Live From The Progress Shed | Why building a business using PR gives profitable results.

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Great.

So thank you and good morning. So I built my public relations business in Singapore in 1995. And, and then I moved to China in 2006. And in 2011, I bought a Morgan sports car. And, um, you know, people said, where can I buy one? And, uh, you know, I, I rang up Morgan and said, uh, you know, Morgan, and said, hey, I've got this car in Beijing, uh, if you want to buy it, where can they buy it? And they said, actually, we don't have anyone in China that can sell them. So I asked if I could do it. And I became the importer for Morgan cars in China. In the, in the process, I managed to find and appoint dealers in Chengdu in the west of China and Shanghai, southern China. I organized, uh, motor rallies across China. I launched the British Motorsport Festival in China. And as a result of the work I was doing, Lotus Cars asked me to become the CEO for Lotus in China for 6 months to build the brand. And I share this because I went to China to build the brand of my PR firm, and I had the good fortune to pick up really a British— an amazing British brand. And I used a lot of the technologies and the tools that I would put in place for clients in my own, in my own business. So I'm talking here with you today not as someone who's trying to sell you public relations. And as Peter said, you know, when I spoke to Peter, he said no one really wants to do PR, no one really likes PR, um, and often people don't even trust public relations people, which is a shame. But I'm here really as an entrepreneur speaking with you about ways that I've built multi-million pound businesses with without spending any money on advertising or trade shows. So I built Morgan from nothing, one car that I had that I drove my girls to school in, to running a business where we bought £2.5 million worth of cars and we became the importer for, you know, British brand and the largest market for cars in the world. So my experience, I built 8 companies in— I built companies in Singapore, I built them in China and India and now in the UK. And I'm here because I wanted to share what I've learned about building a business using public relations for profitable results. Okay, so one of the main problems that people have with PR— and I think, by the way, it's a problem for the industry— that PR originally was conceived as communication with, with the public in general. And in the 1950s, when PR was really being talked about. It actually came out of the Second World War, really was, was the first place it started to be used. But coming out of the, uh, in the 1950s, it became a discipline, but really it became how people spoke through mass media, through the print, through the TV, through the radio. And because the channels were owned by big companies or governments, you had to have a relationship with them. And it was the one company to one journalist to many audience. Now fast forward to, you know, launch of Google and Yahoo, and then in the last decade, the rapacious growth of digital media means that now we have really 3 different kinds of media. We have what we call the earned media, which are the traditional print, TV, radio, where you ring up a journalist like Anita from Business Southwest, say, I've got a story, What would you like to— would you be interested in hearing this? But then we've got bought media where you buy, and what used to be considered advertising then became what we called through the line, which is direct mail where you, you bought print and sent it to people's mailboxes. And now is the banner ads and some syndication software you can use for buying placements. And the third is what we call owned media, which is I own it, you own it. And this is what I'd like to talk with you about because I built the Morgan brand, I built another company called Wait Drinks, which is a British energy drink. I took that to China because I built the motorsport festival in China and other brands approached me to do the same for them in China. So if you own your own channels of media, which you all do and they're all free, This is really the opportunity where technology enables business owners like me, like you, like the team here to have an equal playing field. You have just as much chance of success as a big company. Okay, so this is really what's amazing now about the way that with technology entrepreneurs can access, as we're doing now. If you think about it, a small company We've got broadcast quality equipment. So this is what I'd like to share with you about the Speak PR. So PR isn't— I'm going to share about how to get into the press. I can do that, and that's part of it. But I built the Morgan Car business, for example, without speaking really any Chinese. But I actually got into the media. But I also built over the period of 5 years 250,000 unique visitors came to my website that I built from myself to becoming a main platform. Actually, we became the largest source of traffic for the Morgan Motor Company website in the UK, came actually from China. And I did all of that without advertising, but just using some of the tools that I'd like to share with you in this Speak PR process. I've been building this. I've been back from China now for a year, been working on this program Anthony and Pete kindly at the Progress Shed have allowed me to share this with them. So we want to engage with just 6 companies in total. The Progress Shed is going to be one, so 5 more companies to work with me on this proven process where you can use your owned media to build a profitable business. So just gonna shut that chat, if I may. Okay, now then, so I'm just going to go to the next slide. Okay, now hopefully everyone can see that. Is that coming up okay? Can you see that? Okay, so I think you can see that on the screen. Mark, is that coming up okay?

