Corina’s Concerns Be lowly wise, think only what concerns thee and thy being.– John Milton, Paradise Lost

I travelled recently to a medium-seized Romanian town with a sleepy countenance hiding some amazing surprises: modest people of immodest wealth, chic (and tasty) restaurants with reasonable prices, an almost all-male press of decent, pleasant journalists.

In this really nice city, I also ran into the PR’s worst nightmare: the media outlet that asks for money to cover your news. I had thought it a fable, despite my PR fellows’ protests to the contrary.

It wasn’t.

I had just sent a reminder about the press conference I had scheduled for the next day, and the gala event following, to mark the opening of the city’s first multiplex cinema, a significant investment from both my company and the host mall, in a city where business is dwindling as a result of the recession, opening up to 60 part-time jobs for students. In addition, only 8 cities out of tens in Romania even had a multiplex, while at the same time, previously state-owned cinemas were in a state of transition that threatened their very identity as cinemas.

Get it? It was news, according to the criteria for newsworthiness drummed into my sophomore head by Profs. Christina Kotchemidova and Larry Gordon (the latter is a new Facebook friend, another testament to FB’s amazing prowess in reconnecting lost friends and acquaintances).

The day before the event, I got a phone call, and a youthful female voice told me: “Ms. Gonteanu, I am so-and-so from local TV station X. I have to tell you that if you want us to cover the fact that you are opening a facility in our city, it is considered advertising and you will have to pay us for it. It’s company policy.” I of course, declined, and politely explained to the lady that although a business is involved, the fact that an international company worth millions of euro is now investing a lot of money in a recession fraught town is news, and furthermore that our policy is never to pay for editorial coverage. We do pay for advertising, I explained, and put our budgets where our mouths are, but I personally have never paid for legitimate news, and am not about to start. We said our polite goodbyes, and that was it.

So why is this bothering me? Well, first of all it’s the dubious professional ethics, and second, it’s the quality of journalism arising from that. (I have been schooled to be a journalist, and have the utmost respect for the profession.)

I do not want to be a citizen watching a TV station that accepts (nay, even requests) money to put a news item in the bulletin. It’s tantamount to misinformation. And I do not want to be a citizen watching a TV station that shuns news that may be important, or relevant, because the source is not paying. Think of the great NGO stories that you would miss, for example.

I admit, there’s a thin line between genuine journalism and PR fluff when reporting about a company, and most journalists tread it carefully.

The point was however, I wasn’t asking the TV station to be positive about our new multiplex. I wasn’t even asking them to actually run a story. But I was, naively perhaps, expecting a reporter to be present, and then the producer could decide whether the story was worth airing or not, whether it was crossing that thin line, instead of a sales and marketing exec. a priori telling me that payment was required.

I had heard qualified people saying that Romanian media is far more advanced than other media in the region. I gloated, and agreed that in many respects they were. But perhaps not in all. And I think owners need to be warned that despite tough economic times, journalistic integrity should not be compromised, and every potential story should be approached as a potential story and not an opportunity to gain profit.

And just to clarify whether the stuff was news, let me check the list of newsworthiness criteria, as I always do when issuing a press release:

Timing. The multiplex was about to open (first customers were two days away) so the story was fresh.

Significance. It was a new facility accessible to all the 200,000+ inhabitants of the city (not to mention the county and surrounding cities. Even if seen through the eyes of the 11,000 movie lovers that had braved the dilapidated state-owned cinema in 2007 (latest stats) it was still a statistically relevant group (and percentage).

Proximity. Check. It was the local press, dude

Prominence. Well, the mall owner was a prominent (and previously newsworthy local businessman), and the ceremonial ribbon cutting featured the deputy mayor, a well known local figure.

Human interest. Not so much, by design, but we did get the surprise attendance of the city’s best known cinematographer, who called our presence the rebirth of local cinema, an unplanned emotional moment that many of the press present decided to incorporate.

So you see, it was news. And without being critical of the station (for which reason I am naming neither it, nor the town), I am saddened by their decision and their policy. I understand their reasoning. I understand that the almost ridiculous restraints placed by the National Council of the Audiovisual on company names have created some funny and some monstrous habits in the broadcast media.

But I just think that the press was not meant to be pay-per-news.

Posted under PRealities, Random opinion

I’m battling a fever today, working from home in attempt to keep a really bad cold at bay. At 3, the buzzer rang, and since I was expecting the technical service from the internet company, I rang them in. Instead of the bulky technician, on my doorstep there was a red shirted guy guy handing me an oversized envelope that says kdo.ro.

The envelope hid gifts: three cute (and handy) notebooks in various sizes, each with lovely, colorful mailbox graphics. But perhaps the biggest gift was the letter, informing me that my friend Daniel Secareanu has sent me this gift as part of the “gift tag”. This seems to be an initiative of Loredana from PRwave, promoting the www.kdo.ro website.

I have two (and only two) things to say. Thank you. And … thank you.

The first Thank You! is for Dani. This has got to be the first non-romantic unexpected gift I’ve ever received. Normally, I get things for holidays my birthday, anniversaries, accomplishments, or gifts when colleagues and friends return from a meaningful trip and want to make me part of it somehow.  With my BF, we’ve lately fallen into a pattern of buying useful things (clothing, mostly) either alone or together, sometimes presenting the cash and saying “Choose your present!”. Dani has given me the first genuine surprise in years, and I am grateful to be the friend that he thought of when choosing the gift recipient.

