How to build an outsourced, and offshored, PR program, and what is Bernay's sauce.

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James, and I'm here to share with you thoughts and tips and information that I think can help you as a business owner to get yourself and your company noticed, often for free. Now, the grandfather of public relations was an American chap called Edward L. Bernays, and in an interview conducted in honor of his 100th birthday, back in 1992.

He said that any dope, any nitwit, and any idiot can call him or self a public relations practitioner.

Now, that may well be the case, but the truth is that building a brand is becoming harder and harder.

Now, it's becoming harder and harder because the complexity of self-distribution means that It's no longer just a matter of ringing one or two journalists and getting a story.

Now we have to think about creating content consistently that is compelling, and not just across what we call earned media, i.e., newspapers and TV and so on that has an editor, but across our own owned media channels. Now, over 55% of all content appearing in mainstream news press is produced by PR agencies and consultants. So we now have in this industry an influence far and wide because of the, the prevalence of information on people's mobile devices at home and at work. Public relations then has become something that you can't leave to a dope, nor a nitwit, nor an idiot. Now, just to remember, the definition of public relations is that it's the effort deliberately planned and supported to establish and maintain a mutual understanding between an organization and its public or its publics, and those being the internal— I call them the internal— the team, for example, your allies, your partners, and your customer groups. So the question is, how can a company that is founded by a managing director who may be good at a particular skill— manufacturing, engineering, food— how can that person then have the skill sets to manage the public relations as well? And the answer is, by and large, with a few exceptions, they don't have those skills, which of course then is why people turn to those individuals and agencies that have the skills, and they engage with agencies. So I want to look today at how you can outsource your own PR, but also how you can create a blended solution, because not everybody has the ability to outsource Or the desire to outsource their PR. When I say ability, it can be because the company may not be ready. You may not find an agency that's quite right for you and for your company. But also, you might feel as though no one really quite understands your business quite as well as you do, and therein lies the rub. Now, as we saw, outsourcing became well, it has been something that ever since the laws of comparative advantage, we've seen that different countries and different companies have got different. Different advantages and different skill sets. So this is actually an economics term, not a communications term, but as we saw from as early as, you know, the mid-1980s and people like Kodak shifting all their IT to IBM, outsourcing on a corporate scale has left companies really focusing increasingly on their core competence, and often communications is not the company's core competence. Often it's innovation of some kind, which is why it exists, unless of course it's an agency.

So if we look at how you can manage if you want to outsource the, the PR, and I think here the, the point is to look at which parts of the PR that you want to outsource, because there are some parts that, that you can't outsource. Now, first of all, I'd like to just say that outsourcing your marketing to any agency, be it advertising, direct marketing, or PR, is not an abdication of responsibility. Too often we hear clients or people complaining about the quality of the agency or the agency work, but the agency exists and is profitable and surviving because they know what they're doing. Often what we like to say in the industry is that you're as good as the brief that you're given. So if you're going to work with an agency, then it's really important to think about the complexity of the work that you want to do and to actually create a process that enables that management of the agency. Because public relations and media relations are often undervalued, and the complexity of the work is oversimplified by clients because they say, well, my secretary or my PA, or I have an intern do that.

They treat the agency or the consultant with almost a contempt.

They slightly resent paying the money because they think it's easy, but they don't really have the time nor the skill sets to do it themselves.

If you're looking for an agency or a consultant, then it's not an abdication of responsibility for communicating about your company. The agency, the same way, if you were to subcontract manufacturing, you wouldn't just ask them to think about what product to make. You'd give them detailed instructions, detailed drawings. You'd give them detailed EDI, electronic data interchange, information about, for example, CAD drawings. And you'd have KPIs as well.

The PR agency or the consultant, in the same way the advertising or the direct marketing or the exhibition company will know their own domain better, but they will not know your own business better than you do.

So you can find what we call T-shaped consultants. And T-shaped consultant doesn't refer to people standing with their arms outstretched. The, the across the horizontal bar stands for their professional expertise. And you'll have this, by the way, whether it is in law or accounting or architecture, any consultancy has a horizontal domain and has a vertical domain.

The vertical domain is their sector expertise.

So you'll find agencies that are particularly good in business-to-business, like mine in East West PR, or in consumer or lifestyle or in medical. So it's important if you're looking for an agency or a consultant that you ask about their professional qualifications expertise, but also about their domain expertise.

So we want to look at agencies or partners that have got this fit for your company and your industry, and that they then have those relationships with third parties that you need to talk to. Those might be media, they might be analysts, they might be governments, they may be third-party suppliers. You want them to have the skill sets in terms of, for example, writing is often a core competence of the agencies. Uh, it could be in photography and infographic production, and now increasingly on digital social media management. So you can outsource to an agency because, bottom line, the agency will do it better than you can, but also because they save you time. The agency saves you time because they know what to do, but they leave you free to spend your budget and your money on things that actually make you money. And you outsource this variable cost to a third party. Now, the, the first phase in manufacturing was outsourcing, and the second phase really was offshoring.

Now, offshoring, of course, means conducting work with people that you can't see, okay?

People that are based, for example, in, in Asia. Or in Romania or anywhere around the world. Now, there was a book by Power, Bonifazi, and de Souza, and they identified some 10 traps of outsourcing, and those apply just as much to public relations as they do to manufacturing: lack of management commitment, minimal knowledge of outsourcing methodologies, a lack of outsourcing communications plan, A failure to recognize the business risks, a failure to ask and tap into the external knowledge of the third party, and also not allocating resources internally to managing that outsourced partner.

