Author: admHonWpAdm

So, you’re starting a career in PR – welcome to the world of media monitoring, research, writing copy, and working on client accounts!

Since completing my Bachelor degree last November, I find it difficult to explain to friends and family what it is that I do for a living because there is so much involved!

PR is a constantly evolving industry and an exciting space to be in. I have learned that it is important to be adaptable ready for anything. For those like myself who are just starting out, here are my top five tips for starting a career in PR.

1.    Do your research

The effort you put in now to gain an understanding of the company you work for and the clients you are servicing will certainly make a big difference in future. At Honner, there are a flurry of financial terms that I am constantly ‘Googling’ just so I can understand what I am writing about!

The best way to start researching is by subscribing to newsletters and reading publications so you can become familiar with the language, journalists and environment you are working in.  Another great way is by just asking someone – most understand what it is like to be in your position and are happy to help.

2.    Look the part

When working in a corporate environment, it is important to look the part. Dressing professionally shows respect for the company and the client, and helps to create a great first impression.

3.    Manage expectations

As a grad, people understand that the role is new to you and will help you. However, it is important to get to know the preferences and expectations of your supervisors and colleagues so you don’t disappoint. Remember everyone works differently.

Some ways to do this include listening to the directions they offer, or simply asking them or others for suggestions on ways to measure up to your supervisor’s expectations.

4.    Develop a complete LinkedIn profile

I was recruited via LinkedIn, so this is an important one to me. Making sure your profile is up-to-date and well-written helps you to stand out and get a foot in the door. PLUS it gives you a chance to build your own personal brand – important in an industry that is all about branding

Of course, building and leveraging your networks on LinkedIn can play a large part at the start of your PR career. Aim to grow and improve your connections, share content and engage in online networking, either one-on-one or by joining relevant groups.

5. PR is about relationships
At the end of the day, PR is all about ‘who you know’. My tip for new grads starting out is to introduce yourself and get involved as much as possible. This may be by offering to help others or participating in social activities with your work peers.

Mentors can be another great resource to leverage in your early PR career. Seek out people who can help guide you and offer advice for whatever challenges you may stumble upon.

Public Relations presents many exciting opportunities and challenges, and I count myself lucky to be included in an amazing team at Honner who have introduced me to this wacky world.  My last (secret) tip is to remember to have fun, and enjoy what PR has to offer. You can do it!

In financial services, where there are many similar products available on the market, thought leadership has long been used as a tool to differentiate companies from their competition.

From banks trying to fight off new entrants, to robo-advisers targeting younger investors, businesses across the industry are striving to capture the hearts and minds of clients and prospects.

High quality thought leadership can cement an organisation’s reputation as a trusted partner, industry leader and employer of choice. Yet in a cluttered digital world, there is still plenty of navel-gazing content being produced that fails to cut through.

So how can you be a thought leader instead of a follower?

1. Identify your thought leaders

The CEO or founder of your company should certainly be considered one of your thought leaders, as most media want to speak directly to them about the company’s broad vision.

However, it is important to establish a bench of influencers from different areas of the business who can bring their own unique perspective, while still supporting the brand’s positioning.

Encouraging a culture of idea-sharing and innovation is often the starting point to finding these internal influencers. They can come from any area of the business – sales, product, research, or even finance – as long as they have a passion for what your company does and some unique insights to share.

2. Build a content strategy

Once you have established a bank of talent, determine the business goals you will focus on for the year. These can be anything from new product launches to a potential business growth area. Research has found that business themes give thought leadership programs a deeper level of connection to clients’ needs and goals.

When planning your content strategy and calendar, think about creating content that will capture the attention of your audience. Your information needs to be both relevant and engaging, so get creative. Tell a story, offer a solution to a problem or make bold predictions.

The most effective thought leaders also use sound research to back up their ideas.

Consulting firms such as Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers and McKinsey have become global front runners in thought leadership for good reason. Their fact-based reports give their content credibility and help to cut through the raft of uniformed opinion in today’s market.

