SEALNet, a non-profit organization founded by students at Stanford University in 2004 to improve the well-being of people in Southeast Asia, has successfully completed a comprehensive programme of water sanitation and conservation at the Ban Nong Thong Lim School in Buriram.

The project’s objective was to solve the immediate water hygiene problems and to provide a framework for long-term maintenance and sustainability. The team started working on site on 31 August 2008, and their work was completed on recently 12 September 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

By: Matthew Smith

Featured in Bangkok Post on November, 2006

Good corporate citizenship is one of the marketing objectives to surface in the last half a century. It, like celebrity endorsement or a groomed spokesperson, is a humanizer for the invisible entities of the global economy. If a spokesperson is a company’s face, good corporate citizenship is its good deeds. And like an individual, a corporate citizen that behaves well is respected by society. Being good is noticed and rewarded.

But corporate citizenship is often a misguided task. However, a properly developed corporate citizenship activity has impact well beyond the capabilities of standard marketing activities. It’s worthwhile to note that GCC as we’re discussing it here is separate from corporate social responsibility. CSR extends beyond positive activities and covers areas where a business has the potential to have a negative impact on a community by, for example, polluting or putting competing companies out of business. Read the rest of this entry »

By: Matthew Smith

Featured in Bangkok Post on March, 2008

Public relations is often attacked for skewing the truth in favor of its clients. As the goal of public relations is to build and maintain reputation, PR practitioners are always walking a fine line between presenting a client accurately and positively. That does not mean the two are necessarily contradictory – the vast majority of clients have little or nothing to hide – but as a professional, the PR practitioner is always trying to paint a positive picture while staying accurate enough to maintain credibility.

This, in a sense, is ethical issue number one in the industry. Most agree that lying to the media is professional suicide. And most would likely agree that an accurate picture has much more traction than a flowery, over-hyped one. Ethical issue number two is much deeper and more complex, although this complexity is somewhat offset by its rarity. Read the rest of this entry »

By: Kelvin Rugg

“Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, members of the media, I am proud and feel especially privileged to be standing before you today on the historic occasion of the launch of the very latest addition to the CoolTaste family of melt-in-the mouth ice creams.

The result of many months of dedicated research by our team of highly qualified food scientists, the new chilli flavoured choc-ice has already created something of a sensation in the industry. And I can tell you, we at CoolTaste are tremendously excited with its potential to become a true market leader and a pioneer in a whole new range of tanatalising ice cream flavours and taste sensations.” Read the rest of this entry »

The development of social media has removed the distinction between journalist and audience. The internet has become the vast equivalent to a magazine’s letters pages, with an audience potential beyond virtually any media that has come before it. This has created a react or die situation for organizations in terms of their communications strategies.

In the world before this one, accusations, criticisms or praise would make their way into the hands of concerned media, where, pending a hierarchy of editorial approval, would make their way onto pages or screen or airwaves for the public to receive. Now we live in a world where information or opinion goes directly to a global, open access publication. Read the rest of this entry »

One thing that people talk about when discussing online marketing and public relations is return on investment. Because of the reach of the internet, it’s possibly to increase exposure of a single activity and order of magnitude beyond what’s done in traditional PR. While that’s true and is the driving force behind the fast growth of digital PR, it’s often overlooked just how simple it is to integrate these services into a traditional PR and marketing plan.

Digital PR and marketing works by taking the mainstay of traditional PR and marketing – information – and translating it into a language the internet understands. This is a language comprised of readers, journalists, editors and search engine algorithms. Developing information that can reach all of those is not an easy task and is the reason IT firms and communications firms alike are now specializing in online marketing and PR. The language that communicates effectively to people and that which communicates effectively to machines is similar, but it’s in the subtleties that your communications consultants prove their value (or fail to). Read the rest of this entry »

The decision to work with a public relations agency is one that must come from the top. As public relations is primarily a management activity, a company’s senior management, more importantly its decision makers, must be closely involved with agency selection.

As a client, you’re looking for the perfect marriage. But unlike meeting that special someone, it should not be left to fate. There should be romance, however. The right agency should be a near perfect match of personalities, capabilities and expectations. The right agency is that person you’re sure you’ve known your whole life. It’s not a chemical reaction; it’s because the right agency will know your needs and your industry like they’ve been working with you from day one. That’s what qualified consultants bring to the table.

Think long term. Many companies will attempt to leverage public relations in the near term. While a press conference can be a good way to introduce a new brand or product to a group of media, and will often be covered, an interesting product will not magically snowball into hot topic. It takes months, better years, to build rapport with the media that follow your industry. While you make think your product is the story of the year, so does everyone else. There are more stories out there than anyone has time for. Read the rest of this entry »

As serious as crisis and issues management was before the internet, handling potentially reputation-damaging situations has not been simplified by the rise of the internet, like many other things have been, but has been made even more critical. This is because the internet has greatly increased the speed and distance information can travel. And because of the democratic nature of the internet, it has also dramatically lowered the barriers to publishing.

A new discipline that has emerged to combat this threat is called SERM or search engine reputation management. SERM has formed out of necessity and is a combination of reputation management strategy as normally developed by public relations professionals and search engine optimization. It requires in an organization an ability to develop strategy and a relatively high level of technical knowledge to execute that strategy effectively.

The main battle ground for SERM is of course search engines. Search engines have not only filled an important role in how people use the internet, they have become the single most used way people access the internet. When someone searches for your company or brand or product, you hope that it will be high up in the search engine results in relation to your competitors. If someone searches specifically for you, you also hope that all of the results are positive. Read the rest of this entry »

In an age when information about almost anything is just a few mouse clicks away, the amount of biased, inaccurate or untruthful information is high. As access to information continues to grow rapidly, there is an ever increasing need to find accurate and reliable sources of information. People’s access to information has changed radically in the last decade or so, but the need for reliable, trusted sources of information has not.

One of the author’s first conversations with a journalist after getting into the public relations profession, the journalist gave his advice: “you’re a source.” What the author understood was that to fill a role as an agent, he had to be out there and be trusted by the media.

But what more experience has shown the author is that PR professionals are not primarily sources of information for the media – they are in business to turn their clients into them. A PR professional must be extremely well versed in her client’s business or activities, but can never (and should never) supersede her client. Their primary role is to help their clients become reliable, accessible sources of information for their respective fields. Read the rest of this entry »

Crisis communication, often considered the highest test of any communications team, is in essence reputation management. And in that sense, it is no different from how an individual is watched and judged by her peers in terms of integrity and honesty.

At the center of the issue is the fact that bad things can happen to any organization. Employees can commit crimes, food products can become poisonous, airplanes can fall out of the sky; life is inherently chaotic and prone to disaster. Human life is fragile. And even the most careful organizations can cause loss of property or life for the people around them.

Culpability is often a secondary issue and can often count little in public opinion. A tightly-knit social circle will often revel in news of infidelity or betrayal, regardless of the truth of the situation. It is the possibility itself that often finds the most traction in people’s daily conversations. Read the rest of this entry »