Okay.

So now imagine if customers came to find you. This is really the, the key point. That all of us have got something that we're doing that's special. We all believe in what we're doing. I was very passionate about taking British sports cars, hand-built sports cars that I love, and then I went in when my uncle had— when, when I was a young lad. I was passionate about giving that joy to young people and people in China, but no one knew about it. So I spent as much time telling people about the car and about what it could do for them and how great they would feel and so on, uh, as I did on the logistics and the shipping. And I had a large showroom, I had a 300-meter showroom, I had 5 cars and half a million pounds worth of stock. I had 3 distributors. I had to manage all of those, but it's nothing if I don't have the customers. Now, we've all got something amazing within our own businesses because that's why we do it. We are in ourselves amazing people as entrepreneurs. If people aren't coming, it's probably because they don't know who you are or where you are. Okay? We have to believe that if they knew where we were, they would come. If, if they didn't, we've got a confidence issue. And we're all here because we believe fundamentally that we can add value in some way to our target audience. So there's a simple and proven and effective process to get you noticed, and actually the tools I'm going to share with you today, they're on our website under Speak PR at eastwestpr.com, but you can also use these for free. You take them and you can use them yourselves. If you're interested in working with us here on a sort of facilitated process that we can work together. But otherwise, you can happily take these and take these away with you. Okay, next slide. I'd like to share with you this idea of one single number to know for your public relations. I'd like to share with you the opportunity to take control of the process of your public relations. Now, when I speak to most people about PR, well, you know, Now, Peter luckily knows a little bit more about it, but they think it's proportional representation— how much do you put in, you get out. It's calling up a journalist, it's hiring someone young and attractive to run a cocktail party for you.

I like that idea.

Which sold to the man on the right. So I sold one project already this morning. PR can be that, but I'd like for you to think as business owners that there's a way that you can control how how much your business is doing in public relations. And I call it the Active Communications Index, and it's a very simple 3-part formula. It's content times frequency times channels, and I'm going to take you through that. Now, the key premise of this is that what we need to worry about is what we put into our public relations. What we need to worry about is what we put in. So in the same way that if you have a cookbook, they tell you about the recipe, they tell you about the ingredients and how to make it, how much. They don't tell you what it's going to taste like. They don't worry about how many people are going to like it. They don't worry about how we're going to share the food at the table. They worry about what goes into the food. The reason I use that as an analogy is because often in public relations and advertising, people come up with great metrics. So, you know, engagement. They come up with how many page views. I mentioned I had 250,000 unique visitors to my website. That's great. What you don't know is how much work I did to get to that 250,000. And if we're allocating resources, which as business owners we are, that's actually what matters. So we need to control what goes into the mix, because actually if you do that right what comes out will then be a given, right? So this is why big businesses have processes, because if you take care of the process, the outcome has a greater chance of success. And the Active Communications Index can be the model for you, whether you're doing it yourself or you want to control an agency, or you have a member of the team and you can give them like one dashboard index dedicated to public relations And that's the ACI. So I'd like to share with you this 5-stage process. Is that okay?

Yeah.

