Quantity and quality

The lack of quantitative/qualitative focus the audience will certainly play a cruel joke on those for whom the figures in the reports overshadow the strategic objectives of the project. For instance – one manager desperately need to show a convincing figure in the statistics of visitors to the page by the end of the month. So he begins to wreak news, comments, videos and pictures of all available profiles. Even, perhaps, fall to such a mechanism of "black PR" as bots and the "ghosts". Perhaps, at the end of the month the statistics will shine with a four-five-digit numbers. But in reality, the reputation of the company / product / project will not acquire anything new, but in very advanced cases even lose. We remember the shocking statistics from “Vkontakte”: there were 76% of noodles in a "Rollton" group, 73% in "Svyaznoy Bank,"  59% in Adidas and  37 % in Coca-Cola. Conclusions are evident.

Main mistakes of social-media managers

As the social-media is still too new trend in corporate communications, let's not talk about the "mistakes", but "failed experiments". At least, PR-effect is very long story, who knows where those missteps will lead their authors.

However, as Paul Holmes said on his lecture this April, there hasn’t appeared any fundamentally new thing during last 80 years in public relations. Generally speaking, the basis of all failures of web-PR-experiments are the same mistakes as in off-line. In my opinion, the main factors of bad luck are reluctant to listen to the audience, not understanding the difference between advertising and PR, the lack of originality and creativity, as well as unwarranted activity. As you can see, nothing new and it is typical for the Internet. Specific things - such as too long texts are too big/ small pictures, unattractive prizes for sweepstakes and confusing conditions – all this can be corrected by own or somebody’s practice. In addition, the information field on the Internet is changing rapidly, and today no one remember what exactly was so terrible on the company’s page a month ago. This is great advantage of online, but this is the main risk for you – you should always be faster, remembering that the competitors warm your back by their breath. And everybody is copying everything – or, ok we can say that the ideas are just flying on the air. So you burn three days and caught a brilliant idea, admired your "fans" and "likers", and next day after your neighbor added a couple features, and sowed in his audience. A week later, no one will remember who was the first, and the audience will become hungry for more fresh ideas. Lose the rhythm is another great risk for the PR-specialist.

RUSSIAN PR IN CHINA: EXPEDITION STARTS TODAY!

Today, on April 19, of Russian PR experts Expedition goes to China to get acquainted with the experience of the Celestial Empire’s modern image creation.

As part of the recently launched Year of Russian Tourism in China, delegation of the Russian Public Relations Association (RPRA) will visit Beijing and get acquainted with the Chinese experience of territorial brand building. The expedition will be held from April 19 till 26, 2012.

 Territory promotion, competition for investment between regions, development of tourist image are hot topics for both Russia and China, which is always able to solve these problems efficiently. Among the topics of interest are attraction of tourists (more than 53 million one day tourists visited China in 2012), holding sport events (Summer Olympic Games 2008 in China were the first to be broadcast entirely in high definition and drew 4.7 billion viewers), use of popular art for promotion of national values ​​and mentality, ideas of national identity and statehood. During the event Russian pr-experts will appreciate the communication component of the "Chinese miracle".

The visit is held at the invitation of China National Tourism Administration. The agenda includes business visits to the Chinese companies, familiarization tour to the tourist objects, meetings with representatives of industry of public opinion control.

By agreement of the parties, all events of the working trip will be reported in the special blog on RPRA website, personal blog of Alexey Glazyrin, head of the Russian delegation, RPRA Vice-President and GC Newton Chairman of the Board of Directors.

The PR profession continues to evolve

Thanks to Joe S. Epley, APR, Fellow PRSA for kind words and nice article:

"A good example of the bright new stars in the Russian profession is Natalia Gurova, a vice president for the Moscow-based Newton-PR. She sees continued growth in the profession, particularly because more small- and middle-sized businesses are recognizing the value of public relations. “There is a growing need for specialists within the profession, such as analysts, event planners and internal communicators,” she says. “Now everyone is trained as generalist.”
http://www.prsa.org/Intelligence/Tactics/Articles/view/9700/101/Public_relations_in_Russia_Keeping_open_a_once_clo

Customer request

A myriad of constantly working information channels are trying to get customer's attention every single minute. It makes him to straight against this information attack. Successful PR-strategies today are not concentrated on storytelling, or product advantages, or company achievements. The main goal we are focusing is audience's interest. Only this interest leads us to concrete customer request.

audience - again

The biggest mistake that CEO may make, defining his audience for PR-tasks (and PR-budget), is idea that PR is only about media. Insofar as PR mean relationships (public relations) with numerous different people, we can not define PR to be only relationships with journalists, or just with investors, or only with the government and officials. PR - it's always contact with the audience that you need for strategic development.

Important: Your own history

It's extremely important to create, take care of and develop your history. It doesn't matter who are you now and whom you are working for - PR/AD agency, transnational company, own business or serving your one and only client. Fix everything. Especially numbers. Especially if they can tell everybody the story of your growth.
Let's have a look at two specialists. For instance manager A is huge educated person, famous among colleagues for his genius solutions and excellent writing/presenting/communication skills. He is always positive and all his tasks are prepared in time. Of course, he is popular. For the job. Inside the agency he work for. Because of all mentioned advantages he always is busy. So busy that he has no one single minute to fix the results of all his projects. He is always in process and never gets results.
Manager B is not so educated. Not so positive. Not so creative. Not so popular. But he fixes everything. He always takes approving document for every step he makes. Number of years spent in this agency. Number of sold (or just created) projects. Number of projects he was involved in. Nobody likes him - inside the area he is living now.
But time is very strange thing.