How can entrepreneurs survive and thrive using PR technology during COVID Times?

We've invited Jim James, who is a PR guru of some note, all the way from Singapore, now based in— or just based up the road. And he's actually stepped into the other stage because I think his Wi-Fi is terrible. His Wi-Fi makes yours look good. Massive experience and Massive tools that he's going to talk you through and give you some very clear tools, guidance, and ideas on what to say, who to say it to, how to say it, when to say it, how to believe, how to write people. So with no further ado, I'm going to do the socially distanced swap over and change places between Jim and myself. Enjoy the session. Thank you, Jim. Good morning and thank you very much for inviting me to join you today. We used to sort of shake hands on the way in, but now obviously we're avoiding each other. Um, right, Andy, where can I see the slides? It should be coming up, um, anytime now. Great, okay, so my name is Jim James and, uh, I've been working in marketing and PR for over 30 years. I've been running my own agency And I was based in Singapore for 12 years, in China for the last 13 years, and I moved back last year to bring my daughters back to school. And of course, the internet— the reason the internet is so bad, of course, in the morning hours when they go on homeschooling, my internet actually goes down. So very, very grateful to be invited and allowed to come down here today. So I'd like to talk today about the new era, the post-COVID era for PR and marketing. It seems to fundamentally change And I've also now got some tools that I can share with you, and they'll all be available afterwards online from the Action Coach or from my website. So if I can ask you, Andy, to take the next slide. Too far. My previous life in China, I was selling Morgan sports cars to people driving in Beijing traffic. So I started the car import business because I fell in love with the brand. And I, over the space of 5 years, managed to build a respectable business. We brought 65 Morgan cars into China from scratch. I did that without any advertising. I did it all with PR. And so I've been both on the agency side and managed my own business in using PR. So that's my background. But the point today is, how can you sell your products? Next slide, please. It's a global crisis, but guess what? It's not the first time. People are— some of the younger people here are thinking this is the biggest and worst crisis ever had. For those of us that are a bit older, I graduated out of university into a crisis. I had my business in Singapore, and 2 years later there was a debt crisis, and there was a 9/11, and then there was a dot-com bubble, and then there was SARS, and you get the idea. Crises are not new. So what's important is that we have to figure out how we're going to adapt to the crisis and decide whether it's a temporary change or whether it's a game changer. And I think the point with COVID is that it's really a game changer. I'd like to suggest that we redefine COVID. And the reason for that is our mindset right now is going to be one of the most important tools, the strengths that we've got to survive. So I might suggest that you can also rephrase COVID as being about being compassionate, about being optimistic, about being values-based, about being informative, and above all, about being digital. So there's a new paradigm, and what I'd like to do is take you through what I consider to be this new definition of COVID for your communication strategy. The first one under C is that companies now in this new era need to define themselves and position themselves as being compassionate. It's central to everybody's business right now to show that they care, which of course They should, right? So there's been this shift from this focus on wealth to this focus on health. That's a fundamental change that didn't happen through any of those crises that I have lived through in the last 30 years. It's always been you survive and still worry about money. Now it seems we're moving to really worrying about your health. So companies are pivoting to serve the communities which they used to see as customers. So it used to be a customer, now it's a community. But internal communications are becoming as important as ever and as important as external because 53% of employees say they're afraid of losing their jobs right now. If you just click the slide for me, you'll see that— oh, sorry, there was an animation there. I just want to show you this ad, 2 ads, one from the company before Our products make you look and feel good. But now the ads are about thank you. Thank you to a community of people wearing Crocs. Hang on a minute, I'll see if I can get it to work. Okay, there you go. Is that right? Okay, that one. Okay, so anyway, you can see that— you can perhaps see it's from Crocs thanking people for wearing their shoes. It used to be that, how you looking in our shoes? Now it's, thank you for the service you give to our community when you're wearing our shoes. Okay, next one. The second is optimistic. Okay, the statistics on the right are from a census that was recently taken in the UK. 39% of women surveyed say that they want brands to give them positive information. There's a deluge of information that's negative, no shortage of that, but what people are looking for is hope. In any crisis, they're looking for hope. And as Winston Churchill said, a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity. Now, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. That's a refrain, we have to go all the way back to the Second World War for those kind of comments, but What you'll see here, I don't know whether anyone else has seen this, this is a dog called Rosie who is delivering wine for a company called the Stonehouse Winery in Northeast America, in New England. They managed to turn their marketing, or rather they managed to turn their service into a marketing gamble. They couldn't deliver the wine to the homes. But they had a dog and they asked Rosie to take the wine from the car to the curb charge. And it's gone viral. So not only is it in Fox News, Wall Street