Okay, I'm the only one with the Mac here. Mine's still working. So, 5-stage process. This is your pathway to publicity. So the way I like to break this down is there are 5 stages. The first is to storify, which is to turn events into chapters. And there's a lot of theory behind, uh, storification now. And I have a whole chapter, and I have on my website videos explaining this. And on the podcast that I do, actually, I've interviewed a chap called Park Howell, who's a a storytelling expert who's written a book on this subject. But basically the idea is that stories help everybody to understand a narrative. We use stories whether it's, you know, the Bible, whether it's novels, whether it's articles. We all need heroes, we need protagonists, we need journeys, we need trials, we need successes, right? So part of what we look at when we work with clients is What is the story for your brand? What is your story as an entrepreneur? Because people buy people, and more than ever, people want to know that they can trust people. Ironically enough, whilst we can't get out and meet people and go into stores, people are looking for authenticity from owners more and more. That's why you see people like Elon Musk so popular, or Steve Jobs, because people can associate. The second is personalization. The personalization— I talk about 3 different audience groups. One is the internal, the second are the partners, and the third are the external. Most people think of public relations as press relations, but the reason why I think that's flawed is because in order to have a company with everybody aligned in serving the clients, we need— whether it's the shop floor workers, whether it's the merchandisers in the store, whether it's the people who are delivering to the customer, either at the factory or in their homes or the restaurants, they all need a slightly different message. So the second element is that we need to personalize the message. And actually, in the 5-stage methodology, I have tools that we use to break down the different messages for the different groups. The third is to create engaging content, okay? Because as we know, the big difference now with public relations and marketing is that we have to have content. It used to be when I started the PR firm back in '95 in Singapore, the agency might write a press release, the client might approve it, and we'd give it to the newspaper or the magazine and they might run it. Content creation in the old days was giving all the content creation work to the publisher or to the TV station. They used to do all the content creation. That is fundamentally not the case anymore, and this is the fantastic opportunity but challenge as well for all of us, is that we now have with our own channels the ability to create compelling content. Infographics, videos, text, memes. Okay, we have now the opportunity, as we're doing today, to work on creating content that will reach out to those 3 different audience groups, that speaks to them directly. The 4th stage is amplification. It's fine to have a great message, but a bit like when I had my Morgan car in my garage in Beijing Uh, no one knew about it. And actually, we had a friend, uh, at the time, still a good friend called Steve Engel, who's a Bloomberg anchor for, uh, for China. Later moved to Hong Kong, another story. Anyway, they said, um, hey, I hear you've got this, uh, British car in your garage. I said, yeah, you want to come have a look, Steve? And he came, he said, oh my God, this car is beautiful, Jim, I gotta do a show. So I said, well, you know, do you want to go for a spin? So he and I We got his camera and we drove my Morgan down Chang'an Jie and around through Tiananmen Square in front of the temple.

Yeah.

And he and I took my Morgan car and drove it around Beijing, and we made a feature story that appeared on Bloomberg in Asia. And he cut in a little piece about appetites of the wealthy in China for luxury goods, right? But that was me, and just because I knew a guy that could get me onto TV, right? But most people have got something special locked away in a garage. How do you get that to be amplified? The secret to this, by the way, is to start to set up the channels, and that's what I'm going to talk to you about in the frequency part. So if we look at channels, and amplification, we need to start working on how often we're sending information to how many people and where are we sending it to them. This is the spreading the message. And there's a theory called the cascade theory, which was developed by a chap called Mr. Watts in the 1950s, and it talks about why information spreads. And this explains, for example, Captain Tom went viral with his story. And what they talk about is it's not about having one key influencer who likes what you do and shares it. In fact, the, the, um, this professor called Dodds in Chicago I've been corresponding with as well. What they've proven is