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Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak at the BLUE Mind Summit at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. It was the first conference in history to bring together leaders in neuroscience and ocean exploration. It was an incredible experience and you can read more here on this initial blog post by Wired’s Sheril Kirshenbaum.

So what the heck was I doing there, you might ask. Fair question.

Inspired by our Global CEO, Chris Graves, at Ogilvy PR, we have been following closely how certain advances in neuroscience are translating into the discipline of public relations and communications.

After the jump is the presentation on Slideshare and my speech. A big thank you to Dr. Jennifer Scott for helping me in put this together (Jennifer is on the Board of SeaWeb who partnered with Ogilvy on this presentation). continue reading

Michael Hatcliffe
Managing Director, US Corporate Practice
Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide

I spent the latter half of last week in New Orleans for the Reputation Institute’s 15^th annual conference, Navigating the Reputation Economy.  It was a fascinating few days and I wanted to share the highlights of the insightful concepts discussed at the conference.

1. Reputation has never mattered more. Research was presented that suggests 60% of purchase decisions are based on the perception of the enterprise rather than the features of the product. Cisco said that 25 years ago, Chief Reputation Officers did not exist - the stakeholder society and the internet has made reputation a paramount business concept.
2. Brand and Reputation really are different. I liked what Sprint said: You can create and control your own brand; reputation is what you earn, it’s what you get from others. Cisco had another variation: You own your brand, you earn your reputation.
3. Reputation is an inside-out process. A regular theme among the most impressive companies (FedEx, Pfizer among them) was that you have to win first with your employees before you can win with customers and external stakeholders. Managing your reputation starts with your most valued asset - your people.
4. Reputation derives from the character of the company. Great stories from Honeywell, Xerox and Kodak on how they turned their reputations around - and they did so by going back to the heritage and values that had been important when their companies were  being built. It’s also what Toyota is doing to rebuild its Reputation (’The Toyota Way’). Honeywell said there are 5 principles of character-based communications: Integrity, Performance, Relevance, Accessibility and Clarity/Consistency.
5. Management of reputation does not only happen within Corporate Communications. If management of reputation is seen purely as a PR function, then it is largely ineffective. The companies who treat it seriously have it as a core business mandate, with the CEO personally tracking it (Sprint CEO Dan Hesse told us it is one of his 3 priorities).
6. Reputation should be a consideration in every business decision. Allstate admitted that it only took reputation seriously after it was hammered post-Hurricane Katrina for the way it handled policy claims. Now they have “Conscious Choice” meetings with all internal stakeholders to explore the ramifications of business decisions on consumers, regulators and other stakeholders.
7. Sadly, you learn most about your reputation when it’s being attacked. Toyota’s Jim Wiseman gave a fascinating and candid “lessons learned” presentation about its troubles over the past 18 months - “We never considered reputation crucial until the bottom fell out,” he said.  Before the problems, Toyota didn’t even have a way of communicating with all its employees - the many affiliates did their own thing. He had his own Top Ten list of lessons - I liked “Understand Politics and Fight Back” and “Swallow Your Pride and Communicate with Legal”.

Sara Pereira, Deputy Regional Director, Technology, Ogilvy PR Asia Pacific

Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide (Ogilvy PR), Asia’s largest and most awarded public relations agency, announced the promotion of Sara Pereira to Deputy Regional Director, Technology, Ogilvy PR Asia Pacific, with immediate effect.

Since joining Ogilvy PR in 2006, Sara has been instrumental in building the technology and social media practices in the agency. Sara is currently the Director of the technology practice in Singapore and she will continue in this role.

Here is a link to a presentation I gave yesterday at the Content Marketing Strategies Conference in Berkeley. It’s about the role of Public Relations in content development and activation. Unfortunately some of the videos I used are missing in the slideshare version.

These the four key take-aways:

1. We need to be social storytellers
2. because every company is a media company
3. that means that in the next few years we will see marketing departments transforming in publishing operations
4. and while content is king, we shouldn’t forget about the Queen (Activation) and the Court (Community)

My family travels quite a bit for work and pleasure. This past year has been a particularly busy travel year. While living in and flying often to United hub cities over the past 20 years or so, I became a loyal United flyer pretty early on and our kids have followed suit. So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise in 2010 when both of our kids, under the age of 12, made United Premier status. This got me thinking about Kid customer loyalty. Our family can’t be that unique, two traveling parents who take their kids with them a lot. So what does United do uniquely to engender loyalty in a family/household that is 100% loyal? Turns out not much. Sure, the kids collect miles and get free upgrades, just like their parents. But isn’t establishing brand loyalty with kids, preteens in this case, like hitting the jackpot for consumer marketers? The fact that air travel is one of those hard-to-switch categories once you’ve achieved status, makes me wonder why United wouldn’t try to lock in my kids now for life? Would it be so hard to add more kid-friendly CE gadgets to the United miles for gifts options? Or offer them Netflix-like movie usage while in the Red Carpet room?

