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These days the media is filled with stories about Asia’s economic advance, and the public relations industry is no exception to the regional macroeconomic trend. If the business momentum of Burson-Marsteller in this part of the world is a good commercial gauge, then there’s a rising tide of PR investment in Asia and we can certainly expect the trend to continue.

For international communications firms based in Western countries and their multinational clients, Asia’s ascendancy represents either a great chance to ride the new PR wave to a truly global prosperity or a big risk to miss the boat entirely and be left standing on Western shores.

Winning in this new Asian century of PR demands listening and thinking with an open mind attuned to modern Asian sensibilities, not just talking and executing and bulldozing ahead with traditional Western approaches.

I think understanding the following factors will help determine which outcome occurs:

What works in America or Europe doesn’t necessarily work in Asia

It’s a common-sense point, isn’t it? But time after time, I see public relations effectiveness in Asia needlessly compromised by presuming that the way PR is done in New York or London will be effective in Shanghai or Mumbai. Whether it’s how media relations is conducted or the way that communities form on social networks or even how people communicate, the Asian experience can be markedly different than Western ways.

…and Asia is not a country

Indeed, as far as PR campaigns are concerned, there really is no such thing as a market called ‘Asia.’ It’s amazing to me the cookie-cutter assumptions I sometimes encounter about doing PR here; as if what works in China will work in India even though within each, there is an incredible degree of demographic, cultural, and linguistic variation.

Asian PR merits serious investment

Communicating with such diverse constituencies can command considerable PR resources, because operating in multiple languages takes much more staff time, which costs more money. When you consider the economic pressures of rising salary expectations in countries where the GDP is going through the roof with double-digit growth, then higher prices than one has historically expected of Asia can be anticipated.

Stereotypes should not set PR budgets

Asian PR can already seem expensive compared to what many have assumed in the past. I’ve seen no shortage of situations where someone thinks that if PR costs a certain level in the West, then it should surely cost much less in the East, where ‘there’s much more cheap labour to go around.’ The problem is, in many Asian countries, PR is a relatively new or emerging field of endeavor, meaning that there’s a large demand for a much smaller supply of experienced PR people, driving prices up. Then there’s the expectation that all PR staff must be fluently bilingual in an international firm, in markets where often huge majorities of the population do not speak English, meaning all the recruitment demand fishes in a tiny bilingual talent pond that further increases the cost spiral.

Quality is the thing

There is a lot of restless multinational PR money roaming around Asia, switching from one agency to the next, fed-up with mediocrity and looking for certainty of positive outcome across borders. In some Asian markets, there are few or not enough post-secondary institutions offering PR education, so the smart firms are taking matters into their own hands and building their own training capability. Education is at the heart of building a premium PR brand in Asia. At B-M, training the team to keep setting the PR standard for quality is my #1 priority. I often remind myself of what one of my Korean clients once told me: “Aim for the money, and quality suffers; aim for the quality, and the money will always come.”

English fluency is no guarantee of success

In many Asian PR offices, the best writer in the language that matters in the market may not communicate in English so well. When I ran offices in North Asia, some of our best media relations people couldn’t speak much English but the clients sure loved the publicity results. English fluency is no guarantee of a great strategic mind, and there can be bilingual poseurs who manage overseas audiences well in the language of convenience for head office.

Forget the cultural condescension

Partly because English is a second language in Asia (meaning many PR people may not be so keen to challenge and engage in fast-moving debate in English at meetings and on conference calls), there is still this widespread sense that Western PR is somehow superior to or more advanced than Asian PR, but in my experience that’s not objectively valid nor relevant in most circumstances. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen foreigners come to Asia with the attitude that the Asian PR people are the students and they are teachers when a more peer-to-peer approach would earn the most goodwill. Let’s also note that Asia is now teaching PR lessons of its own, as we see with the worldwide rise of apology PR.

Remember the Asian talent

A few years ago when I was running the Korean operation of another agency, I attended one of its meetings in Washington, DC when I made what I regarded as a statement of the obvious: “The global PR firm that attracts and champions the Asian talent will be the PR firm that wins in Asia.” I was challenged on that point by someone there, and was told that “the Asians look to the expatriate for leadership.” It was ironic to hear that kind of outdated talk, because my Korean successor was sitting in the room with me, and I think a key reason our office was the fastest-growing at that time in our company was the fact that the Korean staff knew he would be taking over after my two-year term and felt highly motivated by that eventuality (he and they went on to grow the business bigger than it was during my tenure).

Asia as a global platform

For many years, the dominant trend in Asian PR for multinationals was the import of Western money, ideas and people into the region, but now we we’re starting to see significant export of all these things from Asia by all kinds of exciting emerging multinationals. Some companies are seizing this opportunity and putting global functions in Asia, but alas others still have the attitude that anything global must be based in a Western centre like New York or Chicago or maybe London. PR firms have certainly suffered from this myopic tendency, but not in our case (we have some global functions located in Asia, such as the leadership of our energy practice based in Beijing).

Asian PR citizens of the world

There have been some stories lately about how because of ailing Western economies, job-seekers are heading East to Asia looking for opportunities. I don’t doubt it, but actually there have always been plenty of people heading to Asia; in the PR world, the flow in the other direction has been more like a trickle. The Asian going West in an international PR firm — more so than vice-versa in my experience — can face many obstacles: stereotypes about whether people from their country can do well in the target country, assumptions about their ‘quality level’ (see above), questions about their language capability, whether they will find ample client business to fund their relocation, how adaptable they will be to a new cultural context, etc.

I’m really proud that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Burson-Marsteller is that we have a very large exchange of professionals around the world, with robust people flows in all directions. Indeed, I consider the truly international character of B-M one of our greatest competitive assets. Here the priority is on being diverse, not conforming to be the same. Cross-border transfers in our consultancy aren’t rare; they are routine.

Relationships matter most

I can’t write any blog about PR in Asia without mentioning the value of relationships, which tend to have a different and often a more durable dynamic in Asia. During an era when a world with a shrinking attention span is embracing the transactional ways of fast-moving cool ‘digital’ technology, there is a special significance to the warmth of  face-to-face ‘analogue’ relationships that stand the test of time.

Indeed, it’s where the online meets the offline that’s the ’sweet spot’ of PR in Asia, but more on that in a future post…

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.

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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.