that if you just have— or a lot of them have— an influencer, you might get awareness in the short term, but it doesn't become viral. What becomes viral is where you get a lot of people who like what you're doing and are easily enough influenced that they will share that again. Okay, so what it means is that, as we found with Captain Tom, the, the now, uh, centenarian, 100-year-old guy who, uh, walked around, what he was doing hit the zeitgeist of the time of everyone wanting to help. And lots of people said, I can do that and I'll share that with people. And everyone said, yeah, I like it too, I'll share it. There were no big influences, no big stars got involved in the Captain Tom campaign. until later. Okay, so amplification and going viral isn't a function of having a big budget. It's a function of having an engaging piece of information that other people in your network and with connected networks want to share. It's called the cascade theory, and I've got an article about this and also podcasts on it. And the 5th part I'm going to talk about today is about measurement of results and measuring your input, the knowing part. So The 5 Make Speak. Okay, so it takes us to the next slide. I hope I'm going at an okay pace, and we'll check if anyone's got any questions. So the first part is about creating stories. Now, when I work through the storification part of the Speak program, We work with clients on what's their narrative, right? Where do they come from? What was the trigger event that made them want to start this business? I was talking to Mark, uh, who kindly gave me a ride this morning. He has something called Bath Water, and he said they were having, having dinner and someone brought them a bottle of Bulgarian water, some horrible— and he said, we're sitting in Bath, why are we drinking Why are we drinking water from another country? And they started a company, he and his wife and a partner, called Bathwater. And we've already had the jokes about what you drink, but we all had a light bulb moment when we thought, oh, I can do that, that's a business I want to run. So in our storification module, we work through that. We have what we call a message hammer. Where we then start to talk about the ABT, the and, but, therefore, which is the classic storyline for all movies, which is the painted picture of what would be brilliant, but here's the obstacle, and therefore I'm doing this. Okay, so we work together with, with people on that. Then once we've got to that level of, if you like, granularity, We want to start to work with people on creating a story every day, or as often as you can. Now, I have a good friend— excuse me— in, um, actually lives in Singapore, but he runs a hotel in Bali. And, uh, we had a chat the other day about Speed PR because he says, you know, he said, oh, we've been furloughed and all the staff are at home and, uh, the hotel is closed. He was happy to go back to his old job. And, and he said, I just don't know what to say. So we started to have a look at all the things that he's been doing while the hotel can't be open. And what we found was there are lots and lots of stories. Like, there's the stories about how they're keeping all the bedrooms clean, how they're turning over the sheets, how people are managing to look after each other when there's no money coming in, how each of the staff are sharing with one another to get them through it, how he's helping to motivate them and how he's given them training on things like language, right? So his business is offline from a conventional sense, but he's got these stories. So what we said was, let's start looking at the different stories. He's got different stories for his team, for his partners, and his external. So as an example, for the staff, the story is, I'm still here, I'm still committed to keeping you Uh, in business, and when the company opens, the hotel opens again, I can get you back to work. For partners, it's, for example, all the travel agent partners that he has. It was, I'm still going to be in business. We could— you could book in advance and I'll give you a voucher. Buy now, I'll give you a voucher for later. Okay. So he's got some stories there, and on the external, he's got a confidence issue. He's got a stay on the search engine so that when people are looking at venues in Bali, they're not just thinking about the big 5-star hotels, he's thinking about independents as well. Okay, so if we work together, the idea is to look at something that's going on in your business as often as you can. If you can't start with one a day, that's fine, but try and think of something at least once a week, twice a week. Now the next thing— excuse me. So the next part is about frequency, because remember I said it's content times frequency times channels. Now when I spoke to Peter about when they last did PR, um, he said, um, so I'm waiting for the answer. The thing is that most people—