3. Know your audience

While commissioning your most experienced analyst to write a 200-page white paper on the energy sector might seem like a great idea, stop and think about how many people are going to read this.

If your audience is institutional investors, a white paper could well prove to be a hit. In fact, recent research found when presented with 11 formats for business insights, senior executives chose longer form content such as feature-length articles and reports (22%) and business books (21%) as their preferred format.

Yet if your goal is to reach a larger audience of retail investors, keep it snappy. A well written blog or focused short video is much more likely to generate hits and be shared than an article that takes a lot of time and technical know-how to digest.

Too often we see thought leadership content that tries to incorporate too many new ideas or is filled with jargon. The pieces that leave a lasting impression are the ones that communicate new information in a simple, engaging way.

Honner helps clients find their voice and share insights in an engaging way. If you’d like help developing your thought leadership strategy, contact us at honner@honner.com.au

Sometimes new ideas stick. They especially do when we’re influenced by them during special experiences. For me, that special experience was a recent exchange program I did in London, where I spent an entire week with our partner agency LANSONS, a member of the GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS PARTNERS network. A few new ideas have stuck with me since.

Thanks to several discussions and workshops I had with my colleagues at Lansons and with the hip consumer-facing agency HOPE & GLORY, I was able to gain a great perspective on the PR industry. The following points are some of my key learnings. They are also a fresh account about where the PR industry is going in the U.K., and where it could go for Australia in the near future:

© AdobeStock / vege

1. Strategic advice and creative ideas are at the centre of PR. A lot of the legwork that we do today in PR – as in all professional services – is being automated. Processes are becoming more efficient thanks to the latest digital tools and PR practitioners only need to learn how to program these tools. But what machines can’t deliver today is strategic advice. That’s where we come in. Our skillset comprises the ability to understand the interests and sensibilities of journalists and other stakeholders, as well as assessing how each action affects a company’s reputation in the context of long-term business goals. The creation of ideas to execute a strategy is also in high demand by clients from PR teams. Because of this mixed demand, the PR profession is gradually looking more like a mix between business consulting and a creative agency.

© AdobeStock / momius

2. PR is moving deeper into the marketing funnel. Traditionally, PR services have focused mostly in the upper layer of ‘awareness’, which is at the top of the marketing funnel, and refers to raising the profile of an organisation in the public consciousness. From my discussions with PR practitioners in the U.K., I could see that the industry is quickly moving into the next stage in funnel, which is ‘consideration’, where stakeholders develop an interest in an organisation and engage with it. A lot of this is thanks to the digital work PR companies are currently doing. There are now direct channels to engage audiences, which can be leveraged to build communities. Consumers, partners, prospects and even investors are engaged in this level and exposed to tailored messages from companies, which can lead to the deeper levels of engagement, such as purchase and advocacy.

© AdobeStock / oka

3. Client-only input for insights is not enough. For a long time, ad agencies have been the champions of gathering insights from customer segments, but PR is starting to catch up. Talking to our clients’ customers is a growing practice in the industry and using third-party research to inform a strategy is quickly becoming an essential input too. Expect to see a gradual shift in PR towards a service that relies less and less on client-only input.

© AdobeStock / freshidea

4. Neuroscience and behavioural economics are penetrating the PR industry. Ultimately, the whole point of Reputation Management Consulting (a concept that Lansons uses to describe PR) is to influence the perception and behaviour of others. And since there are no restraints today to borrow knowledge from other disciplines, the PR industry is now looking more closely than ever to neuroscience and behavioural economics to influence that behaviour. PR practitioners working on employee engagement and change management as well as the creative minds in the industry are some of the direct beneficiaries of these disciplines. My visit to the U.K. also coincided with the announcement of the new Nobel laureate for economics, RICHARD THALER, the “nudge” economist.” And there was a real sense of excitement about this news from some of the people at Lansons. Their enthusiasm about learning from these disciplines is genuine. So much so, that the agency decided to sponsor and launch a book this year called ‘WHY WE DO WHAT WE DO’, written by Dr. Helena Boschi, a psychologist who focuses on applied neuroscience in the workplace.

