Falling forward...how a Paralympian inspires, publishers close and Zoho social shares.

Hi, this is Jim James here and I am the Silver Fox entrepreneur, those of you that remember and subscribe to this podcast. So my incarnation in normal life is as the founder and managing director of East West Public Relations, which is an agency that I founded in Singapore in 1995. Now I've been not podcasting and I decided that I need to stop, that I need to get back on the mic. I had listened this morning to an action coach webinar with a guy called Steve Judge, who is a two time world Paralympian champion. And Steve talked about resilience and about the need to tackle the fears head on and about keeping going when times are tough. So I'm back on the mic because I have to confess that I set some targets for myself that were frankly, you know, pretty hard to achieve. And as a result I was, you know, I was satisfying myself by failing. So I'm back on the mic and I really wanted to share what I know best, which is PR and entrepreneurship. So I've been working on a course called Speak PR and that is all about how entrepreneurs can use public relations to get notice for what they do. It's how I built my own businesses in Asia, in Singapore first and in China and now back in the UK without using big budgets. So I thank Steve for reminding me that we have to set a target and that there will be some obstacles on the way and some moments of being a bit, a bit demoralized, but we have to get to just smaller bite sized tasks that are achievable rather than thinking the end goal is going to be attained so quickly. So I wanted to share that today we did have some great success with our platform called Zoho. And for those of us that are trying to communicate on a daily basis and build a brand, one of the challenges is simply time. How many times can you afford to post to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram? And we were taking up about an hour or so a day just trying to manage the distribution. Over the weekend I spent some time looking for a solution and realized that Zoho, which is a platform I use for other aspects of the business include the newsletters and the CRM, has a social function. And so Rob Oakley, who works with me and I have been looking at that. And today, within about an hour and a half, we were able to log in and connect our five social media accounts directly using the Zoho Social Social. It really is a remarkably simple and comprehensive platform. Even I can do it. And so what we've done is we've now been able to take content and schedule content to go out over the next two weeks to those five platforms. We enter them as blog posts on our website, which is also hosted by Zoho. And the software in Zoho Social will automatically post them, either by scheduling or we can allow the software to schedule when they're most likely to be read or just put them in a queue. This is transformative because it means that we can still reach out to the people that we need to talk to, but it won't take very long. So to give you an idea, We've got some 1200 people on our Facebook, we've got a page and a group. I've got some 6,000 followers on LinkedIn and we've got now 600 people on our LinkedIn page as well, or group as well. And then we've also got Twitter, some 600 people. So along with our newsletter, we've got the best part of the maybe 8,9000 people that a one man army like me has over the last 25 years met and has been in contact with and who has stayed in touch. So what this means is that even small companies like ours, as long as we keep hold of the people that contact us, have an amazing opportunity to use this tool set. And there are others like HubSpot, Buzzsprout, there are lots of them out and we've got them listed on our Technology Applications Directory, which is on our website. As entrepreneurs, we can use this technology in a way that puts us on an equal footing with big companies. This afternoon I had a phone call from an old friend called Tim Charlton who publishes media in Asia. And Tim and I met each other back in about 96, 97. He's publishing trade publications in power and gas and finance. And he told me that Haymarket had just announced that they are closing two of their big titles. One is called Finance Asia and they're going to focus instead on making the business run on events, forums and conferences. Now, obviously what we also know about that is that those events are not going to be happening for some time to come. So Tim and I talked about it. The challenge now for the publishers is how do they continue to provide value for advertisers and for PR companies and for marketing and entrepreneurs. How do you keep reaching the audience that in the past you turn to the media for? So Haymarket, which was founded by Michael Hesseltine, Margaret Thatcher's defense secretary at the time, these publications are going to have to pivot drastically. They're going to have to use digital themselves. But what it means is that they're not going to have necessarily the monopoly on contact to those people that in the past just subscribe to their publications. Now, obviously, for people like Tim, he's got to make decisions about the staff that he's got, the sales team that run the ads, the journalists, there's all the printers and so on. There's a whole supply chain involved in producing a publication. And some of these people are going to, are going to have to go in the same way that we saw in the move to print some years ago, five, six years ago. So there's a report that came out from McKinsey this week that talks about how coronavirus is really going to be a catalyst for change and it's bringing forward the digital and the digitalization of our lives by five to maybe 10 years. And publishing, which is already struggling with print, is going to be 100% print because it just doesn't make sense. The advertisers, like the big banks are saying, well, if you can't get the magazine into the hands of these executives, then, then there's no point me paying for that. And Tim, who publishes a magazine called Singapore Business Review, they put them in airline lounges and hotels and people are not there. So all these people that were publishing these glossy publications for areas of communal activity are finding that there's no activity in the communal places anymore, and that's having a knock on effect for their advertising. So this McKinsey report is talking about how now not only do we not want to go to work necessarily in the same way, but also we're communicating, obviously through zoom and through podcasts and so on. Now, the silver lining is that for entrepreneurs like me running small agencies, there are many, many ways that we can capitalize on this. So I've converted my agency to be an on demand agency. So everyone working for me is turning up to do the job. They're not hired anymore because if they're not coming to an office, they had the freedom to sell their services as and when they want. In fact, this is a model I've adopted nearly four years ago because when I was running the business in China, the traffic and the congestion, the price of housing in Beijing was so high that it meant that young people didn't want to travel to work. So it became inevitable, even before coronavirus, that this was going to be a way to go. But what it also means when we look at tools like Zoho, is that even a small business like me can have a footprint of a scale of a big company because it's no longer about paying 5, $6,000 for an advert. It's about how much compelling content that I can produce and share. And reading an article about how LinkedIn works and the algorithms which we'll post later on our website, the algorithms for all of these platforms are now going about levels of interest. And as we've seen from in, in some bad ways with Cambridge Analytica, people are getting the content that, that they're looking for and that's kind of being reinforced by getting more of that. So if you can kind of get into the jet stream of current thought like Captain Tom did with his record breaking walk for nhs, you could find yourself even as a, as an entrepreneur, playing the same Facebook pages, the same LinkedIn pages as big brands. So I started my day with Steve Judge talking about the physical obstacles he overcame to get to his gold and his goals. And it reminded me that one of my goals was to share my knowledge through the podcast with entrepreneurs on how to get noticed for free. So I'm getting back on the bike. I'm going to be a bit wobbly at the beginning, probably not that quick, and I'm going to be out of breath from time to time. But I'm determined to get fitter and get better at this. So I hope this provides some valuable insight for you and that you find it some use. And then next we have the opportunity that is presented by Covid, which is that for entrepreneurs around the world, you can use our Speak PR methodology which we have on our website and I'll go into over the coming weeks and months, which is a five stage methodology that you can use to get noticed for free. So thanks so much for listening and if you have enjoyed this, then please subscribe and subscribe and share it with other entrepreneurs that you think would like to get some tools and some tips and some company from a fellow entrepreneur on the journey to getting noticed. Stay safe, stay profitable and keep communicating.