Not you.

Most people Say, oh well, I, uh, I launched this product once, or they said, oh, I did this when I, um, you know, when I, uh, I hired a senior person, so I, I sent out press releases. Most, most companies think that what they're doing is not that interesting most of the time, is the truth of the matter. But actually, in the old days, if you're trying to get Business Southwest to write a piece about you hiring a new person, for example, with the Progress Shed hiring Mark here, in the old days you may or may not get the local newspaper or TV station to cover that because, with all due respect to the Progress Shed and to Mark, it doesn't impact enough readers. Okay, so it does impact people.

It does.

So the old metric, as, um, good friends of mine used to explain, for example, in the South China Morning Post I work with, uh, at Hong Kong. If, if a story doesn't reach 2/3 of their readers, they don't run it. Okay, so use that as your metric. If it's not going to touch 2/3 of the readers, they're not interested because quite simply they're either selling subscription advertising or they're selling advertising. There are only 2 models the publishers have got. So if you're not appealing to the readers where people enough who want to buy it they go to WHSmith's or when they get it delivered. If you're not getting 2/3, if you think from a business point of view, the economics don't make sense for the publisher. Okay, now what's changed? And there was a time, um, literally 2006 in fact, when there was a sea change in fact between digital and traditional in terms of things like search engines and content generation. So now, 14, 15 years ago, the sea change is that now you create your own content because you're your own publisher. So actually, anything that happens in your business is interesting to your business, and it impacts your internal team, it impacts your partners, and it, and it can impact your customers. The joy of social media and digital content production is that This is yours to publish. Okay, now you may have a group of 5, 6 staff. You may have 4 or 5 partners. Partners could be your, your legal firm, your accounting firm, a supplier. It could be a courier company. It could be a referral partner. Let's face it, most of us get most of our business— well, I said I get a lot of my business through referrals. I just I just contracted with a, um, an accounting firm in Bath, and then I rang and said, can you help me with a wealth management company? Right? So we all refer people. I asked Brian. In fact, I met Brian through the Progress Show, right? So how are these different partnerships hearing about your business? An external— we've all got our existing customers, but then of course we've got the universe of people that we would like to be Selling to us. Scheduling content to go to these people that come from the storyboard is a process. Very simple, doesn't cost anything, but it's just a mindset. It's just a discipline. And just like someone says, if you want to get fit, if you run only on a Sunday, it's going to take you a long time to get fit. If you do a little bit every day you'll get fitter. And it's just the same. And as Peter said in the, uh, inter— in the introduction, public relations is about consistent communication. And because so much content comes out so quickly now, whatever we produce drops down the screen almost within minutes. Certainly that's the case with Twitter, or in China we use Weibo, we use WeChat. If you look at what the kids are using with TikTok, it's so quick. It creates a pressure and a demand on us to have frequency. Okay, excuse me. The next then is on channels. Now, unlike the earlier slides, I put in some channel examples here, and I've done that because Channels give us reach, and this is the fundamental game changer that's a great opportunity for all of us that run businesses. Amplification can take place through multiple channels, and the beauty of amplification these days is that there is automation to do it for us. In the course, we go through that, and you might remember I introduced something called the TAD, which is the Technology Applications Directory. Which is also on our website eastwestpr.com/speakpr, and there's a directory there of over 100 applications that you can use for free to help you do your marketing. Okay, they all have a freemium model, and then you can pay to get more value as you like it. So the world has gone nuts, especially the American world has gone nuts with providing tools that we as business people can use to automate our distribution, which means amplification becomes amazingly simple. When I went to Singapore in '95 to send a press release, I initially had a fax machine, and because you wanted each press release to be personalized because it gave it a better chance of being published, you would print out 25 press releases each with the name of the journalist on, and you'd hire somebody to stand at the fax machine and putting it through the fax machine. And at the end of that, 2 or 3 didn't go through. And then we got smart, said, I'll tell you what, let's have a cover page and the fax. So then we did it, because then you could cut the pieces of paper in half and put it on the back to save paper. And then it got smarter. I had a Siren organizer, a little 2.4, uh, bitrate modem that's stuck in the side of the sign organizer. And I— for those of you that remember sign organizers— and sent it that way. It was the beginning of automation back in '96, '97. It's moved on massively. Now here, when we look at the channels that you can use, you can have an internal channel, you can have a partner's channel, an external channel. Now I've just put in here 10 And I'm going to ask the obvious question, can anyone see which one's missing? Right, and I'll give you the answer already. There's one that's missing that's one of the biggest of all, but if you look there, you've got internal meetings, you've got your own website, you could have an intranet. Anyone got— someone's flashing. Do we have an answer?

Facebook.

Facebook, thank you, Brian. Exactly. And thank you, Jonathan, for that about this discipline. So, and I've left it off on purpose because when I— because in China launching Morgan, I couldn't use Facebook. So I've come back to England in the last year and gone, oh my word, I've got to figure out how to use Google because now I use— because Google's blocked, Facebook is blocked, Vimeo is blocked, YouTube is blocked, right? So with Morgan, I built a an ecosystem based entirely on Chinese platforms. What's kind of cool about that is I don't speak Chinese. And I say that's cool because what it means is that if I can build a brand like Morgan in China not speaking the language, imagine what you can do building your own brand in England, right? Or in Italy, right? Right. So these are some of the channels that you can use. So you've got your internal You've got your website. Now you can also have a website, an intranet for your clients. I use one called Zoho, for example, and I give my clients access to a certain portion of the projects that I'm working on with them. And there's what we call a stream. There's, in other words, there's a current conversation happening with my clients who are currently based in— I've got some in Atlanta, I've got some in Denmark, that we do work in China, Indonesia, Vietnam. So there are tools like that for collaboration, but it's a stream of communication, right? I have Twitter. I don't use Pinterest, it's not quite right for what I'm doing, but I know Nick Hemmings, for example, who I interviewed on my podcast, uh, this week, he uses Pinterest because he's a fashion and style consultant. I think Nick Hemmings is going to be speaking Here with Progression in the coming weeks. I've just set up my YouTube company account, which is free, and I use a product called repurpose.io that takes my podcast and automatically makes an audiogram. In other words, it takes my podcast, automatically makes a video, puts a picture in, and automatically goes to my YouTube channel. Now YouTube gets half of the world's search traffic. So, and it gets 46% of all music is listened to via YouTube. Okay, so if you're not doing something on YouTube, it may not be what you think it is. Newsletters. How many people here create newsletters? I have a newsletter goes out every Friday, uh, 10 o'clock. Um, we have 6 articles only. It's, uh, 20% my own, 80% curated from around the web, right? And there are some formulas about what makes most effective content mix. So newsletters, are you using that? You can have an internal one for your team depending how big your team is and how remotely working they are. You can have a newsletter for your partners, for example, and suppliers, and you can also obviously have a newsletter for your LinkedIn. How many people are using LinkedIn? And if you do linkedin.com/sales.ssi, if you're using LinkedIn, that's your Social Selling Index. You can see— and Peter and I checked ours yesterday. I won't tell you who got a higher score, but—

By only 3 points.