© AdobeStock / Bits and Splits

5. Financial PR is becoming more holistic. Corporate calendar work continues to be important, but a much more holistic approach is starting to emerge in financial PR agencies. In scenarios involving M&A activity, communications programs that once only considered what market participants and the media would say about a transaction are evolving into programs that now consider all stakeholders – the local communities, political parties, unions, pension funds, and anyone that may be affected. The reason for this evolution is a practical one: if any of these parties pushes back, a transaction may be cancelled. And as society evolves to a less hierarchical structure, all these groups – who can all make themselves heard – are now more relevant for M&A activity and shareholder activism.

© AdobeStock / Beeboys

Another implicit trend I experienced in this exchange program is the deep level of collaboration between companies like ours, who would send an employee to the other side of the world to learn about different processes and different perspectives on the same industry. I learned that knowledge workers, even when on the other side of the world, can benefit from discussing business themes and sharing mutual advice.

Once again, big thanks to everybody at LANSONS and HOPE & GLORY for making my time in London a very enriching professional experience. And thanks to HONNER and the GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS PARTNERS network for making this possible!

Eric Robledo is a Senior Account Executive and has been a Honner consultant since April 2015.

Another day, another headline shouting about a cyber breach.  Except this time, it’s a business that has already made the headlines numerous times, and holds a vast amount of personal data from millions of people around the world.
It appears the ‘disruptor’ has become the ‘disrupted’.

Last month, Uber admitted to a massive data breach, having been targeted by cyber criminals in 2016. To add insult to injury, it then admitted to paying the hackers $100,000 to go away, and not tell anyone.

Even though here in Australia businesses are not legally required to report data breaches (until next year when the Privacy Amendment Bill comes into effect), in other parts of the world, businesses do have to report it.

By demanding that the hackers destroy the stolen data, Uber may have violated a Federal Trade Commission rule on breach disclosure that prohibits companies from destroying any forensic evidence in the course of their investigation.

But aside from what Uber has done illegally, there’s the ethical aspect. It traded transparency and honesty for a cover up that may damage its reputation for the foreseeable future.

So what can businesses learn from this?

1.    Take responsibility

We all know not to cover up the issue, it will only make it worse.  Yet time and time again there are businesses who still try and do so, or wait until it’s too late to do anything proactive about it.

The best course of action is to front it as early as possible, taking responsibility, reacting immediately, and responding to feedback.

Instead of arguing publicly, acknowledge people’s concerns and questions, and respond personally to the right conversations.

2.    Be human

There’s nothing worse than a CEO or spokesperson acting like a robot. Giving automated and clinical responses immediately suggests a lack of care and consideration, putting the brand in a bad light.

It’s important to share how policies will be put in place so the issue or mishap does not happen again. Act fast before people lose faith in your brand.

3.    Communicate

Getting ahead of the situation will pay dividends with public favour.  Communicate all relevant details to key stakeholders in a timely manner, and if you cannot comment, make sure you have a holding statement ready.

If you’re still assessing a situation, simply say that. Recognise that transparency is key about how you’re solving the situation.

4.    Establish an appropriate culture that the brand is recognised for

Treat people how you want to be treated.  If a business has a bad internal culture, its employees will mirror that externally—negativity is toxic and it breeds.  Employees are not responsible for the toxic brand culture.  Create a happy and positive workplace and you’ll find that’s reflected across the brand, and externally too.

5.    Be ready

No one wants to be at the centre of a scandal, but scrambling around in the heat of a crisis takes things from bad to worse.  Anticipate potential crisis scenarios and establish internal protocols for handling them.

Having a plan means you’ll know who needs to be notified, how the sign off process will work internally, and key spokespeople will be identified who are able to speak publicly on the businesses behalf.

