TUV SUD, the global testing and certification company, launched a new lab in Vietnam this week with an event for clients, government officials, textile industy experts and the press. TUV SUD Asia Pacific President and CEO Ishan Palit and TUV SUD AG COO and member of the board of management Dr. Manfred Bayerlein led the company's celebration of their latest investment in Vietnam. The laboratory will be used to test garments, footwear, leather goods and textiles--ensuring that products made in Vietnam meet international standards for safety and quality.
With bullets pinging throughout central Bangkok, a corps of Thailand-focused bloggers are delivering information and analysis to an audience desperate for the latest news about the violence.
It isn't that bloggers are necessarily breaking news on the conflict. Mainstream media continues to play the lead role in delivering reporting and major factual themes about fatalities, troop movements and statements from the government. However, blogs are way in front of mainstream media in serving as a platform for analysis, sharing information and photos, opinion, maps of the conflict zone and as collection points for breaking mainstream media news and analysis.
Blogs are also serving as a forum for debate and as a barometer for public opinion. The New Mandela blog recently introduced a comment rating system, allowing members of its community to rate comments in reaction to blog posts. The impact is that those comments rated most favorably rise to the top of the page, offering a rudimentary gauge to the opinion of New Mandela's readership.
Blogs are also serving as unique collection point for news reports from Thai news media and international news media. In regular posts, the Bangkok Pundit blog provides summaries of key excerpts, links and analysis of news and opinion articles from The Nation, Bangkok Post, Matichon, Krungthep Turakij along with the New York Times, Reuters, AP, Straits Times, Bloomberg, CNN and the BBC.
Photography of the conflict zone is also an important feature of the blogs covering the Thai conflict. In addition to linking to photos in Thai and international news media, the Nation's State blog features original photos from the conflict, including from the government's designated "Live Fire" zones. Contributors and commentators are also providing original photography and video to their blogs of choice.
New Mandela, Bangkok Pundit and Nation's State have long been part of the routine daily download for people interested in Thai politics. But now, their servers are working at full-capacity to keep up with the traffic. What was once one or two visits per day to these blogs before the conflict, is probably closer to a dozen or more daily visits for the average visitor.
In addition, new bloggers have arrived on the scene. As the Bangkok Pundit notes today, military blogger Michael Yon is now in Bangkok, blogging and tweeting on the conflict with analysis of the weaponry and military strategy.
Media of all types are obviously playing an important role in this conflict. The mainstream media continues to deliver breaking information. But blogs are now serving as indispensable go-to outlets for people seeking a steady flow of information.
A very positive portrayal of Thai markets and economic potential by Reuters reporter Viparat Jantraprap in a news story today.
A few key excerpts:
1) Renewed attention on Thailand, one of the biggest Southeast Asian economies, is drawing comparisons with Indonesia, the region's top economy and a long-time emerging market favorite.
2) Investors see the peaceful protests as a turning point, and the economy is rebounding quickly. "The demonstrations have by and large been peaceful and this is taken as encouragement Thailand will see relative political stability going forward, enough for an acceleration of growth," said Frederic Neumann, an economist with HSBC.
Other firms’ suffering has bolstered the public-relations business
Jan 14th 2010 | NEW YORK | From The Economist print edition
Illustration by Claudio Munoz
THE past year or two has tested the idea that all publicity is good publicity, at least when it comes to business. Undeserved bonuses, plunging share prices and government bail-outs, among other ills, have elicited the ire of the media and public—and created a bonanza for public-relations firms. The recession has increased corporate demand for PR, analysts say, and enhanced the industry’s status. “We used to be the tail on the dog,” says Richard Edelman, the boss of Edelman, the world’s biggest independent PR firm. But now, he continues, PR is “the organising principle” behind many business decisions.
According to data from Veronis Suhler Stevenson (VSS), a private-equity firm, spending on public relations in America grew by more than 4% in 2008 and nearly 3% in 2009 to $3.7 billion. That is remarkable when compared with other forms of marketing. Spending on advertising contracted by nearly 3% in 2008 and by 8% in the past year. PR’s position looks even rosier when word-of-mouth marketing, which includes services that PR firms often manage, such as outreach to bloggers, is included. Spending on such things increased by more than 10% in 2009.
Not all PR firms did as well as IPREX, a global consortium whose revenues increased by 14% last year. Many had to shed jobs, and some estimates show the industry’s overall revenues declining, although not nearly as sharply as those of most of the businesses it serves. According to a survey by StevensGouldPincus, a consulting firm for the communications industry, nearly 64% of participating firms saw revenues slide in 2009 and only 23% saw revenues increase, perhaps because businesses put their faith only in the biggest and most established firms.
PR has done well in part because it is often cheaper than mass advertising campaigns. Its impact, in the form of favourable coverage in the media or online, can also be more easily measured. Moreover, PR firms are beginning to encroach on territory that used to be the domain of advertising firms, a sign of their increasing clout. They used chiefly to pitch story ideas to media outlets and try to get their clients mentioned in newspapers. Now they also dream up and orchestrate live events, web launches and the like. “When you look at advertising versus public relations, it’s not going to be those clearly defined silos,” says Christopher Graves, the boss of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. “It may be indistinguishable at some point where one ends and the other begins.”
PR has also benefited from the changing media landscape. The withering of many traditional media outlets has left fewer journalists from fewer firms covering business. That makes PR doubly important, both for attracting journalists’ attention, and for helping firms bypass old routes altogether and disseminate news by posting press releases on their websites, for example.