By only 3 points. But anyway, so LinkedIn. How much are you using that as a platform for getting yourself inquiries? We're doing that for a client that's a plastic moldings business in Malaysia and China. Actually, they're out of Denmark. They contracted us to do their LinkedIn. We've refreshed, put the logo, the branding, and we put content in, and they've seen an uplift, nearly a 40% uplift in traffic to their own LinkedIn and comments. Including some procurement, uh, directors who are very much relevant for what they're selling in terms of 3D printing. Are we using Instagram? Outbrain— now, Outbrain is a content syndication platform that I included in my podcast this week. There's an issue which publishes magazines, PDF magazines, and has, uh, like 10 million views a month. Okay, so the newsstand that used to be in, uh, WHSmith's is now— okay, huge growth. And Issuu, you can publish your own magazines for free. I published in, in China, by the way. I worked with the UK publisher of Morgan Magazine. It's called Mog. A great guy called Matthew Millers here in Worcestershire. He's a brilliant publisher, Matthew Rogers. And I said, look, can I just take your content and I'm going to put 4 pages on the front, 4 pages about China, but the rest is your content, but I'm going to translate it? So I created a China Mog magazine and I printed that and gave that out and gave that to dealers and so on. But I also put them on Issuu because it's free and people could download them and I could send people PDFs around the country of China. Okay, and you know who loved that? Students. Couldn't afford the magazine, it didn't make any sense to send them one, but these were the future of Morgan's customers. Okay, I wanted to give them the information, but I didn't want to spend £1.50 every time and also have to go and send it at the post office. In the Technology Applications Directory, there are— I kid you not— 100 of these platforms. There's And that's— and someone rang me the other day. Uh, there's a group called Telum in Asia. Um, they have a very large media platform. Um, and they said, we're not in your book. A bit embarrassing actually because they were interviewing me about starting the business after 25 years in England. Anyway, I missed one of the biggest ones. So there are more, and I'm finding them every day. So there are over 100 tools that you can use. And what's great about this, and Jonathan will be able to tell you know about this as well. There are tools like, um, Ask Edgar, HubSpot, Zoho, Sprout Social— these are all listed in the technology applications directory— that automate this for you. Okay, so I send out now content to half a dozen different channels, but I only post it once and it automatically goes through to these places. Okay, this is what we'll work with you on If you're one of our 5 that come in with us. So this is where I like to try and bring it all together. Now, I'm not a PR person. That's why I'm not good at this. I'm not a mathematician, okay? So I try to keep it very simple, um, so I can understand it. But the formula is very simple. It's content times frequency times channels, and it's a simple consolidation of these metrics that I'd like to offer to you, and you can use it for free. You don't have to work with me at all. I work with, um, with Verne Harnish, the Rockefeller Habits, and he has this, uh, David Hadley talks about data rhythm and priorities, right? That if we can simplify our business to a few measurables, it means it's easier for us to determine what those are, but it's also easier to manage teams. Most of you won't be running the PR yourself. You'll have either a member of the team internally or you'll have an agency. And the problem with that is someone says, what have we done this week? Well, I've got a press release, I've done Twitter and I've got 45 followers. But it doesn't tell you how much they put in. So this dashboard will give you an indication of how much— what ingredients are going into the product. So each week we take the number of pieces of content that we're putting in, we're putting in how often we're sending them out, and we're putting in the number of channels, and it'll give us a number. It gives us a formula when we multiply. I hope this is okay. Do shout if you've got a question, if I'm missing anybody. So this is the formula. This is the secret to effective PR. I've run my own businesses across the world for 30 years, some quite big and some quite small, some successful, some not successful, and I've worked on over 500 clients, everything from AT&T to Philips to smaller companies. The essential element for successful and profitable public relations is content times frequency times channels. Okay, so if you take nothing else away take away that formula. This is what it looks like then in your business. And what you'll start to see here is that we can consolidate the monthly on the weekly metrics— sorry, the weekly into monthlies. And can you see here we've got stories? If you have one story and you send out 5 times, you can repeat sell. You can sell and send the same information more regularly. But if you're only sending it to 4 channels, you get what I call an ACI of 20. Okay, but as we move down, for example, to week 5, 2 stories— in other words, you've only done the same amount of work, generate 2 stories, but you've sent it out 8 times. Okay, but you've also changed— you've doubled up your, your channels to 8. Can you see that gives you an ACI of 128? Now someone said to me, what does ACI mean? I said, well, it's a metric by which, a bit like an acid ratio, you can see how much effort you're putting into the marketing. It doesn't tell you what you're going to get out because it might be Twitter's got 1,000 or Facebook's got 200, but we can't control those numbers. Okay, I'm not worried about those because I can't control them, but what I can control is how much content I ask my PR team to write, how many times I can ask them to resend it, how many channels I can put it out to. Okay. So we work together. The whole point is to work on the storification, to start to identify what you could be saying about your company. To the different audience groups. Remember, it's not just sending 8 stories to the same external customers. You've got your internal, you've got your partners, your external, right? So if you start to take a slightly more filtered view of who you're talking to, because actually you need different messages, you can see how you can really start to build this up, right? So if we then look at—