Rushing, you know, making a procurement decision at speed and not appreciating the cultural differences.

And certainly we find, as we work with companies around the world and we have teams in Asia, language complications. So minimizing also what it will take for the vendor to get up to speed, how much information they need, and not valuing and giving the, the partner the time that they need in order to do their job. So offshoring manufacturing and offshoring and outsourcing PR suffer the same issues. Now Over 45-50% of all PR is outsourced according to a study all the way back in 2000 by a group called Impulse Research. Now, so this means that nearly half, over half of all work is being done by agencies. Now, obviously that translates into a huge potential for miscommunication and lack of, of really empowerment of the agency by the, by the client.

But what if you want to do it yourself?

Now, many companies are a bit smaller, or they believe, as I found, many entrepreneurs believe that, you know, they can do it themselves. Now, if that's the case, then it's possible to do what I would consider to be a blended solution. And then to some degree, I do this myself. So what I do is I think, well, there's certain aspects that I know and that I can do, and that's often around the distillation of an idea or the building of a brand or of a communication. But what I don't want to do is the production of that, so I can outsource production. So for example, with the Speak PR program that I've just drawn up and written up, I've, I've been to the studio and filmed 10 videos.

So there are 5 episodes and each video has 2, and I need to embed one video with the other and do titling and music and so on.

Now I could sit here for hours and try and figure out GarageBand and iMovie, or I can outsource. I've used Upwork and I found a young man called Ivo in Romania. And so while I'm recording this and trying to add value to my organization, Ivo is post-producing for $50 my sequence of 5 episodes of the Speak PR program. There is also fiverr.com, there is indeed.com, peopleperhour.com, simplyhired.com. If you want to look further afield, there are dedicated websites for the Philippines, for people for hire in the Philippines. There are dedicated websites for Vietnam. So if you're looking for English language speaking, You can find them around the world, either in some of these global sites like Upwork and Fiverr, or you can go online and find them in dedicated websites, certainly in Asia, and I imagine there are in, in Latin America if you're looking for Spanish and Portuguese. Then if you find these partners, how do you manage that?

So what we need to think about is knowledge management and file sharing. So what we use with clients is a combination.

So we use Zoho amongst our own team and for our freelance partners, but with some clients we use Basecamp, with some clients we use Asana, with some we use Slack, some we use Dropbox for just file sharing, and some we use SharePoint. So if you have an agency or a freelancer doing work for you they become an extension of your organization, and therefore knowledge management becomes an essential part of the engagement with that, with that third party, either a company or an individual. Once we've got the information back from the third party or from the agency, if we want to do it ourselves or you want to send out your information yourself, you've created the content idea, but then you've given it to somebody else to, if you like, produce and to manufacture for you, and then you want it to come back to you for the distribution.

And if you think about it, this is really all that Apple does.

On the box it says designed, um, in California, but it's made in Shenzhen, um, by a contract manufacturing company.

It comes back in the shiny white boxes with the cling film on it, but it's sold through the Apple Store. So public relations can be the same production model. So you could then use tools like media.info.uk. You can use Press Rush. You can run media through Cision. You can use something like Hootsuite or Buffer or Buzzsprout. You can use WooPitch. Or Journalink. And in our technology applications directory, which is at eastwestpr.com, we've listed over 100 applications that you as an entrepreneur or a small business owner or manager can use to promote your own content, quite often for free, and almost always there's a free trial. So if you think about your public relations and if you want to outsource you could find that there are certain times that you want to outsource and there are certain times you want to bring the information in-house. So there's not a right or wrong reason or, or methodology. It depends on the nature of the work, the type of situation that you're in, and also the phase that your business is at. Obviously, if you're the managing director and you have got more time than money, then doing it yourself in this blended solution where you create, outsource, bring back, and distribute— this sort of ABA model works well. But as the company gets larger and you have other things to think about, then outsourcing more and more of the production and the distribution makes a lot of sense, not least of which because you need more reach. But what you can never outsource is giving the inspiration and the direction to the strategy, because that is the differentiator between your company and somebody else's company. So if you work with an agency, it's always important to give them a proper brief, a written brief. And if you haven't got a written brief, have a meeting with the agency or the consultant and ask them to write down for you and to send back to you the understanding of the brief so that you're all in alignment. In my experience, It's this lack of inspiration and direction allied to the lack of alignment that causes a decay in the relationship between the client and the agency, and that leads to people thinking that agencies are bad, just in the same way that they might say a contract manufacturer is bad or any outsourced service is bad. You can't rely on them to be as motivated and as loyal as an internal member of staff, and because they don't have the same degree of knowledge because they're not picking up received information from within the organization.

They need a lifeline. They need a direct channel of communication which is structured and consistent and that enables them to do their job.

Now finally, going back to Edward L. Bernays, he said that his number one rule in public relations was that it's a two-way street. So on the one hand, the PR person interprets the customer's needs and desires for the general public.

But on the other hand, that person decodes what the public wants and what he— what the public needs, and he communicates that back to the client or to the executive directors and ideally to the founder.

So if you do all of the PR in-house yourself, you're actually missing a bit of an opportunity, which is to have counsel.

So if you outsource everything, try and maintain somehow access to somebody who can give you some guidance and some insight into what it is your company is saying in the outside world and what the outside world is saying about you. So with that, I'd like to say thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR, and my name is Jim James. And I hope that you found some of this information interesting and insightful. If you have, please do subscribe or visit our website at eastwestpr.com and subscribe to our newsletter. And in the meantime, I wish you to have a profitable business, that you stay healthy, and that you keep on communicating.