Journal, The Times, it's actually even got to the Metro in England. Okay, so they've taken a crisis and gone, oh, I can't deliver the— I can't deliver this product. What could I do instead? Is there anything that you can do today to make someone smile, because that's what people need right now. That's what people want. That's what they want to resonate with. Thank you. Next slide, please. The third in COVID is values-based. Okay, there's a sincerity of purpose now that is being expected because people are locked indoors and they're losing family, friends. A million people die of cancer every year, but somehow that's become almost sort of taken as normal. But people are panicked now. So what they're looking for is sincerity of purpose. And what does your company do, or can it do, to show solidarity with the community and the nation? So for example, the Pret family, as in the coffee and tea, they're giving NHS half-price coffees and they're giving them soup. Okay, so they say— the CEO is saying the Pret family and the whole world are in uncharted territory. For the first time in my working career, people are saying it's an entirely new world. BT are offering free broadband for home. I'm on Vodafone, so I'm not going to benefit from that, unfortunately, but the CEO is saying, if a customer contacts us with money worries related to coronavirus, we'll work out what works best for them. I don't remember ever there being an advert or a piece of PR like that, an unconditional price promise. Now what's interesting is you can see from the Independent news outlet this week, there's even now an article, which brands and businesses are supporting the NHS workers. Now I have tried for 30 years to get the media to publish stories about my clients. And if you're— in a miracle, would they actually write the name and give a link to the brand itself? Can you see now what's happening in the screen? You can see that they've written an article, actually they've done links to people like the taxi company that's giving free half-hour rides home for NHS. They're giving a link to Addison Lee in The Independent. It's amazing. It's never happened before. But it happens if you're showing sincerity of purpose as a company. Next slide. The third is to be informative. I spent so many years writing press releases for companies and doing what they say, we are the best. And you say, can you prove it? Well, we are, we feel like we are, we want to say we are. That has changed. Positioning no longer matters. PR needs to be informative. So I'm not sure about you, but I've been getting a letter almost weekly from Mike, who is my neighborhood Sainsbury's CEO, only he writes to 450,000 other people personalized. This is called personalization at scale. So are you communicating directly with your stakeholders? And this is one of the other changes. People used to think PR was just about getting noticed in the broader public. But people are realizing that there are different communities that you need to talk to, and you can appeal to them and talk to them directly through different tools. And then, as Mark Cuban, the famous investor and Shark Tank, uh, host, says, information is power, particularly when the competition ignores the opportunity to do the same. So if you think about it, You've got an opportunity now, which is that if you're doing something and you know who you could talk to, you've got information you can share, and maybe your competition doesn't want to do that. You can gain loyalty from your existing or potential customers. If you just press the button for me. You'll see shipping— there you go. Now, what Mike is sending me— this is the CEO of a £27 billion company to my mailbox on a Saturday morning. He's telling me that they're ordering more supplies. He's telling me that they're going to put more capacity in the warehouse. They're going to set limits on the number of items I can buy. I have never ever been told by any client what's happening within their business. But now, on a Saturday morning, the CEO of Sainsbury's is communicating with me directly about what to do in the store. So PR, your communications could be informative because that's how people get reassured. Information is only power if it gives them some knowledge. So what can you do to help your customers, your staff, and your allies to feel that they're fully informed? Digital, because digital creates efficiency of delivery. This is the first time in my, and in fact the world's memory— bear in mind that mobile phones, the iPhone, is around 11 years old— That you can have personalization at scale. And here we are in this— forgive me, Jasper— fairly humble workshop studio here, and we can broadcast worldwide to the same audience with the same quality as used to be the preserve of just a major studio. Technology is enabling us to communicate across different formats Instantly, globally, one-to-one. So that's a real opportunity. Now, 79% of adults own smartphones, and broadband is 93%. Now, obviously my broadband's at the lower end of those quality thresholds on the 93%, but what it means is, as the CEO of Ofcom said last week, families across the country are going online together this week. Doing work and keeping children busy at the same time. Now what's key about that is that if you look at the picture, everybody has their own device. We used to sit down together and watch the news. For those of you that remember, we watched the 6 o'clock news or 5:45 on ITV. But every child and every adult has their own device. They're all getting their own news or their own information or entertainment. That creates a challenge from a PR point of view, but it also creates an amazing opportunity. Okay, I'd like to suggest that COVID requires a new paradigm, and if we change our mindset from being COVID being a word of fear, but being actually an anagram for us of opportunities, so our PR marketing communications can be compassionate, It can be optimistic. It needs to be values-based because that's what people are buying into. They need trust. That only comes if they have a sense that they've got the same values. It needs to be informative because people are