It’s all very well to do something in theory, but often it’s not until we practise something in the real world that we feel truly comfortable with it.

Imagine if as well as teaching our kids about the basics of money, we also gave primary school classes real money, say $20,000, to inve invest in stocks and bonds.

That’s what U.S. investment manager Ariel Investments is doing on a small scale at a public school in its home town of Chicago, and we think Australia can learn a thing or two from their approach.

Financial literacy is back on the policy agenda here with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) reviewing its national strategy to tackle the issue, making it a prime time to consider new approaches.

Despite ASIC’s attempts to boost financial literacy in recent years, largely through its MoneySmart website, ASIC’s own research shows 42% of Australians still don’t feel confident managing their money day-to-day and 36% find dealing with money stressful and overwhelming.

Without the confidence and ability to manage their finances, many people are facing insecure futures. According to recent research funded by NAB, 70% of Australian adults are facing some level of financial stress or vulnerability. Furthermore 2.6 million people have no savings at all, and the situation is deteriorating.

The problems starts in childhood. Around a fifth of 15-year-olds in Australia don’t have even the most basic level of financial literacy, according to the OECD, with the proportion of financially literate teenagers slipping in recent years. Those with low socio-economic backgrounds on average perform much lower in financial literacy assessments than children from more well-off families, highlighting the need for better programs aimed at disadvantaged students.

Start early, make it real

A key focus of Ariel’s approach is to start teaching financial literacy to kids at an early age, and to use real-time and real-world experiences to make sure school is a place where financial literacy is practised and not just preached.

For 20 years, the firm has supported a financial literacy program at the Ariel Community Academy (ACA), a public elementary (primary) school on Chicago’s South Side, where 98% of students are African-American and more than three quarters qualify for subsidised lunches, reflecting their families’ low incomes.

A core driver of the program is to use financial literacy as a tool to fight inequality. A study conducted by George Washington University (Washington DC) revealed that “those with the least financial knowledge are also the most vulnerable groups in economic terms. As a result, the lack of financial literacy exacerbates economic inequality.”

ACA students learn not just about personal finance, which is typically the extent of most financial literacy programs, but also basic to advanced investment concepts—kids start learning about stocks from first grade and begin trading stocks in sixth grade.

Ariel sponsors a three-pronged financial literacy program for the school that includes:

1. 1. A financial literacy curriculum developed in consultation with educators and leading economists that comprises four key strands: Economics, Personal Finance, Entrepreneurship and Investing.

1. 1. The Ariel-Nuveen investment program. Through a partnership with Nuveen, the investment arm of TIAA, Ariel awards each class a US$20,000 grant to invest in the U.S. stock market over the coming eight years until they graduate. In the early years, the money is invested and managed professionally on behalf of the students. However, as the students advance through the school’s unique investment curriculum, they become actively involved in making the investment decisions, with a Junior Board of Directors (made up of sixth, seventh and eighth grade students) assuming ultimate responsibility for deciding how the $20,000 is invested.

1. Engagement between Ariel as an organisation and students to drive home the importance of what the kids are learning. Students visit the Ariel office to observe board meetings and stock presentations, and high-profile guest speakers visit investment classes, providing students the opportunity to dialogue with leaders of industry, finance and philanthropy.

Ariel and Honner recently made a joint submission to ASIC calling on the regulator to create a platform whereby local banks, investment managers and other financial companies can support financial literacy programs in Australian primary schools, similar to the way Ariel supports ACA.

At a minimum, we recommend that ASIC work with educators and the private sector to develop a financial literacy program to target the 5% of government primary schools that are the most disadvantaged in socio-economic terms.

We don’t believe it’s sufficient to wait until university, or even until high school, to begin teaching young people about investing.

If a national framework was established to target younger children in need, we believe many generous people across Australia’s substantial financial sector would be willing to give time and money to support the program. And we know, from Ariel’s inspiring pilot in Chicago, that change is possible.

We encourage you to read our submission and welcome your feedback.