Calling excellent PR professionals

We have lived with a skill shortage for as long as I can remember in technology PR. This was certainly true in the late ‘90s and although there were more candidates on the market in ’01 and ’02 it has always been a struggle to hire the really great people – the people we (and our competitors) are after. Recently the market seems as tight as ever and one top recruiter told us that they have handled only 10 technology candidates in the past twelve months – while having almost thirty live vacancies in tech PR on their books.

In terms of where the real shortage lies, it's predominantly for people with four to six years experience – account managers and account directors, the people who weren’t being recruited in 2001 – 2003 when many agencies stopped recruiting all together. The pressure to compromise on quality is huge, but is something Hotwire isn’t prepared to do; unfortunately some agencies have had to go that way.

There are two bits of bright news – first, as Hotwire gets better known, we are getting a gratifying flow of direct applications. We love these. Using a recruitment agency involves a hefty fee, so we always look first at applicants who contact us direct. It shows as well that they are entrepreneurial. We have recently taken on an amazing Australian Senior Account Executive who was enterprising enough to contact us directly from Sydney and two calls and some references later we made her an offer.

The other bit of good news is the ongoing success of our graduate programme. This year we had 600 applications for positions with Hotwire, and after a stringent filtering process we made 10 offers to graduates who we think are truly phenomenal.

My guess is that we aren’t the only agency taking on loads of graduates and over the next two years the skill shortage will ease and some semblance of a normal market will return. For the moment, it’s a candidate’s market and the whole industry is fighting over a small pool of the best ones.

The global media

I recently contributed to a webinar hosted by Hotwire's US banking and finance practice agency partner, William Mills. The seminar was an introduction to the European market for US companies, and delved into all the idiosyncrasies of the main European countries from a demographic, cultural, political, social and PR perspective. Admittedly it was more the latter than the former as we only had an hour! The seminar was predominantly focussed on the wide and diverse FS sector, however it never ceases to amaze me, that while the industry preaches the growth of the global economy, how this is seldom reflected by the media make-up.

In the banking space, for example, we have only one true global title - The Banker. The space is fortunate enough to have a lot of pan-European titles and a fair smattering of smaller global titles, especially within the online environment. Yet still regional boundaries really, really matter. Isn't that odd within this new digital, online age?

How many of you, I wonder, are head of PR/marketing EMEA? A sizeable chunk if our client base is anything to go by. Now answer me this, how many pan-EMEA publications can you mention? Yup, I'm struggling as well.

OK, so obviously there isn't an enormous demand to cater for such a wide and diverse media…or is there?

This might be a niche example, but let's take a brief look at the smart card industry. The humble smart card has rapidly grown into a fairly ubiquitous platform residing, as it does, within every mobile phone handset and an increasingly healthy proportion of your debit, credit, travel and ID cards (plus a whole host of other emerging and visionary applications). If we focus on the debit and credit card for a moment we will see it becoming fairly standard across the Continent within the next two or three years. Now the Middle East is in the midst of its own EMV (the standard that underpins the debit/credit chip and PIN card) migration although it looks set to be less a Big Bang rollout and more a steady drip-drip. In Africa the smart card is seen as a vehicle to provide banking to the un-banked, bringing the possibility of paying by card rather than cash to remote and poor communities for the first time.

From my experience of doing outreach into the Middle East and Africa over the past three years they are crying out to hear about the European experience. They want to know what is going on and just because they are 'behind' does not mean they are going to slavishly follow the European migration path step-by-step. Instead they are more likely to leapfrog directly to where we are today or beyond. So why does the media not reach internationally to share the same information to such a broad audience?

Yes, we can probably discount print publications through shear distribution cost - especially to Africa - but the on-lines are also peculiarly tied to their regional localities.

Let me give you another example of why I feel this is odd. Part of the SOA dream is the erosion of silos. These silos are not only inter-departmental but also cross-border. I appreciate that the number of examples of companies with cross-border IT implementations are few but the wave of M&A activity is going to make this increasingly commonplace - after all, one of the significant parts of the business case for the Santander/Abbey merger was supposed to be the IT rationalisations. Now name me a pan-European IT title? In fact, let me go one further, name me a European IT title that will accept a non-national case study. Other than the occasional rogue example that slips past the editorial controls it isn’t easy, is it?

It's nothing more than an observation at this stage but actually I think it is time that the publishing houses woke up and accepted that the world is globalising. Some aspect of globalisation creeps into virtually every edition. The majority of vendors are global or certainly have global aspirations. China is the next big market, not just for IT vendors but business as a whole. Basically, globalisation is not just coming, it's here. That's not a bold statement, it's a statement that simply underlines the fact that the media, not just the trades, but also many of the on-lines, are falling out of step with the evolution of the global economy and I think it is time they considered this a problem.

The battle for the empty chair

Hotwire's seminar last week, The Battle for the Empty Chair, provoked a lively debate with the help of two great speakers in Gareth Jones from Marketing and Derek Owen from NEC. We were discussing the future of marketing and who will be the owner of the marketing strategy in this age of digital media. Rather than a being a land grab between marketing and communications the consensus was that these departments need to adopt a much more integrated approach to working together. Nothing new there then you might say.

Do we need to acquire and learn new skills to adapt to the growth in digital media? Yes. Do we need separate departments to focus on digital media? Probably not (worth noting at this point that there was broad scepticism of agencies who have attempted to ride the digital media wave by doing this).

In fact, while the way we deliver the message may be different via a blog or a podcast, the essence - in terms of the message - must fit within a broader and integrated marketing communications strategy. Some of you will no doubt remember how this same debate kicked off 10 years ago when everyone was asking whether we needed separate online teams to cope with the Internet.

More then anything, what I took away from the debate is that we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Yes, we need to get a proper grip on digital so that we can respond to the changing media diets of our customers, but we need to approach these new channels in the same way we do others. Working towards an overall strategy and with clear objectives and measurement, and then choosing the tactics and media channels that will best support these.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying put the brakes on digital media. In fact, I would say that many businesses, particularly in the B2B arena, are missing a trick by not exploiting digital media more that they are. I just feel we are in danger of fetishising digital media as a new channel, at the expense of the bigger picture of understanding and influencing our customers.

Is there room for calculated experimentation? Absolutely! Without experimentation our approach to public relations and marketing won’t evolve. But just as in science where experimentation is followed by rigorous assessment, so it should in our industries. Only by doing this will learn and move forward.