Today in Shanghai it was my honor to address the China New Social Media Forum on the crafting and co-creation of persuasion narratives, digital storytelling through the news feed with stakeholders, producing and packaging content for the new public mind. I also spoke about how PR is the key marketing discipline when it comes to both promoting and protecting image in the modern world of social networks.

View more presentations from Robert Pickard.

Check out B-M Seoul’s new ‘Intern-Speak’ blog, the first of its kind in Korea. I like it because the idea is to engage the rising next generation of PR talent, listening to what they have to say and providing a place where colleagues can build peer-to-peer relationships with each other.

I just don’t accept that junior turnover is an insoluble problem for PR agencies. Sometimes I see this depressing tendency for senior managers to throw up their hands and assume high staff churn will always be with us, so why bother doing things differently?

Such wrong-headed thinking results in attitudes where entry-level staff can feel like they are an anonymous labour commodity expected to fail, rather than as a precious community of individuals supported to succeed.

Just about every PR firm’s offices are brimming with young digital talent. When they see their firm using modern platforms and techniques, I hope they will see a future in the consultancy business and be empowered to proactively advocate the digital approaches senior people in the profession need to personally master.

Let’s face it: there is a generation gap in pretty much every PR firm (crudely between the older ‘analogues’ and the younger ‘digitals’), and this makes staff retention more difficult. PR business leaders of high caliber and true character should confront that reality as a motivating challenge to overcome, not as a necessary evil to accept as a given.

PR leaders need to wrap their heads around the fact that the future of our business will be built by people who ‘get’ the importance of transparency and information-sharing, where the credibility of communication comes from fearless conversation, not from timid control.

That’s why I like the thinking behind B-M Korea’s intern blog.

One of the key influences in my recent PR life is Steve Bowen, who joins Burson-Marsteller on July 1st [from Edelman] as our new regional Managing Director for Marketing & Training in Asia-Pacific.

I first met Steve in 2002, when he was the head of international public relations at Kia Motors Corporation (KMC)  in Seoul, Korea. At that time, Kia was looking for its very first global PR agency, and as the brand new Managing Director of Edelman Korea, I was keen to put a few wins on the board.

For all the credit I’ve received in my career for building PR businesses in some very challenging circumstances, I always remind myself of the people who helped create the winning conditions along the way. It was Kia’s confidence in selecting my old firm — when the great Mark Juhn was KMC’s COO — that really jump-started the rise of “The New Edelman Korea,” and Steve was the best kind of client whose support and encouragement I will always well remember.

As my customer, Steve provided thoughtful and clear feedback and well educated the agency about his company’s business. He was the exemplar of excellence, a champion of quality, and a factory of new ideas. Better yet, he valued listening and thinking before just talking and doing.

Today international PR for the rising Asian multinationals is becoming an important part of our business, and Steve’s pioneering experience and track record in this area from his Kia years will help take our game to the next level.

I’ve blogged about the benefits of working with friends before, but in Steve’s case the new wrinkle is that while many people think of him as an Edelman guy, in fact he is a ‘Burson Person’ who is now returning to the consultancy where he first cut his teeth in the PR business.

Here I am speaking with Glen Frost of Australia’s The PR Report about Burson-Marsteller’s approach to Evidence-Based Communications:

A few weeks earlier at New Delhi, here I was interviewed by Ashwani Singla, the CEO of Genesis Burson-Marsteller, India’s premier public relations consultancy. Of particular interest to PR industry types is our tackling of the procurement trend in communications services.

I was in Kuala Lumpur this week to expand Burson-Marsteller’s geographic footprint to Malaysia through our new preferred affiliate agreement with Essence Communications. This was actually a re-entry announcement, because those with a sense of PR history will remember that ‘KL’ was one of B-M’s first Asian operations dating back to the early 1970s.

Knowing a thing or two about market re-entry situations in the PR business (having in 2005 brought Edelman into Japan to stay after my old firm’s earlier abortive attempts), I was impressed by the respect and profile that the B-M name still enjoys in Malaysia to this day.

The last time I was in this important yet under-appreciated PR market, it was to attend a regional leadership retreat in lovely Langkawi a few years ago. This time around, it was much less confining, with ample opportunities to meet Malaysian PR professionals working on the front lines of our profession.

Count me as quite impressed.

I connected with some ultra-talented people, all of whom wondered whether PR will ever achieve the zenith of respect in Malaysia that their capability and consulting results should already merit.

For the communicators I met in KL, PR is a proud professional calling, but alas there seems inadequate respect for the PR craft in the marketplace and the limited budgets are commercially vexing (which makes the recent controversy over our competitor APCO’s huge Malaysia consulting contract — which has been extremely high-profile — a rather ironic development on a couple of levels).

