hands. Whilst there was no immediate health risk, from a PR perspective, it was interesting to see how these big hitters handled the ensuing media storm and dealt with what can, inevitably, lead to a loss of public confidence and reputational damage. These are, of course, brands we need to trust and have complete assurance that what we’re buying is exactly what the label tells us it is.

Whilst products were swiftly removed from shelves, Tesco went further and took a full page advert in nationals to apologise, “We and our supplier have let you down and we apologise” going on to say that “We will find out exactly what happened and, when we do, we’ll come back and tell you.”

The news and the brand’s swift reaction brought back to mind some of the areas we covered in a crisis communications course, which the eclat team delivered last year.

The training was designed to deal with ‘real-life’ situations which are unexpected and evolve as more information comes to light and the golden rules that should be followed when dealing with the media. We covered areas such as : pre -Crisis Management ; the importance of having a plan and updating it; having a team in place that is trained to deal with a crisis, testing the plan and preparing the channels of communication that will be used. We also covered the initial crisis response and best practices for responding to media questions.

Finally we role-played some interview situations, which tested the messages the delegates had developed and underscored the importance of preparation. The unfortunate truth is you never know when a crisis, in whatever form, can strike. The key is to have plans in place so that, should the worst happen, you’re well equipped to deal with questions from employees, stakeholders, suppliers and the media. You can find out more about our crisis communications courses here… http://www.eclat.co.uk/services/training/

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Far too often companies invest considerable sums in tech PR agencies but become the architects of their own downfall. Here are my top 10 tips to avoid the most common pitfalls that get in the way of great PR….

1. Ensure objectives are clear and documented in writing – whilst you’d think that this was pretty obvious, there may be multiple people involved in the process on both the client and agency side and – if the targets haven’t been agreed and regularly updated at least quarterly – then agency and client may not be working on the same page.

2. Agree on how to measure your achievements – Setting objectives is only half of the battle. Being clear about how you will measure success is equally important and I don’t mean counting press clippings. Wherever possible use an independent measurement metric as – with the best will in the world – the agency is likely to present a biased viewpoint!

3. Facilitate regular contact with thought leaders and visionaries – If you want your agency to come up with creative campaigns and ideas, it’s vital to provide them with regular contact with your visionaries and thought leaders. Limiting regular contact to marketing people only isn’t sufficient.

4. Give open and honest feedback – Relationships, whether business of personal, thrive on open and honest communication. If you’re not happy with what the agency is doing, tell them. Equally encourage your agency to tell you how you can help them be more successful.

5. Eliminate pointless reports – Getting the right balance between feedback and expending a disproportionate amount of time on generating reports that will simply be filed away for posterity can be tricky. Ultimately – particularly if the agency is working on an hourly basis – the more time they spend reporting, the less time they spend generating actual results so keep reporting to a minimum.

6. Establish clear lines of authority – In order to avoid miscommunication and confusion it’s vital to establish where budgetary responsibility lies and who the agency reports to. Equally having multiple points of sign off for materials inevitably leads to long lead times and delays which negatively impacts on PR coverage and can be extremely de-motivational for the agency staff.

7. Organise regular reviews – Taking the time out for structured reviews and planning sessions is vital and allows both client and agency to take a step back to take a strategic look at progress against objectives and to plan the next stage of the campaign.

8. Set realistic budgets – Any business relationship has to be mutually beneficial. Setting a realistic budget and remunerating the agency fairly will keep the relationship on track. It’s perfectly acceptable in this day and age to share the risk and reward between agency and client and some agencies offer a ‘Payment-by-Results’ element to their fees.

9. Keep the agency in the picture – keep them informed of all key developments – good or bad. Too often agencies are presented with a rose-tinted view of the client’s business or kept in the dark until the last minute. If they’re really going to act as an extension to your business, they need to have the full picture – warts and all!

10. Get the agency’s mindshare – Make sure that you’re not a small fish in a big pond. When you choose your agency partner, check out their existing client list and average budget. Far too often clients end up being sidelined because their budget is significantly smaller than other clients the agency is working for; so don’t get lured into the trap of choosing a large agency just for the kudos of their name. It’s vital that you have mindshare and are important to the agency if you want to get the best results.

The post Top ten tips to getting the most out of your PR agency appeared first on Eclat Marketing.

As a forward-thinking Tech PR agency, social media is an integral part of our day to day job, and last week an opportunity emerged to conduct a fresh and exciting, fully integrated social media PR campaign for one of our clients, and I jumped at the chance.

The campaign developed from a roundtable that we were asked to put together, and right away we decided that we couldn’t face the prospect of having to drag the press along to yet another tedious roundtable, let alone face the weeks after the event, anxiously trawling the internet for coverage.

So we immediately canned the idea of a traditional roundtable and instead turned it into a debate, inviting some of the country’s top cyber security experts from the Jericho Forum, ENISA, Royal Holloway University and infamous ex-hacker Robert Schifreen, all there to argue the case that we are facing the prospect of ‘cybergeddon.’
We knew from the outset that if we wanted to do something like this and make it a success, we would need to think outside of the box, and social media would have to be at the heart of it.

Every component of the campaign was leveraged through social media. The invites were sent out in the form of army helmets and call-up cards, and journalists that tweeted a picture of themselves in the hat won a bottle bubbly. We created a ‘cybergeddon’ hashtag, which coincided very nicely with the release of the major US TV series and movie, helping boost the profile of our event even further. In total, we had over 50 people tweet and retweet coverage from the event using our hashtag on the day, and many more in the days after. We also took the opportunity to make the event truly interactive by live tweeting key highlights, quotes and pictures, and invited questions from the twittersphere, which of course did wonders for our hashtag and got plenty of retweets.

