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Technology tears down barriers to create new ‘virtual’ PR firms

In his book, “The World Is Flat,” Thomas Friedman makes the case that advances in Internet technologies have liberated the individual to offer his skills and services to companies around the world.

Fueled by technologies that enable collaboration and remove geographic barriers, Houston has witnessed the emergence of a sophisticated network of independent public relations firms. Together, these professionals represent the largest collection of PR talent in Houston — larger than even the biggest agency in Texas — and they are challenging the region’s midsize to large agencies for the lucrative client work doled out by major companies.

Many of these “virtual agencies” are an outgrowth of entrepreneurial ventures by seasoned PR professionals. Many grew disenchanted with the waste inherent in the corporate and traditional brick-and-mortar agency worlds. They offer clients a fresh alternative to high rates for green talent, one-size-fits-all staffing approaches and high team turnover that is typical of traditional PR firms.

Today, independent communications professionals and owners of small communications boutiques are forming partnerships to offer corporations all of the benefits of a full-service firm without the down sides.

Tailored discipline or industry teams

Traditional agencies have a number of advantages, including a predictable supply of talent representing a range of experience levels and billing rates. In concept, they also offer standards for quality. However, this model also limits traditional agencies to staffing client accounts according to their full-time employee base. There isn’t much flexibility.

If the desired talent is not available in-house, those agencies must either spend time and resources trying to find the right full-time personnel, or just contract out with an independent professional.

The virtual agency model is completely flexible and enables client account teams to be molded and shaped to satisfy the unique needs of each client. Depending on the challenge, a virtual team might bring together the talents of media strategists, writers, crisis management specialists, graphic designers, Web marketers, event planners and other experts. As the client’s needs change, the team makeup can also change.

Without the need to keep ill-suited employees busy to justify their payroll, virtual agencies can engage the best communications representative for each role.

Senior talent at attractive rates

Many clients who use traditional agencies want more direct connections with senior-level communicators. Instead, many pay handsomely for their account to be driven by junior staff. In these relationships, clients’ bills reflect not only the services provided, but also a share of the agency employees’ office space, benefits and other operational expenses.

Free of overhead, virtual agencies can combine the forces of seasoned professionals at rates comparable to those charged for entry-level personnel at traditional agencies. Companies looking to maximize their public relations budgets can secure senior counsel for just the cost of the expertise.

stable relationships

Turnover among lower and midlevel staff at traditional agencies is fairly high. In the agency world, the mantra is “must move out to move up.” For clients, this means that their account teams can change several times a year, with new individuals joining the mix and having to spend precious time and resources getting up to speed.

In the virtual agency model, clients work directly with the owner who occasionally engages others to help with specific tasks. For the most part, these individuals have chosen the entrepreneurial route because of the flexibility, the wide-ranging work and the potential rewards. They understand the importance of stability in the account.

Although these virtual agency teams can be geographically dispersed throughout the country and even around the world, they nonetheless are driven by close-knit relationships. As such, they quickly learn to operate as if they worked in the same office — learning each other’s strengths, using each other as sounding boards, sharing responsibility for strategic planning and tactical execution — only without the office politics and bureaucratic hierarchies.

Transparency for the client

Face-to-face interaction continues to be an important element in developing strong relationships with clients and ensuring quality customer service. However, there is a diminishing need for public relations practitioners to have bricks-and-mortar offices.

Many clients prefer their public relations counsel to come to them. And with speed playing an increasingly important role in communications, virtual agencies have all of the same channels at their disposal in home-based offices to facilitate dialogue and collaborate among teams and clients: E-mail, the Internet, instant messaging, text messaging, cell phones and fax machines. Because virtual firms are driven by entrepreneurs, many tend to experiment with and adopt new technologies, keeping them at the leading edge of client connectivity.

For clients, virtual agencies offer the same seamless service offerings as traditional agencies.

Expect virtual agencies to continue to mature and gain favor — particularly among executives accustomed to drawing upon the global supply chain to secure the best talent at the best value for a given task.

Is it a threat to traditional agencies? Not for those willing to change, incorporating greater flexibility in all aspects of their business. Others who insist on business as usual and ignore the growing power and value of the individual risk becoming obsolete.

Three keys: Act fast to protect corporate reputation in a crisis

Nearly every organization, at least once in its lifetime, will face one crisis that draws unwanted attention and hard questions from target audiences. It is never easy to be subject to such scrutiny, and in a crisis it is all too easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and the realities of being under the microscope.

In order to get through a crisis as fast as possible with the corporate reputation intact, corporate leadership and the communications team should commit to three strategic focuses:

• Fix the problem. This sounds simple, but the natural tendency of companies is a knee-jerk reaction often in the form of “spin,” which is just a message designed to deflect attacks but often has no substance behind it and only makes matters worse.

Too often, company leaders say, “This is a public relations problem.”

Most of the time, that is just not the case. If someone sues the company, it’s a legal issue. If someone is hurt or killed on the job, it’s a safety issue. If someone steals from the company, it’s an internal controls problem.

Very few problems begin as a PR problem, and very few solutions start with just a message. Companies need to take action to deal with the true problem, whether that involves changing policy, holding individuals accountable for their actions or commissioning an independent audit of company operations.

• Manage the issue. Once the immediate problem has been corrected, the company needs to demonstrate a commitment to operating under the highest of standards going forward, while ensuring that every employee buys into that vision.

For example, if the company or individual employees were accused of wrongdoing, the company may want to conduct mandatory ethics seminars, issue a new stringent code of ethics and corporate values that are displayed in visible workplace areas and have every employee sign it. The organization may want to appoint a new chief compliance officer or internal auditor who is responsible for monitoring ongoing corporate activities and ensuring full compliance.

• Address perceptions. The natural instinct of many corporations is to say as little as possible or avoid comment altogether and just wait for an issue to die down. But, as some companies still find out the hard way, “no comment” is almost always taken as an admission of guilt in the public’s eye. And, in a vacuum, internal audiences will come to their own conclusions, often filling in the blanks with rumor and innuendo.

When internal audiences are skeptical, the company loses some of its most important potential ambassadors. Trust levels among employees rise the closer the source is to them, so regional leadership and immediate supervisors should always be kept abreast of new information and encouraged to share important messages with their direct reports.

Ideally, companies would have direct communication channels with key constituencies — employees, customers, community and industry leaders, elected and appointed officials and others — to avoid reliance on the media to carry the organization’s message. The company should communicate with these groups early and often — at least three or four times more often than it would normally.

Third-party advocates also can serve as strong and more credible sources of supporting information than a company speaking on its own behalf. Testimonials from external, respected sources can hold great weight in the court of public opinion and can go a long way toward safeguarding a company or individual’s public image.

In a crisis, success should not be measured according to whether media coverage is favorable or not — although media training and prior relationships with reporters are important keys to effective media relations. When a company is in the hotseat, all the rules change. During such times, instead of expecting positive coverage, company crisis teams should work hard to address and mitigate negative messages, maximize the amount of column inches dedicated to the organization’s message and try to get through the crisis in as few media cycles as possible.

Communication must be and should be managed carefully, as highlighted by the Pennsylvania mining gaffe when families were told that all of the miners had survived when in fact all but one had died. However, in a crisis the only thing company officials can be sure of is if they don’t share their side of the story, someone else will.