So what does this have to do with tech PR? The PR profession has always listed ‘customers’ as an obligatory target audience in PR plans, but the truth is we haven’t always had consistent access nor purview with this important audience. With the arrival of technologies like social CRM that invite customers to engage with brands from customer care, innovation and enthusiast perspectives, I’d argue that the PR profession has never been in a better position to help engender brand loyalty. This is a step beyond leveraging social media with customers.

When I think of my family of four traveling over the holidays this year, all of us with Premier and higher status on United, I can’t help but think what a huge lost PR and customer loyalty opportunity that was for United. Not that we were somehow so unique, but more-so that United would want to focus on this Frequent Flyer Family, and do whatever it could to engender and promote it. They knew who was traveling ahead of time, the kids’ ages, and their United status. Why not ask more families like us to blog about it? Check-in as a family at different United Family online locations? Submit a video chronicling what travel is like from a kids’ perspective? Provide service enhancement suggestions? (side note: my kids are way better travelers than a lot of adults I see. They can beat most people’s bin-to-gate time, hands-down.)

So PR peeps, let’s deliver in 2011 on that component of the PR plan that pledges to treat customers like a priority audience. Think beyond the social contest and fan page. Which brands do a good job of engendering loyalty across everyone who lives under the same roof? And United, if you are listening, I am all ears and would love to engage with you as the representative of a very loyal, enthusiastic traveling family.

Recently I gave a talk at SMU (Singapore Management University) on the future of social media and its impact on businesses. Here is a blog post by Michael Netzley on the talk.

In a nutshell, I see 4 key drivers that will shape the way we work: Enterprise 2.0, Mobile, Content and Video, and finally Crowdsourcing. All of them are related in one way or another.

If you think that only 10 years ago we were dealing with Y2K, that Google was just one and a half years old, that we were excited by the first USB flash drive… We can only imagine what’s ahead, in the next 10 years.

Will you be in DC on October 14? If so, don’t miss the opportunity to hear Alec Ross, Senior Advisor for Innovation in the Office of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speak about the intersection of U.S. diplomacy, international technology partnerships, and entrepreneurship. Learn about how the State Department is promoting mobile technologies as tools for women’s empowerment and international development. The Department is also involved in “Apps 4 Africa,” a new competition to spur technological innovation in East Africa.

We’re pleased to host Alec at Ogilvy PR’s DC office. Learn more about the event here.

The Progress and Freedom Foundation has closed its doors after a fantastic 17 year run. The PFF was the first think tank to study the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. We’re sorry to see them go and we look forward to working with these great people in future endeavors.

FHM Germany replaces website presence in favour of Facebook

By the end of July FHM a re-known lifestyle magazine in Germany will dismantle its homepage. Instead, FHM wants to manage its internet activities via a Facebook fan page. “We are where our readers are, on Facebook. Interaction with our readers is our most important focus”, argues a representative of the publication.

OK, everybody seems to be on Facebook and of course giving up a homepage in favour of a Facebook page will save some resources and costs. The decision raised some buzz in social media in Germany when marketing experts and social media discussed the pros and cons of becoming dependent to a third party with its own interests, and how this would result in less opportunities in terms of branding, functionality and tracking.

What is even more interesting is the fact that FHM sees “no future” for its homepage. Looking at the numbers confirms this view. Only 8.000 users per day visited the page, its Google visibility was relatively poor as were the inbound links. As the old site seemed to have low relevance for the target group it would be interesting to know what makes FHM think that this would change on Facebook.

Simply transferring an apparently unsuccessful concept to another platform would not be a very strategic answer and it would not even be very consistent from a financial POV as any budget spent on a concept with low perception would be a poor investment.

As social media is not a one-size-fits-all solution the answer to the question of whether a brand should move to Facebook or not is a quite individual one. But the answer is always NO if it is done without a content and engagement strategy that is tailor-made for the new address. And by the way, it’s a myth that success in social media comes for free.

A company cannot just start a twitter and/or facebook account without having any competences in this field. Well, (technically) it can. But acting in an unfamiliar but public arena generally bears risks and this is especially true for social media. But what if a company does not have the man power – or the know-how – to professionally run a social media campaign? Fortunately, there are PR agencies that offer professional advice.
But when social media is all about transparency and authenticity how can that be handled through an external PR agency? Ok, this seems to be a no-go and could mean the end of all social media activities in the above mentioned case.

But wait – taking a closer look at the issue, there is an approach to outsource major parts of an enterprise’s social media activity without interfering with the social web’s ethos. Most important thing here: major does not equal all. A successful outsourcing of social media marketing requires active partnering and contribution from both the enterprise and its chosen agency.
At the end, it is much more crucial that the created content sticks to the social web’s rules and expectations than the question of its originator. It is important that a consistent delivery of quality content is guaranteed. And that is a task a social media specialist who is familiar with the company’s business can fulfil even better – if he is not stuck in time-consuming approval processes.