…on how to avoid being a global company

Although both in Indonesia and in Korea I have found myself talking to local companies with regional and global aspirations, not every company wants to expand its business overseas. Here then are ten tips for remaining a purely local player.

1. Make sure your website is available only in your local language. Bad English is an optional addition.
2. Train your call center staff to just put the phone down if the person on the other end is speaking a language other than their own.
3. Ensure that no-one in your organization knows who to refer international inquiries to.
4. Focus all your communications on the things a domestic audience wants to hear – international perceptions of your company are irrelevant if you want to stay a local player.
5. Benchmark against your closest local competitor. There’s no point setting an international standard for quality or performance if you don’t want to compete internationally.
6. Make sure that any emails that you receive from overseas in relation to your product or your business are ignored for at least two weeks. For each follow up mail you receive, add another week.
7. Don’t worry too much about employee engagement. The ones that want to work for a global company will quit anyway and you can get by perfectly well without attracting expensive, top caliber talent.
8. If you are looking for outside support make sure you choose the cheapest possible option. After all, money is money. And see point 5
9. If you decide to market your brand, make sure it is absolutely indistinguishable from your competitors. Prominent, successful brands attract outside attention and you don’t want that.
10. Forget about transparency and corporate governance. None of your local competitors waste time on it, so why should you?

Of course, if you want to be an international player then disregard all the above.

…on the voice of dissent

I read an editorial this morning that hit home on a number of issues that I observe on the ground here in Indonesia. The salient paragraphs are:

It’s a feature of human societies that we can have views on a certain matter that differ from others. In a democratic society, we should be able to express different views. We lived through an era that did not accommodate different views and their expression, and we called it dictatorship. We were proud that, after making great sacrifices, we achieved a society recognizing our mutual differences….

We will only reach political maturity when we acknowledge our differences, when those who oppose something, others can also oppose them in turn and hold different views. Those who believe they alone are right and bully others who disagree with them are in no position to criticize.

Interestingly, though, the comments were not in an Indonesian newspaper but in the June 9 edition of  Chosun Ilbo, Korea’s leading national daily.

I find the parallels between my previous home and my current one absolutely fascinating – both are relatively young democracies with a history of authoritarian government, both have a tradition of street demonstration of student activism as a catalyst for change (for better or for worse).

The undermining of the democratic process that Korea is seeing in the face of beef protests, we are seeing in Indonesia in the persecution of religious minorities and what an acquaintance called the “creeping Islamization” of the country.

Tolerance of minority viewpoints is a feature of stable democracies. Where that tolerance is seen to be breaking down, it has an impact both on the rights of the citizens of the country and on the willingness of international investors to place funds there. Something the government should consider in face of militant activism.

…on social media gone ‘mad’

The International Herald Tribune today puts the long running ‘mad cow’ story in Korea into a Web 2.0 context. I’m not sure whether this is heartening or deeply disturbing.

On the one hand it shows that the world really has changed; that the power of the Internet to pull people together and address major social issues continues to be a force to be reckoned with. In theory this should lead to greater oversight of government and business as their actions and motivations come under closer scrutiny.

On the other, it shows how dangerous that power can be in the absence of rational, critical thought. The protests in Korea are sustained by a comparatively small number of agitators with a specific political agenda and fed by junk science and mindless nationalism. The result is not a triumph but a breakdown in the democratic process.

I see some disturbing parallels between this situation and the current Ahmadayah issue in Indonesia. In both cases the prejudices of a few people are being fed into a giant public megaphone that effectively drowns out the voice of dissent. In the IHT story, one sentence stood out:

“In the online discussions on beef, you are welcome only if you voice a certain opinion, and you’re attacked if you represent an opposing view,” said [Kim Il Young, a political scientist]. “I doubt the debate is rational.” (emphasis mine)

The Internet culture in Indonesia is not nearly as pervasive as it is in Korea, but the tendency to shout “Merdeka” and jump on the anti-establishment bandwagon looks, to my admittedly fresh view, disturbingly similar.

Bigots have always had the capacity to whip up popular outrage, but it’s sad to see a tool with an unrivaled capacity for constructive debate be used instead to promulgate the tyranny of the mob.

…on the wisdom of lawyers

This post from David Maister’s blog makes good advice for PR people as well as lawyers. The whole piece is worth reading, but the salient points are:

Be someone others count on. Clients come to you because they have a situation they cannot solve on their own. Solve it. Don’t add to their problem by being hard to find, missing deadlines, or describing their problem back to them.

Be an interesting person. Read books, go to movies, be part of politics, go to lectures. You’ll meet people, you’ll be able to talk about things other people find interesting, and you won’t burn out.

Look out for yourself. Accept that you are in charge of your success. If you think you need experience in an area, go get it. Ask for a promotion – people aren’t watching what you do as carefully as you think.

Determination matters more than intellect. Great careers are the result of day after day deciding to do good work and being someone who others count on.

Be enthusiastic. Clients want to do things. They want to be told how to do what they want to do. And they want to know that you’re happy to be part of what they’re doing.

Trust yourself. If you don’t understand something it may be because it in fact doesn’t make sense, not because you are stupid. Don’t let a conversation continue past the point where you understand what is being said.

Get involved. You know how to organize your thoughts, analyze a situation, and articulate action plans. Use those skills everywhere. Stuff will get done, people will appreciate your initiative, and you will derive satisfaction from making things better.

Be nice and have fun. Just doing that makes life better for everybody, mostly you.

Words to live (and practice) by.

…on measuring results

This piece in stategy+business caught my eye this morning, partly from my own interest in measuring PR results and also because it raises some interesting questions about how companies allocate resources.

PR practitioners are constantly being asked to justify our budgets in terms of concrete ROI. I am 100% in favour of that. Corporate communications is a core business function that is closely aligned with strategy and which needs to be able to hold itself to the same standards of performance as any other business division. The minute that communicators cease to focus on the success of the business as a whole they have lost the plot.

Advertising, I think, has created a big hole for itself by focusing on reach and message over impact and outcome. I recall GM once saying that their $2.8 billion advertising bill attracted 17% of the people who came into their showrooms. If you consider that a good salesperson might convert 30% of inquiries into sales, that number implies a very high cost of customer acquisition.

Part of the answer I think is to focus on conversion rates at different stages of the consumer cycle – how many people know the brand, how many consider it, how many purchase it, how many return to it and how many recommend it? Those are hard numbers that a communications professional from any discipline can put in front of a CFO to support marketing spend in a given area of activity.

However if communicators (including PR people) continue to justify our activities by the number of eyeballs we get in front of or the number of clips we generate, we can hardly complain when the people who control the budgets ask “So what?”

And if we can’t answer that basic question, we can’t complain when the budgets go to people who can.