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.