Jim?

It's Nigel. Just a question on this particular point about targeting messaging, sort of being a sniper rather than firing a shotgun. I wonder if you could just comment on that. Sure. Okay, so I think what you're talking about then is you're moving into the area of— well, there's 2 issues really. One is a sniper. There's 2 issues there. One is if you've got one particular target you're trying to hit. Okay. So sniper implies that, you know, there's that one customer you want to get to, right? So if you know that that one particular customer lives in a certain place, then you can focus on that customer. Okay. If what you're doing is you're reaching— so then, for example, with the plastics company, For example, what they're really interested in is a business-to-business procurement company. They want to find the procurement supply to the procurement directors in companies. So they, they actually know what they want to say. So we're going very much for them with LinkedIn. Okay, so it's targeted. What we've done there though, Brian, is we've increased the frequency, we've increased the content. Okay, does it make sense? Now if you've got a broader consumer business or you're launching something, you might want to reach out to other— through other channels. So to give you an idea, I'm sending out through my newsletter, I've got my known audience, right? So I've got 4,500 people that over 30 years I've met and that know me and give me their details, right? So that's my targeting. I've got specific news and information for those people. For my more general audience, for example, on YouTube, I don't— I do the podcast. Okay. And I'm literally putting that out there to see who, who might want to find it. Now this, you're then getting into this concept of funnels really, Nigel.

Right.

That actually we kind of need a broad— we need a broad net and then you start to bring people in. Does that answer that question a little bit? So the, the point about this is this is not about engagement, um, specifically. This is so you can start to measure how much you and your team are doing, and then what you do is you start to adjust and fine-tune that. But the other, the other point here is that what we want to try and do is We want to get to a level where our businesses have a consistency of communication over time. Now, Nigel, to your point, if you know that you want to talk to a certain community, a certain audience, you might talk to that particular audience through one or two channels in a very consistent way, a bit like the TPS guys here are doing. They're doing this webinar for you every week.

That's it.

That would be a a sniper, right? They've got a particular audience, they want to bring particular value, they want to bring this webinar for an hour. But what we're now doing with this, they're starting to broadcast it live on YouTube because actually there might be people out there who don't know about the Progression yet but might find this interesting. Okay, so we create a bit of a funnel with that. So the point with the ACI is— and thank you, Nigel, for the question— so the point about the ACI is, and what we want to do is to find a group of 5 companies along with TPS that would like to be the first sort of cohort in the system. My experience is that most people's, most companies' ACI is very low. And I hate to pick on Peter, but when I said, you know, what channels do you use, he said he uses Facebook and LinkedIn. Okay, which—