The second thank you is for Loredana. Her “gift tag” is one of the most innovative PR ideas I’ve read or heard about in years, tapping into the amazing power of blogs and blog tags, but with an added twist of positiveness that’s purely her, and it’s very refreshing .

I am carrying this tag forward, and keeping the recipients a surprise, just like Dani has done for me.

Thank you for the unexpected gift of friendship.

Posted under Morning coffee, Random opinion

Once upon a time there was a young sales professional, whom we will call D. D. was a busy bee, toiling from morning till evening to maintain good relations with her clients, and to keep herself and her company in their top of mind, whenever it came to purchasing services.

As any good sales organization is wont to do, D. and her colleagues wanted to show their appreciation for their customers via a token, a small gift to put them in a good mood, but also remind them of the company. They decided they wanted to offer them DVDs. All in all, it came to 100 DVDs, craftily chosen to create genre or author based packages, to suit each client individually. With prices being what they are, D.s appreciation was worth slightly more than 1000 euro.

As ideas go, it seemed perfect. The execution was more problematic. The differing genres and titles, meant that these DVDs couldn’t be purchased from a distributor, and had to be sourced from a retailer (such is the reality of the far from fabled realm of Romania).

Alas, though D. called and e-mailed, and called again, and looked for other and other e-mail addresses from various sales people, none of the retailers could be bothered to sell her these 100 DVDs. The stores had maybe one or two copies of each title. The sales departments wouldn’t answer. The customer relations departments deleted her e-mail (or so it said in her read receipts), and in the end, nobody seemed to want to take her money. D. was left without DVDs, and with the puzzle of salespeople who seemed not to want to sell.

Thus did the retailers lose the trust of one customer (and all the friends and partners that she told), and 1000 easy euro, to be had immediately, in one transaction, at the cost of reading one e-mail.

The moral of the story is in fact a question: You probably know if your employees are getting you business. But do you know whether they are losing you some (and losing you face or if you prefer, eroding your brand value)?

If you don’t, mind the tale of the 1000 euro. The next time, it may be 10,000. Or more.

Posted under Random opinion

The other day I read an article in the local press in which one-screen, traditional cinemas were deploring the loss of 40% of their viewers due to the opening of a new multiplex

Tucked at the end was the sentence “Small investors are hopeful that viewers will return to their cinemas, due to the price sensitivity of Romanians.” Underlying this assumption is an erroneous view of price sensitivity that I cannot refrain from commenting upon.

Assuming that human beings are rational, we can make the statement that price differences, all other things being equal, will have an influence on purchase. Thus if store A and store B are right next to each other, and store A sells at price a<b, while store B sells at price b, the customers will prefer store A.

But ceteris paribus seldom holds true. Billa and Cora are the same distance from my home, and Cora has better prices, but I still shop at Billa. The product selection is closer to what I want, I prefer their store layout, and I once bought stuff at Cora and their bags broke. This trivial example shows that there are other factors that influence choice:

Place – not only in the sense of location, but also physical space, layout etc.
Product – in the sense of the product itself, but also in terms of diversity, alternatives
Image – the image that the product and company project in the mind of the customer, an image that the company can manipulate through Promotion

In other words, the other 3 Ps of marketing.

Finally, there is the 5th P: the Person. My assumption of rational behavior was only for argument’s sake, but all marketers know that people behave both rationally and emotionally. The associations they make with a product or brand, their habits, the value they derive from its use, all influence their decision to purchase or use a service.

Living in the price sensitivity bubble blinds a company to all these influences. And it’s a surefire road to losing out in front of its competitors.

So burst the bubble. Price alone will not reconquer customers you’ve already lost, especially when your price was lower already when you lost them.

Posted under Random opinion

Chris Brogan threw the gauntlet, proposing 100 topics he hopes other bloggers will write, and as this blog is struggling to find a voice distinct from my former writings, I took him up on his challenge.

HOW WOMEN USE SOCIAL MEDIA

The simple answer to the question is: I don’t really know. Out of the 6 billion people on Earth, more than half are women, and their patterns of interaction with the world around them are as different as their size, shape, hair or eye color. But as a woman who embraced blogs early on, twitters madly and has been doing so for more than a year, and is using Facebook to keep tracks of her friends, I believe I can venture some answers.

1. Women = more

Check your Facebook friends. The likelihood of them being predominantly women is extremely high, and a Business Week article explains why. In brief: there are more women aged 30+ online than there are men, married men tend not to join social networks whereas married women do, and when online, men are biased towards transactional behavior, rather than the relationship-building that such networks are predicated on. The figures come from a Rapleaf study of social network users, and the gender and site by site breakdown is revealing, albeit US centric.

2. Women = later

In the last report I’ve seen of women versus men online, it was made clear that the innovators and most of the early adopters of new online technologies are still men, although that may be a little bit dated. The trend was towards narrowing this gap, and of course, women made up in numbers what they lacked in intensity and speed of adoption. I’d be interested in seeing an update on the Pew research, though.

3. Women = broader

Most data on online behavior, as well as my private experience, is that women’s use of social media encompasses larger segments of their life than men’s use. Thus, women frequently use social media to share personal news, whereas men prefer business connections, and they are also more attuned to the events and changes in their network, which they actively seek out and react to, than men are. Much of that is related to staying power: men can join an online network  at the spur of the moment, and never keep up their membership, whereas women, once online, tend to cultivate their presence. This, of course, is opinion, but i bet it won’t be long until it’s validated by research.

Posted under Random opinion