trying to make decisions now. Do I go to the shops? Do I not go to shops? Will I have enough toilet roll? Will I not have enough toilet roll? Will I have dog food? Okay, so people need to be informed, and you can do that through digital platforms. Okay, move on to the next section. Now, if you're hoping for an Instagram course, this isn't going to be that, because one of the conversations I'm having with friends who are entrepreneurs is this: they've relied on one channel only for their PR and their marketing. And so they're missing a bit of, I think, an understanding of all the different kinds of tools that there are, and also they're missing some of the audience groups that they could be or should be talking to. What I've got for you on the left-hand side of the screen is just to show you— it's all things that you know already, but there's a fundamental shift in the last decade of how people are accessing your content. Okay, so a decade ago, 20% were on mobile, now 80%. So it's probably just the older generations who are not on mobile, digital smartphone. DVD players have gone down because people are doing live streaming, Netflix and so on. But nearly 68% of people are using a tablet to access what you would like to tell them, and they're doing it as a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, an employer, a teacher, home teacher. Many of us are playing all those roles at once and using the same device. So we're seeing digital radio, we're seeing smart TVs. Now, all of these technologies, there are some commonalities. One is there's a diversity of distribution. Distribution is no longer BBC through the ether to the home 1.1 box and you watch a desk schedule, right? We've all got our own devices, but also we access the content when we want to. This is a fundamental shift. Some of my clients that I've had over the years were pioneering this technology, actually launched predictive text entry back in 1997 in Korea. So I saw the first ever text entry in mobile phones. Multi-channel, simultaneous, time-shifted content. But the other development is that the information now travels with the consumer. Now, it used to be that it traveled with the consumer if you bought the newspaper, you took it on the train, and someone else picked it up in the metro. That would be information traveling. Ideally, you put the newspaper home and someone would read it. But now, People will carry, and if they're wearing smartwatches, for example, it's even more intimate. Now this gives you an amazing opportunity to run a company. It gives you an amazing challenge, but amazing opportunity. The final point about this is that consumers now choose, but they also share. There's a whole category now of PR which is about— and sales— it's about referrals. And people giving testimonials. And this is where this whole key influencer program starts. So the consumer is now taking your messages wherever they are ready to receive them, on whatever device. And if they like it, they share it. If they don't like it, they tell you quickly. So that's why people like TripAdvisor are being so powerful, right? They can make or break a brand. On the right-hand side of your screen is a digital prison. I put this up here just to show you the wealth of tools that there are available for businesses to use. The key is not to try and use them all, okay? And the key here is not to show you that to overwhelm you, but I just want to show you there's a universe out there that is much more than the top 2 or 3, which is Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and there are many that are quite specialist, and therefore they create an opportunity for smaller brands because the big brands dominate the big platforms. Okay, thanks. So the next point to think about is that when you're operating your PR, it used to be that you'd send a press release or do an interview, and then you get a daily newspaper or you get a monthly magazine or you see it on the news. And people were in a kind of a fixed place when they absorbed and consumed that content because they sat down to watch TV with their family or they got the newspaper with a cup of tea. So you kind of access people at a certain time and place, but actually now that's changing. And what it means is that customers have got a journey and you're with an audience possibly 24 hours a day across all of their lifestyle. So people are buying and acquiring, they're owning and serving, and what they're doing is doing research, they're evaluating, and then they're buying, they're getting delivery, they're using, they're maintaining, they're possibly advocating or not, they may recommend or not. You can get awareness and that creates a need. I tried the other day to buy a new Logitech HD camera for my sister who's starting to do some work. And I bought one a little while ago and they're sold out. Everyone now is starting to recommend which products to use, which tools to use. So start to think about where you want your different audiences to see your information in their journey. Are they going to work or are they staying at home? Are they at the beginning of the day, the end of the day? Because actually the message that we give is different. You might still see some ads on LinkedIn for— I think it might come off now, but a famous Asian car manufacturer was still running ads for a showroom promotion about a month ago in the UK. People, it's lockdown. Why are you running an ad saying come to our showroom for a test drive when no one can get out? It just shows you're completely out of touch with what your audience is living through. So I'd like to suggest that people don't just focus on the social media stream-of-consciousness sites, because the problem with those is they— and I personally hate Facebook. I lived in China for 13 years with WeChat. I've come back and used Facebook. I can't understand why you separate one lot of content from the Messenger, and then there's all these things and alerts and everything. I can't— I can never focus. So there's so much content that as a company, it's almost impossible to engage and to reassure and to inform your customers and your allies and your