there's nothing—

and this is true, and this is— and Twitter, right? So, but he doesn't know about that. So in the same business, in the same business, 2 partners who spend a lot of time together weren't aligned about how much was going on. So, but the question is, well, when did you last send something and what was it? Then becomes a little bit more blurry, maybe not for Peter and And Andy, of course, they know exactly what's going on. But the whole point is that if we use this ACI methodology, you can start to create some structure. And in a way, if you think about it, if you had a cash flow statement, you, you'd want to know— you want to know what you're doing every day, you want to know what your revenue and your sales pipeline is like. Why would you not measure your marketing activity in the same way? Because in sales you've got how many calls you're going to make per day, what's the value, and you measure that, right? You, you have a goal of the output, which is the sales they make, but unless you make the numbers, you're definitely not going to get the sales. So the ACI is doing the same thing, okay? The ACI is trying to say if every day and every week you commit to sending out great content to these 3 different categories, to this number of channels, you will start to build up what I'm calling your Active Communications Index. And what will happen then, you'll find a happy level. You'll find a happy level for your business. So Peter was saying, what do you think the right number is? And what we're going to do is we're going to find out what companies can manage, because there'll be a difference between some companies that got people doing it for them full-time, some part-time. My, my personal experience with my own business is that, um, I send out, uh, 3 stories a day. I do a podcast every day, and I go out to 15 different channels in English and Chinese. I'm one guy, right? Uh, but through automation and some outsourcing My ACI is closer to 250, right, for one guy, right? It's not that I'm particularly good at it, but I just have a methodology. I just have a process. And that's really what I'd like to share with you, is that there's a process that big companies do, but they delegate that. But with technology, business owners like you can work with a technology that I'm sharing here or a process I'm sharing here. You've got people like Jonathan in the network here who know a lot about the technology, more than I do, who are I'm sure willing and able to get involved in helping with this. So the idea is then to build your ACI and get it level, and then if you've got a team, you've got a number. You've got the number that you can say to your marketing manager, what's our ACI this week? All the other stuff— page views, engagement— it's all nice, But that's the result, and it may or may not fluctuate. What you want to know is how much did they do? How many sales calls did you make? How much content did you generate? When did you send it, and where did you send it to? And that— if you follow that formula, just like fitness, you'll get fit if you do that every day. Okay, so the implications, simple. If you'd like to get more people to know about your business without going one at a time. I can, I can share with you the way that I built Morgan, I built Wake, I built British Business Awards, I've built lots of different brands. Increase content creation, increase frequency of distribution, and increase the number of channels that you use. And this 5-stage speak methodology, allied to the podcast that I produce every day We'll give you a guide and hopefully some useful, uh, instructions, and we're here to support you if you'd like to work with us on it. So we've got an idea of a sort of an 88-day challenge. My sister said, why 88 days? I said, well, I've been in China a long time, so it's, it's, you know, 3 months as well. So 8, ba, in Chinese is also, uh, for wealth, so they use the same number. That's why you don't have 4, because it's the same. So sound as death. Ts is the same as ts. So that's why you don't see a 4 often in hotels. You don't have the number 4 as a floor. Okay, so that's why it's 88. Be a pioneer, uh, be a pioneer in intakes. I'm not new at building brands, and I do this kind of work for clients in terms of one-on-one in their companies with quite a lot of money. What we'd like to try and do with the Progress Shed is to create this as a, as a program so that entrepreneurs can afford it, not just the big companies, and enjoy personal engagement with Mark, who's here now, is a great consultant as well, very experienced. And that— imagine when customers come to you, how easy running your business will be. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to share that with you, and I think I'll bring you back on.

Excellent.

Is that all right?

Yeah.

Perfect.

So brilliant, uh, some really, really cool tools coming through there. And in relation to this, uh, the opportunity to really be part of the beta testing and pushing that forward, uh, I think is, uh, it's an opportunity for anybody, uh, anybody who wants to be part of this. So, um, I think we've already got one, um, but, um, Mark will be sending out some information on how to register and how to get this pushed forward. And in relation to next week, next week we've got a great session on leadership and leading through this current climate, which will be fantastic. And really, it's a great opportunity. So yeah, Peter, the details will be coming out. So Mark, whilst he doesn't know yet, will be sending it out to everybody to invite everyone to apply. And I think it's a massive opportunity, which would be fantastic. And coming up next few weeks, some amazing speakers. From our side, we're loving doing these. We'd love to grow this audience though, and we really need to push it up if we're going to keep getting brilliant speakers and people giving their time. So I am asking you, begging you, and pushing you to share this share this as far and wide and recommend it and ask everyone to join and push people through. Um, and in relation to that, it's great having you with us, and we'll see you next week.

Take care now.

Bye.