The rise of the internet and social media has given PR a big boost. Many big firms have a presence on social-networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, overseen by PR staff. PR firms are increasingly called on to track what consumers are saying about their clients online and to respond directly to any negative commentary. When two employees of Domino’s, a pizza chain, uploaded a video of themselves apparently sticking ingredients for dishes they were preparing up their noses, the firm responded by posting a video of its own online, of a senior executive apologising for the incident.
Blow-dried blogs
That sort of content is proliferating. A PR firm called Ketchum helped IBM start a blog about sustainability, complete with posts written by the technology firm’s executives. It also created cartoons on the subject that it uploaded to YouTube. Edelman recently worked with eBay on the launch of a web-only magazine, “The Inside Source”, which provides articles on shopping and tells readers what is selling well on the online retail giant’s website.
VSS forecasts that spending on PR in America will surpass $8 billion by 2013, with much of the growth coming from online projects such as these. According to Miles Nadal, chief executive of MDC Partners, a media holding company, investment in digital PR accelerated during the recession “and will go forward in perpetuity” because clients became more focused on measuring the impact of their efforts. The internet offers various yardsticks, from traffic to cheerleading websites to numbers of Facebook fans, whereas the number of people who see a conventional advertisement is much harder to gauge.
Perhaps the best indication of PR’s growing importance is the attention it is attracting from regulators. They are worried that PR firms do not make it clear enough that they are behind much seemingly independent commentary on blogs and social networks. In October America’s Federal Trade Commission published new guidelines for bloggers, requiring them to disclose whether they had been paid by companies or received free merchandise. Further regulation is likely. But that will not hamper PR’s growth, says Jim Rutherfurd of VSS. After all, companies that fall foul of the rules will need the help of a PR firm.
Today I had the opportunity to attend a talk by Paul Midler, author of Poorly Made in China.
Midler provides an insiders account of the manufacturing tactics behind China's rise as a manufacturing hub for the world. Many of Midler's comments focus on the challenges of manufacturing in China and the cultural aspects that he believes contributed to safety and quality problems.
Among Midler's observations were these tidbits he provided to the group.
1. Midler disputes the idea that China is going through the same issues as Japan did in the 1950s with regard to quality. Never in the 1950s, he says, did manufacturing companies need to send thousands of people to Japan to manage quality control. Moreover, he said Japanese manufacturers have traditional sought to improve quality, sometimes to the point of obsession.
2. Midler says Chinese manufacturers are experts in what he terms the "Quality Fade". After securing a contract and creating the initial production run, Midler says Chinese manufacturers will find ways to incrementally shave costs from the production costs. Part of this he attributes to an abhorrence of waste and a deeply ingrained saving culture.He compares this to a game of Jenga, whereby manufacturers continually shave costs and quality from product specs, until the product quality becomes low-grade or even dangerous. 3. "Made In China. Made in the World" is the tag-line of a new public relations campaignfunded by the Chinese government to off-set some of the recent controversies surrounding manufacturing problems.The campaign was launched in November, 2009.
Midler says it is time that people begin to seriously question the logic of producing goods in China. He says the perception that goods made in China have the lowest possible price point of any manufacturing locale is not necessarily accurate. There is a mind-set that says "that if something is made in China then it must be a good value," says Midler. But this is not necessarily the case."
Yesterday, the Nation published a news article about a new agreement between the Thai cable television company True Visions and the Phoenix TV group. The full article is here.
An executive commenting on the agreement stated that the Phoenix TV group is "like the Eastern CNN." Indeed, True Visions has positioned Phoenix TV's news programming and content on channels directly in between the channels carrying major sources of Western media, CNN, BBC, CNBC and Bloomberg. This would appear to be progress for the Chinese leadership's efforts to engage in a public dialog on an international level. The Phoenix news channels broadcast on True Vision are Chinese language, but we imagine that there may be some serious efforts underway among Chinese media companies to build English language broadcasts on a global scale.
I attended a breakfast meeting yesterday hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce focusing on the Creative Economy initiative in Thailand. To kick-off the meeting, the U.S. Consul General provided an overview of the US government's efforts to sync with the Thai government's efforts to promote a creative economy.
Interesting to note that the U.S. government is focusing its efforts on Chang Mai, in northern Thailand. Also interesting to note that the U.S. government seems to focus its resources on a single industry--technology.
This appears to be an effort to create the kind of "innovation cluster" that David Brooks references in today's New York Times column. Brooks defines an innovation cluster as a place in which tech obsessives work in close proximity and feed off each others ideas.
Obviously, it takes years to develop an innovation cluster, but given the pace of technological progress, it could happen sooner than we think. This would be a great development for Chang Mai and Thailand.
The conference is called "Northern Thailand's Creative Economy: Opportunities and Challenges in the IT sector." The conference takes place Feb 18-19 in Chang Mai.
Economics. Business. Communications. Government. Culture. I started this blog to share insights on trends and news happening in all of these areas, particularly as they relate to the business of public relations.
This blog will be a group effort, with ideas, narratives, news and videos shared by the Vero Public Relations team. We hope you enjoy the blog. Thank you for visiting. To reach us click here.
Brian Griffin is a campaign strategist with Vero Public Relations in Vietnam, Myanmar and Thailand. He is charged with helping clients navigate opportunities and challenges in media, government and stakeholder relations.