staff through these channels because they're just so busy. So think about the complete lifestyle and how you can start to engage with those people on a more consistent basis. I'm going to show you some tools that I've developed that are my way of trying to, you know, serve the community. So I've built some tools I'd like to share with you, which is what I've worked with my clients on, that I think you can use. Okay, next slide. Don't worry, by the way, if this looks complicated. I'm going to take you through it. Also, Andy and Peter have got these downloads, and I'll also share a link at the end. First of all, my experience of smaller companies is that they need the PR most But they have the least budget and time to do it. It's kind of a cruel thing. So I work for large multinationals that have a dedicated PR director, and they pay a lot of money for people to come and do this kind of work. But I see the funny when they don't really need it. So I wanted to share with you the methodology that I use when I work with big clients, because they're tools that you can use now for your, for your business. I create what I call the speak Another acronym of trade, which is storify, personalize, engage, amplify, and enable. So just 5 letters to give you a guide to make PR relatively simple and manageable. The first one is to storify. People love stories. That's why we watch TV. That's why we communicate through stories. The Bible is is a story, right? So I encourage you to start to think of your business in chapters, okay? So rather than being, oh, we're just a company, start to think of the narrative of the story of your business with chapters. And you have characters in there. You have key roles— entrepreneurs, business owners. You have supporting cast. And in there, what you do at the top of that message home is you put the key message. The key message is going to be what you do that's special, your why. The next is personalise. Now, personalise is personalising the message, and I've shared with you that actually different people need different messages and they need them at different times. I break it down into external, which are traditionally your customers, your allies— now those are your partners, landlords, banks, suppliers. Okay, often they're overlooked in PR. And then you've got your internals. That's those 53% of people right now who feel like they might lose their job. Okay, we need to keep those people feeling comfortable. It's part of our role as business leaders to ensure that they feel safe. The third element is to engage. So this is about engaging the people that matter. The internal square in the personalized is for you to write down the names of the top 5, 6 people that you should call now. 5 or 6 people that are mission critical to your business that should know what's on your mind. And Peter was talking earlier on about the need to communicate. Things are moving so quickly right now that to be in alignment with everybody is key, and that's only going to happen if we engage people. And align them with what we're thinking and find out what they're thinking and find the common purpose. So the engage is about when are you going to send messages to people. Sainsbury's sends me a Saturday morning letter. Shell petrol station had one saying, we're going to go into business, we'll see how we get on. So what I find often with clients, big and small, and especially with entrepreneurs, is they do one thing and then they, then they go on to do cash flow, they get to do the product, and they forget about the P&L, the communication part. So what I've done here is I've created you a daily schedule. It starts on a Sunday because some people need to communicate with their staff. We're open for business tomorrow, your hours are going to be this. And I've created internal, allies, and externals, and I encourage you to think of these as 3 different Streams of conversation, and then you can create a total. You're going to do two on a Monday, three on a Friday, and add that up. The next is to amplify, spreading the message. This is when you boost, and then you use those tools that I'm going to share with you in a moment. Okay, what I've done here is created just a chart for you to write down which channels you've got. You've got Instagram, you've got Facebook. If you've got Twitter, okay, whatever you're using, write these down because then what can happen is you can start to delegate this work. Because if it's always on the entrepreneur's desk, it's probably going to fall behind managing cash, managing clients, okay. So write down what they are. You can, if you want, write the passwords down so you can give this to someone else to use and write down internal, external, and allies. And one platform can be used for all 3, or you can have one specific group audience, and then to total those. Now the final chart is what I call knowing, and I've created what I call the Communications Activity Index. Now you're the first group to kind of hear this, so if you, if you don't like it, then you can feedback and I'll take that on board, obviously. But the idea is I wanted people to start thinking about how much content you've got, how often you're sending it and how many channels you're sending it to. And what's going to happen is that that's going to start to give you an indication of how often you're communicating and if that's enough. Andy, can I have the next slide? Yes, sorry. Okay, so the Speak Storyboard is here because I speak to a lot of my friends who are entrepreneurs and we have chats and they say, well, what do I say? I mean, I haven't launched anything for ages. And what I've written here is a template for you to start to ask who, what, why, where, when, and how. This is information about your business that your staff, your allies, and your customers would like to know about your business. Okay? What can you tell them? And if, again, if you think about this as chapters in a book, Rather than the whole book, it starts to simplify the job because what could be the story today? We're open. Story number 2 is we've got a special on muffins. Story 3 is I'm giving away a voucher for people that