All in all, my first foray into the world of social media digital campaigns went remarkably well. In fact, it went so well that even after the debate the hashtag’s popularity continued to grow, with all of the journalists tweeting their stories. Even the cybergeddon movie account was tweeting our coverage to their 2600+followers using the hashtag, along with their fans. Whilst social media was just one part of the overall assignment, it has to be said that it was a very important component that, having been leveraged to its full extent, propelled the campaign to an entirely new level. Now I just can’t wait to get stuck into the next project.

The post PR gets social appeared first on Eclat Marketing.

Bill Boyle, someone who has straddled both sides of the fence, takes a stab at solving PR’s eternal philosophical conundrum – can a hack become a flack?

As I began to edit IT publications myself and had to deal with the marketing functions and the sales functions of those publications I became more aware of how the public relations function adds a value to an organisation. As an editor you have to be the ambassador for the title and that title is a business enterprise, something which the news journalist is very much insulated from. They are the attack dog behind the fence which has a very singular and blunt purpose — to dig out the news stories that will make a difference. In my days at Reed Business International and VNU business publishing I was never leaned on by a publisher not to run a story for commercial reasons even when we were being threatened with lawsuits.

Journalists get the threat of lawsuits all the time – in fact it was the publisher Robert Maxwell who used this tactic most brutally against Private Eye. It wasn’t until a few years after I stopped editing PC Dealer when I realised how worried my then publisher had been – it had been explained at a VNU board meeting that the biggest risk to the company at that point, apart from a lightning strike on the building, were the seven threatened lawsuits that PC Dealer was fighting. Fortunately none of them materialised because we had got all of our stories right.

So why did I then go into PR? I did it reluctantly because the resources available to me as an editor became so meagre that I could not do decent investigative reporting. This wasn’t the fault of the publishers. Most of the classified and job adverts which were the bread-and-butter of the trade press swiftly migrated to the new online magazines and job boards. There just wasn’t the money to go around to pay a larger pool of reporters. When I began working on Computer Weekly, there were 30 editorial staff. I would be surprised to find more than five on the title now.

As an editor, and ambassador for the title, I found that I was unconsciously doing PR and came to the conclusion that I could do PR for other organisations as well and moved into a PR agency where I was suddenly expected to deal with multiple clients. This was difficult since up to then I have believed in my one client, PC Dealer, and now I had to deal with lots of them and be as passionate as I could about all of them. I found this hard.

What most people do not understand in moving from a journalistic role to a public relations role is that you immediately lose the status, within your little universe of the IT technology industry, of being a third-party influencer whom vendor’s and PRs have to be deferential to. You suddenly become part of the service industry with clients who expect you to deliver great coverage and have sky-high expectations which you have to fulfil on a weekly basis.

As a PR person you get it in the neck on a daily basis for things that are not under your control such as journalists promising they are going to run a story and not doing so. (Bastards). I still remember my confusion the first time a client was telling me how disappointed they were at the meagre coverage they had received in the previous month. This was the first time this had ever happened — as a journalist you produce your copy edit your good you get the approbation of your colleagues and maybe win a few awards. So I desperately over-promised what they would get the following month and they were even more crestfallen when they saw the same results. Account handling was not my strong point initially.

The second thing which took me a while to get used to with being on the other side of the news fence was always having to big-up the client, even if the client was someone I had no real empathy for. As a hack I chose my own stories and anything demanded by a news editor I was usually up for.

Being suddenly outside of the news loop is also a hard thing to deal with — a newsroom is an exciting place to be and does seem like the centre of the universe because everyone is trying to influence you to get onto the pages of your publication. I would advise every PR person who has not spent time in a newsroom to do so and find out what it’s like.
I have now gone back to journalism because I can now control the environment that I work in. It’s taken a long time for me to get to this luxurious stage. I learned a lot about PR, selling-in, communications and client handling and lots of other things about business which I would have never learned had I not been in PR.

That is the main lesson I take about the difference between being a journalist and being a PR pro. Journalism in its purest form is a vocation with the best journalists wanting to tell the truth beneath the surface of government lies or corporate greed and going to almost any lengths to get their story. The public relations person is a business person who works within the corporate environment. One is an insider and the other has to be prepared to be an outsider. Crossing the floor is difficult – staying there depends on how comfortable you are in periods of crisis.

If you missed it, Here’s part one of Bill’s blog

The post What is the fundamental difference between PR and journalism? – Part 2 appeared first on Eclat Marketing.

The big news yesterday, today and probably for the next few months is that William and Kate are expecting a child destined to be third in line for the throne. The UK media is talking of little else and the former headline story on tax avoiding multinational corporations has consequently faded from view. It is another example of a lack of media tenacity when in pursuit of a populist audience.

The appalling situation where a company can make hundreds of millions in UK revenues and legally pay nothing in corporation tax remains and the media appear to be no longer questioning the companies, the taxman or the politicians as to how this could have been allowed to go on for over a decade. I wonder how much tax revenue could/should have been collected during that long period. It might even be enough to drastically reduce the national debt and the austerity we are all faced with at the moment. This deserves to be a major focus in the media and we should seek to claw back every penny from these companies.

The only remaining media interest is due to one of the organisations concerned saying they will pay more tax in the future. A good PR effort to avoid further damage to its brand, but I wonder if the other tax avoiders will just duck under the royal baby story until it all blows over. Unless the media keeps the pressure on I fear they might.

I admire the media in the UK most of the time, but not today. Today is a great one if you need to bury any bad news it seems.

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