International PR – focus on India

Some of my readers may recall that back in February I chaired a CIPR Education & Skills sector group panel discussion on international PR. Following that event I blogged about the ethics of engaging with PR ‘norms’ in particular countries (specifically in China) and how easily this sits with a UK perspective of PR conduct. This blog post was also converted into a shorter article for ConnectEd, the newsletter of the CIPR Education & Skills Sector group.

Today the headline ‘Why do PR people pamper the media?‘ posted by @IndiaPRBlog on Twitter grabbed my attention. This blog post, written by Vikas Kumar provides an interesting insight into the practice of gifting journalists to get them to cover your story or event. I thought my readers might be interested to read this too, particularly in light of earlier posts.

A PR Beast of a Feast

As I sat with my other half yesterday evening watching Channel 4 news I couldn’t help but comment on how inappropriate it seemed that the news item reporting on G8 leaders discussing food shortages should be accompanied by cutaway shots of said G8 leaders sitting down to dinner. It was therefore no surprise when The Guardian dropped on my doorstep this morning to see as front page news the incongruous G8 feasting and the leading subject of conversation of the day being hailed as hypocrisy on the part of the G8 summit.

As ever when I see items on the news or making the front pages, I always think about the PR people working for the various organisations behind the stories or battling with them. Sometimes I inwardly congratulate and even envy them at times for pulling off such great publicity. Sometimes I pity them. Sometimes I get angry at them. This time, however, I just can’t see how they could possibly win! If I were asked to organise an event to which 8 of the guests were going to be the leaders of some of the most powerful countries in the world, you can bet your bottom dollar that I would be recruiting top chefs to provide a sumptuous feast for them! However, if knowing that on that same day they would be discussing a global food crisis you would see a certain irony on putting on such a feast. So how do you win? There’s a cultural difference at stake here too – the difference between what we might consider to be a feast in the UK and what the Japanese consider to be a feast. Is eight courses really that uncommon in Japan? I served five courses to guests in my little two-bedroom Coventry terrace house on Saturday evening.

I therefore pity the PR person who might have had any say in this. On the one hand the annual gathering of eight of the most powerful people in the world is something to celebrate and ought to be celebrated in style, on the other hand if they’re discussing food shortages then only the most modest of dinners (or better still perhaps no food at all) was really going to keep people happy. I think perhaps with a budget of over £200m, perhaps there are some other extravagances of the G8 summit that ought to be looked at instead of the food, but no PR person is going to draw attention to any of those now, are they?

Universities need to internationalise their approach to social networking

The news that Facebook has finally launched a Chinese-language version of the site will undoubtedly excite many British universities. China is an important market for recruiting students and developing research partnerships. It is clear that British universities have over the past few years started to get to grips with the opportunities for communications (and dare I say, marketing) through social networking sites. The familiarity in the UK with Facebook and other popular sites such as Bebo and MySpace has encouraged universities and HE colleges to establish a presence in these virtual networks, or at least to monitor them for looming crises. Surely adopting a presence on Facebook’s Chinese-language site is just another extension of this approach? Or is it?

I’ve been wondering over the past few months just how much consideration universities actually give to the international scene in social networking as opposed to thinking purely in terms of social networks that dominate in the UK or western world. For example in Asia Friendster is one of the most popular social networking sites, overshadowing both Facebook and MySpace quite considerably. QQ, Xianonei and 51.com are also dominant in the Asian market but barely heard of in the West. The language barriers make some of these sites inaccessible to the marketeers and communicators working in British universities, but if they are serious about continuing to engage with potential students in Asia, particularly China, then perhaps efforts should also be made to educate ourselves more in social networking spaces dominating other markets. Time is an issue, with many communications departments in British universities already stretched and undoubtedly struggling to keep up with the pace of technological change and online communications. I’d be delighted to lead some research into the potential for marcomms with non-English language social networks if there were a few universities out there that might be interested to get involved and back this.

This recent blog post on Venture Beat gives an insight into Friendster’s dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. This post from Read Write Web written in January 2008 might also provide useful background information to anyone looking to explore the social networking phenomenon in China and Asia.

University Open Days in Second Life

The BBC reported this week that Liverpool John Moore’s University (LJMU) is hosting an open day for prospective students in Second Life.

I have been involved in a number of conversations over the past couple of years with colleagues throughout the HE sector about hosting open days in Second Life. If truth be told, it’s a no-brainer and if the popularity of Second Life continues (and at this moment in time I’m not entirely sure where it is going) then all universities will begin to take this approach.

However, what worries me about the reports from LJMU is that the campus that they (or in this case some of their students) have created is not a true representation of the actual campus. Some of the buildings are virtual replicas, but others are reported to be fictional spaces that students would like to see built on their campus, such as halls of residence with their own swimming pools. Designed to be ‘talking points’ amongst the student amassadors and prospective students, I fear that with language barriers in place amongst even some of the best English-speaking prospective students from overseas, these fictional buildings could be mistaken by some as representations of real buildings and create a false reality.