book my Airbnb after the coronavirus. You're doing something every day that could be a little bit of a narrative that you can share. Okay. What happens is when you total those up and you put them into the activity Communications index, you get a number. Okay, next slide, please. So this is about cadence. So the communications activity index, a bit like your cash flow index or your time billing index and so on. I created this because I think it's really useful for entrepreneurs and business people to have an indicator of if they're communicating enough. Now the question is, is it enough or not? In crises, we need to communicate more, people communicate a little bit less. But at the minute, no one's measuring it. People think about influencing or how many people are going to see it. But as a friend of mine got covered the other day in a newspaper, and he only— and he got no response. But actually, he only needs 5 new clients. So why be in a 450,000 circulation newspaper that goes across a whole part of the country when he's not going to serve them? Okay, so content times frequency times channels, and what you'll see here is the multiplier effect. So if you just do a little bit of content, 2 per day, and you send it out twice a day, you can do a morning and an afternoon, for example, and you have, let's say, 8 channels, you get 32 as an index. But if you're only sending out one piece of information once a week, one channel, your index is lower. Now, The point is you're going to find an index that you can manage, and the idea is to start to use that as something that you can track over time. Okay, there's not a right or wrong, but obviously if it's a low number, there are people who don't know what you're doing, and the question is how's that going to impact your business? Okay, so these numbers then feed back into your plans. Thanks. Next slide. Oh, sorry. Okay, so what, what we've created is a technology applications directory for you, because as I said, this isn't going to be an Instagram course, because actually Instagram isn't the right platform for all people all the time. There are in this directory that we've put together 11, 11 tabs, 11 sets of content. You can see them here. And I had thought about doing 10, but I've actually added in customer service because now that customers will buy and experience and share PR now includes customer experience and customer services, so the whole arena of CX is important. So I've added in here 10 services and apps per category of service. So that's including people, and then if you think of the next slide, so it's including, for example, freelancers. Now most people Don't have the time to write things, but you don't need to. You can have a phone call with a freelancer and you can find them. And I put up a whole number of resources there where you can find people who will work for free or in exchange or next to nothing. My whole presentation was put together working with a freelancer in Spain. Okay, there's a young Indian woman who I found on Upwork, and for $80 over the weekend, she and I put this whole thing together. Okay, so imagine the power that you've got through the internet. There are people that can write. The other tasks are how you can do graphics, how you can make explainer videos, how you can use a marketing suite to send to multiple platforms. At once, how you can create animated videos, explainer videos, how you can use tools like Loom for videoing yourself. Okay, so there's an education process now for all of us which is about how we outsource some of the content creation and distribution and how we leverage many of these platforms. Some are free, some are a low amount per subscription. I'm using one called Wondura which is free video. I can send video emails, for example. I get my first 50 free. Okay, there has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur or run a small business if you need to do PR, because the tools that you've got available to you and me are exactly the same as the multinational companies. And actually, my experience is the multinational companies are not using them because they've got compliance issues, they've got staff, they can't manage the different processes, they don't want to outsource information. So as entrepreneurs, one of my friends who's running a coaching company says he thinks it's a land grab. So there's a fundamental shift in how businesses are being done. The technology of communications enables you to follow the journey of your ally, customer, partner, staff, and bring them along with your vision in a way that has never been done before. Next slide. This is another page from the DirectShare. This is a marketing suite. So if you want to increase your activity index, it doesn't mean you've got to be online all day sending stuff. You can put them on these suites and it'll schedule and repurpose and it'll do text, it'll do video. They're very sophisticated now, all from your phone or from your laptop, or you can outsource it. So my firm is called ESSEC PR, and as Peter kindly said, I've been operating both on the client side and as an entrepreneur building my own businesses for 30 years. I've been worldwide marketing for companies, and I spent the last 25 years in Asia. I've come back, and I just want to share with you today what I've learned and what I see as being a fundamental change in our mindset that's required if we see COVID not as a disease, but as an anagram for something positive in the mindset, which I think we have to adopt because everything's changing. And my contribution is to build some tools that I share with you free and to use. And for anyone that is an Action Coach client or on the seminar, happy to have a 30-minute free consultation to help you go through some of these tools or answer any questions. I've got a Calendly link there so you can make an appointment or you come through the Action Coach. So my name is Jim James. Thank you very much to Andy and Peter for allowing me to share because I wanted to try and make a contribution in the way that I could to help entrepreneurs and business people use PR to keep their businesses and help them thrive. Thank you.