Then there is the Malaysia PR Act. Whenever I mention to colleagues outside of Malaysia that this major nation’s government is considering the enactment of such legislation, there is general curiosity. Inside Malaysia, there are strongly mixed reactions. On the one hand, there is a feeling that PR has come of age and that this proposed new law will finally legitimize the PR profession while curbing past ‘abuses.’ Then, on the other hand, there is the view that the PR Act will achieve nothing more than the demonization of the PR trade and the unnecessary regulation of an industry that merits more commercial respect than it deserves more legislation from government.

Either way, I think a more pressing issue may be how the multinational PR industry better integrates and applies top Malaysia PR talent, who can transcend domestic PR roles and take their rightful place on the global PR stage in highly interconnected digital environments.

I’ve noticed that some multinational PR agencies in this part of the world — perhaps regionally imitating the way culturally ignorant international headquarters can often treat their own Asia operations — seem to go too far with a ‘hub and spoke’ philosophy wherein say Hong Kong or Singapore are assigned to be the ‘hubs’ (where the thinking and control are assumed to reside) and places like Seoul and KL are the ’spokes’ (where the assumption is that the locals should just follow instructions and simply implement).

Having run an office in Korea, I know how patronizing and demoralizing such approaches can be in practice. Now that I’m a regional CEO, I make it a priority for all the B-M offices and affiliates to know that if they can achieve great things and do wonderful work, we’ll spotlight accomplishments and accelerate talent and share responsibility regardless of where it happens. In that sense, all of our offices can be hubs of thinking and spokes of implementation.

I will be looking to our new affiliate in Malaysia to evidence the business-building logic of that approach. I think we will hear a lot about that country’s PR prowess this year, and I can’t wait to get back to KL.

For different reasons, I’ve been a fan of both the US and UK PR Week publications for years, but as each is so geared to the American and British domestic audiences (respectively), there was a gigantic ‘rest of the world’ blind spot between them and now we have a fresh source of international PR news content.

Indeed, I’ve been fortunate of late to provide commentary on PR Week’s market focus reports for Canada and for Japan.

Considering the increasingly worldwide nature of communications consulting, there surely should be more room for quality journalism in this space and now we have another key player.

I reckon that we PR people can take this two ways:

1. As a promising sign that the rising PR trade is now so powerful and profitable that it is ‘worthy’ of cross-sectoral competition from other providers of professional services who now want to get into our act.
2. As a sad commentary on how the PR industry has failed to keep its promises with clients, who insist on a quality of especially corporate communications counsel that existing providers aren’t providing in ample or consistent measure.

There is truth in each of these perspectives, and so the PR industry should prepare itself for increasing competition from the newcomers. They are not trying to do PR by purchasing established PR firms, and they are not tending to recruit high-profile senior PR talent. Instead, management consultants are in most cases simply adding PR consulting to their existing range of advisory services. Rather than attract real PR people, most are simply putting on a PR hat.

Is this because management consultants have such a low opinion of PR consultants that they see communications as an easy add-on for people of their own advanced acumen? Or is it because they are somehow arrogant, believing that someone successful in their famous firm can become easily expert in a field so ’simple’ as PR? I’m not going to attempt to answer such questions here, but it is noteworthy how the new front being opened in the PR war is so devoid of actual PR professionals.

It shows, too, and that may limit the commercial success of these raiding missions into PR territory.

The other day a famous management consulting firm circulated a white paper on measuring word-of-mouth marketing. With the prestige of the firm’s powerful brand behind it, I was prepared for an impressive experience. But when I flipped through one sophomoric page after another, instead of the expected ‘thought leadership,’ I found obvious observations about very basic 101-level PR concepts which were written with an overblown style and an attempted profundity. Accompanying the written article was a simple diagram of FisherPrice-level communications thinking.

If it isn’t the hubris of condescending professional services brands that will limit the appeal of their new PR offer, then it is the leadership limitations of the PR industry that will increase it. Our own profession — sometimes egged-on by false industry prophets — has often believed its own hype about how PR people deserve a ’seat at the table,’ even though as a trade we’ve repeatedly shown that we have no business being there much of the time.

Others have traditionally held the biggest marketing cards and owned the most advanced research information, so we PR folks have been found quantitatively and qualitatively wanting in comparison. But now the balance of power is shifting PR’s way. Our traditional strength in relationship management is being amplified by the easy reach and measurability of digital. Technology may be causing a disintermediation in the global recruitment business (why pay a 30% headhunting fee when we have LinkedIn?), but so far it is helping to further extend the existing capabilities of the global PR business.

PR’s knack for distilling a client’s complexity into simple and compelling content (drawing on our skills as media storytellers), then sharing it persuasively with people across platforms in the right sequence comes naturally only with years of practiced experience. It is difficult to replicate this kind of thinking suddenly from an outside industry where, on a good day, PR will always only be a notch up from afterthought status.

The main thing going on is that there is a growing market for ‘big brain’ PR and clients are financing a flight to quality. Regardless of its traditional designation, the firm that can provide c-level answers to vexing communications questions will command a premium in the marketplace.

How the art of PR is becoming a science