If Second Life is to become a widely used tool for marketing universities to overseas students I think a few simple rules of best practice need to be observed by the creators of those virtual spaces:

• keep it true to life. If you are including buildings that are either planned to be developed or complete fictions then these need to be very clearly labelled as so, and in a language that is concise and not open to misinterpretation by those who do not speak English as their mother-tongue;
• if you have ’student ambassadors’ there to speak with potential students, then you need to be true to their genuine personality and not have marketing or communications folk ‘posing’ as students, which would be very easy to do in this false environment;
• when advertising a virtual open day you again need to be clear and upfront (in a language or languages that cannot be open to misinterpretation) about what will be available for visitors to see, and whether it is a genuine representation or not;
• don’t ever see Second Life as a suitable replacement for actual visits to a campus. I have visited a vast number of university campuses over the years and nothing quite sells a university so well as the atmosphere that its people can create (a sunny day always helps too of course!). Second Life really does open up opportunities that standard print prospectuses or online 360 degree tours just can’t offer, and this is an important step for overseas student recruitment, but nothing quite beats one-to-one communication in person on a real campus and I really hope that universities don’t ever begin to see this as a replacement for that level of contact.

How does a code of practice cope with varying degrees of ethics for international PR?

This week I chaired the CIPR Education and Skills Sector Group’s panel discussion on ‘Building contacts with international media’. Needless to say the subject was popular with universities and we had a turnout of around 80 people. However, the session got me thinking about the varying degrees of ethics in the PR-journalist relationship around the world and how being a member (as I proudly am) of an organisation like the CIPR, signed up to a code of practice, actually sits with being able to manage a successful PR campaign.

Let’s take an obvious example discussed at the event: China. Every university in the UK is interested in China. The largest proportion of overseas students come from there: they arrive in the UK, pay the highest level of fees and go back home after their course and spread the word to other families about their university.

Now, at yesterday’s panel discussion it was made very plain that payment for editorial is commonplace in China. This isn’t advertising, this is actually handing a brown envelope of cash to a journalist to ‘persuade’ them to write about your organisation, product or story. We learned (lots of raised eyebrows in the room) that at Chinese press conferences it is again commonplace to order the room according to a hierarchy of journalists: the most ‘important’ (or influential, perhaps we should say) sit in the front row where they are welcomed by hefty brown envelopes and served tea and coffee to their liking throughout. As the rows go back, the envelopes get smaller and the service gets less attentive.

We also learned that India is increasingly adopting this approach to the PR-journalist relationship.

So, given that we were holding this event under the umbrella of the CIPR who have a very clear code of practice for PR professionals in the UK, and, let’s face it, the raised eyebrows in the room can only mean that most people think the Chinese practice is somewhat unethical, how do we cope with globalisation and the increasing demand for international PR approaches? Is it any different to taking a journalist out for lunch, or to buying advertising space in a newspaper and just ‘by coincidence’ there being a mention of your product, company, service, findings or whatever it might be in the same paper just a few pages later? I think it is. Perhaps the press isn’t always quite as free and fair as we might like to think it is, but they too have ethical standards.

Or is this really a question of ethics at all? Is this just actually a question of business practice and how such practices vary from country to country? Should we engage with such practice in order to get the international coverage for our organisations or clients that we so need, or should we maintain our British PR practices and just hope that they will work? I think some kind of middle-ground needs to be found (yes, I’m sitting on the fence), and a way worked out to engage with media in such countries without compromising our professional or personal integrity.

There’s also part of me, looking back to my student days and thinking about cultural identities and difference, that likes this difference and embraces the challenge that it presents us with. In a globalised society, isn’t it somehow refreshing that such cultural differences still exist and we don’t just have one great homogenised system of working? From an ethical point of view I don’t like it one bit, but from a cultural point of view the difference excites and interests me. I’m not saying the practice is right, but what is right is that different forms of PR practice exist. Difference is good. Without difference in such practice, and different ethical viewpoints, how do we actually continue to test our own values? How do we know what is ‘good’ if we never have any ‘bad’? We can only test and reinforce our own values if we have something to compare them with, and for that reason if for no other, we need to embrace difference.

Building Contacts with International Media

I’m going to be chairing the CIPR Education & Skills Sector Group’s event on Building Contacts with International Media on the 26th February. It should be an interesting event and we already have lots of people signing up to attend. So now I have the challenge of deciding what questions to ask them, what way to steer the discussion … and how to claw things back if the discussion goes off on a tangent. Some initial and very obvious thoughts for questions to the panel include:

1. How to get the stories to overseas media (distribution methods, is email okay, what services are there to use to help with this)
2. Where to begin with building contacts – are UK-based correspondents a good ‘route-in’ as such?
3. Can language be a barrier?
4. Do different countries have different conventions in terms of writing and issuing press releases?
5. What kind of stories should we be trying to place with international media?
6. How can we monitor pick-up of stories in overseas media?
7. Perhaps encourage the panel and members of the audience to share experiences or anecdotes about working with overseas media.