Why Public Relations in Europe is Different posted by Martha de Monclin at Monday, January 12, 2009

Late last year the Open Source Think Tank was held in Paris, France. One of the themes was the difference between selling open source software in Europe vs the US. As Matt Aslett points out in a post around this, Europe is in no way a single market. The same can be said for PR. Each country has its own culture, its own publications and in many cases its own languages. For a PR campaign to be effective in Europe, each country should be treated individually. This means press releases should be translated into the local language. With editorial teams having less and less time to write articles and needing to cover a wide range of topics, providing local language material makes it easier for them to do their job. News will very rarely get picked up otherwise, unless of course Microsoft is announcing that Windows is going open source! It is better to get a good translator to provide the local version, rather than one of the newswires, as the latter do tend to be too literal. Talking of wire services, another misconception is that wire services work in Europe. Unfortunately this is not the case. It is the personal 1-to-1 contact that works the best.

What is classed as news? Unfortunately French journalists will not be interested in a new US customer, or for that matter a UK customer. They want well-known French companies using your technology. Similarly the Germans won’t be interested in a new office in the UK. Each geography is interested in local news or news that is pertinent to their geography.
It is preferable to have a local spokesperson for the company. Otherwise journalists will cover what is in the release without seeking further information or will go to a local partner for the story, and that local partner is not necessarily going to express the messages you want to convey.

Cultural differences are many. One that springs to mind is vacation. In the US, you rarely take more than a week off at a time and only have 10-15 days per year. It is often met with disbelief, but there is very little point announcing important news in France, or indeed many of the Southern European countries in July and August. The French tend to take the majority of their annual vacation between 14th July (Bastille Day) and 15th August. It is certainly not unheard of for them to take 3 weeks off during this time. While you may get clips (you will be one of the few companies to send in a press release during this time), who will be around to read them? One of the other French specificities is that if a holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, they will also take the ‘pont’ the bridge between the holiday and the weekend. In May, the 1st, the 8th and the 31st are holidays, making May another tough month to get useful coverage in. While the French do take alot of vacation during these times, the month of September, ‘la rentree’, is an extremely busy period with many announcements.

This post only scratches the surface of the minefield that is PR in Europe. If there is one key message to retain, it is that you cannot treat Europe as a single market and a local agency/PR resource is necessary to understand the specificities of each individual country.

Page One PR Joins Twitter (finally) posted by Shelly Milam at Thursday, January 08, 2009

We've been helping our clients build and maintain their corporate Twitter accounts for so long that we pretty much just forgot about building one for ourselves. Well no longer! I would like to formally introduce you to the new Page One PR Twitter account. Here we will discuss the worlds of social media, public relations (of course), maybe some client news and probably a whole lot about the happenings at our office. And let me tell you, if that doesn't entice you, this blooper video surely will.



Enjoy! and be sure to join us on Twitter for more fun.

Power to the People: Using Social Media to Launch a User-Generated Video Campaign for Linux posted by Anonymous at Monday, January 05, 2009

Can community and collaboration surface the same innovation in advertising as it does in software development? This is the question that we’ve partnered with The Linux Foundation to answer in the months ahead with the “I’m Linux” video campaign.

The campaign seeks to find the most creative user-generated videos that showcase what Linux means to those who use it, and inspire others to try it. The winner gets an all expenses paid trip to Tokyo.

We’ve seen some really unbelievable, early results due to a few important strategies we defined up front.

The name of the contest was very important. We needed to help people immediately understand the context and purpose of the campaign, so we chose “I’m Linux” as a take on the widely known “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” advertisements. And, it’s working: the online conversations taking place are noisy ones with both criticism (“why be a copycat?”) and applause (“finally, an ad campaign for Linux!”).

Another key component of our strategy was the decision to establish a panel of judges to review the submissions and help choose the winner. While we considered leaving the voting completely up to website voters, we decided to establish a panel of 5-6 judges so that we could tap into their online followers. Each judge has their own Twitter account and their own blog, among other social media channels. This exponentially increases the reach of our message and the awareness of the campaign.

The benefits of this strategy are being proven early on. While the campaign doesn’t officially launch until January 26, 2009, it is important to solicit a variety of early entries that set the tone and build momentum for the contest. By confirming judges in December and early January, and encouraging them to start talking about the campaign, we have been able to see immediate results.

Matt Asay, Larry Augustin and Tim O’Reilly were among our earliest judges to join us in the journey to find the best Linux ad. And, when O’Reilly “tweeted” about the campaign and his role as a judge late on a Friday evening in mid-December, we started to see the Twittersphere and blogosphere light up like the phones during a Howard Stern radio broadcast.

We’ve seen more than 200 additional “tweets” since O’Reilly’s shout out. We’ve also seen 43 news articles, including a Slashdot entry with more than 400 comments and 1,200 Diggs.

Also, within this two-week period after the “leak,” The Linux Foundation’s YouTube channel jumped from one subscription to nearly 100 with over 2,500 channel views. And, two of the early “I’m Linux” contest submissions have already received a combined total of 5,354 views. Simultaneously, The Linux Foundation’s Facebook group has jumped to more than 250 members.

The most interesting thing about campaigns like this one, and the variety of new PR tactics being tested, is that there are no longer any “rules of PR.” With the “I’m Linux” contest, we didn’t have to conduct a focus group or do exhaustive planning and research in advance to understand how people would react to the campaign. We put a short description on the web and engaged community influencers to share the idea with their followers. Now, we’ll help to facilitate the conversation and adjust the campaign as we go.

Look, ma: no hands!