HYPERtext

Making History, One Client at a Time!

I'm sure our founder, Mark Adams, didn't appreciate he was making a little piece of history when he took a young Bill Gates on his first European press tour back in 1981.

And I suspect our Text 100 teams around the world didn't quite appreciate the significance of launching the first global Chinese tech brand when they unveiled Lenovo in 2005 either.

I'm not claiming Text 100 has changed the world (well, not that much anyway!) but by virtue of being the granddaddy of tech PR firms, we've often had the privilege of a ring-side seat at great moments in technology industry history.

I got that feeling again this week when Text 100 had the opportunity to represent the Russian Venture Company on its first US press tour and business development visit. Like India and China before it, Russia is starting to build up its technology industry and it's not hard to imagine this country of 140 million people offering 60,000 new IT and engineering graduates each year could soon live up to its billing as one of the high-potential 'BRIC' countries.

And if Russia does realise its technology potential - aided by the investment dollars of our newest client and the expertize of entrepreneurs and VCs from Silicon Valley - then we'll be proud to say: "Text 100 was there at the beginning!"

David McCulloch

The World's Not Flat After All!

If you've read a business magazine in the past year, you won't have missed the impact Thomas Friedman's Book has had on the way we view globalization. It's interesting then to see the Harvard Business Review giving some airtime to a contrarian point of view articulated by HBS professor Pankaj Ghemawat in a book called Redefining Global Strategy: Crossing Borders in a World Where Differences Still Matter.

I wouldn't go so far as to dispel the value of Friedman's work, but what I like about Ghemawat's book is that it diffuses the notion we're all racing towards a homogenized global society where one-size fits all. If you're a Japanese PR manager trying to make a communications strategy forged in San Francisco work in Tokyo...then you'll understand what I'm getting at. The truth is that cultural, political and even economic factors still have a massive impact on how companies communicate around the world.

What I really like about Ghemawat's book is his assertion that smart global strategies comprise three elements: Adaptation (adjusting to local markets), Aggregation (finding efficiencies and commonalities that overcome distance), and Arbitrage (exploiting specialist skills or lower costs wherever they happen to be).

In that three-piece-suite, Ghemawat nicely sums up our philosophy to globalization too. Text 100 has taken 26 years to build 31 local businesses market-by-market. We continue to invest in technology to ease collaboration and in sharing local knowledge globally (10 percent of our workforce has spent time in another market in the past five years). Last but not least, we've set up our GRO group (yes, we have to get a new name for it!) to take advantage of both specialist skills and cost advantages in Asia.

We'll find out whether the PRWeek judges think all of that adds up to a great Mid-Sized Company strategy in a few months!

David McCulloch

London Rising!

Our US and UK marketing teams are together in London this week for the CATAPULT conference in Westminster. The conference is for early stage companies considering an expansion to the US in the next 18 months or so. Text 100 is a sponsor and I'm speaking on a panel on "Launching into the US" on Friday morning.

The various sponsors and speakers of the event gathered at the fabulous Institute of Directors building on Pall Mall tonight and despite only managing three hours sleep on the flight from San Francisco overnight, I got a real buzz of excitement about the event over dinner. London seems to be buzzing, thanks partly to the regulatory tightening of the American financial markets (and consequent boom in London), and partly due to a resurgent entrepreneurial scene.

Being in Silicon Valley for the past six years, I've grown rather used to (and depressed by) Europeans complaining about the lack of innovation in the technology industry here, so it's a refreshing change to sense that Europe is once again on the rise.

Nick Giles, MD of our UK business tells me Text 100 London is on the rise too. The London team has received a nomination for PRWeek's Specialist Agency of the Year award and finds out whether there'll be an extra trophy to add to the cabinet on October 24th. Good luck all!

David McCulloch

Technorati Tags: Text 100, London, Public Relations,CATAPULT

In a global view on social media - Asia rules

Another important study that hasn't got enough attention in the PR blogosphere. Back in May, Universal McCann issued the second wave of their global surveys tracking the impact of social media. At the time, only Neville Hobson highlighted a couple of the important findings as they had been reported by Brand Republic. He couldn't get hold of the study itself, though. Today it can be easily downloaded from Universal McCann's site.

There is substance to this report: in January and February 2007, 500 regular 16-54 Internet users were sampled in each of the following 21 markets: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, Greece, Russia, USA, Mexico, Brazil, India, Pakistan, China, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Australia. 9,460 people completed the survey. Universal McCann estimates that these markets represent 75 % of the 500 m frequent Internet users worldwide.

Here is a summary of the findings I found most important:

1.) Blogging

• 339 m blog readers worldwide
• 172 m blog writers
• US still dominates blog readers with 63.9 m, China is close with 53.3 m (at an Internet penetration of only 10 %!)
• China already has the largest number of blog writers (38.63 m), with a clear lead over the US (26.75 m)
• Blogs have become mainstream: in all but 2 of the 21 markets at least 50 % of regular Internet users are reading blogs. (Pakistan and Germany are the exceptions.)
• US and Europe are showing signs of saturation (with the exception of the notorious blog laggards in Germany), the growth in South East Asia is dramatic
• Personal blogging drives usage in Asia with interactivity levels being high. Many talk to few.
• Compared to Asia interactivity levels in the US and Europe are lower and topics are not as personal. Few talk to many.
• The attitudes towards blogging have improved worldwide: 60 % see it as a positive form of expression, 40 % view it as an important social tool, 34 % trust bloggers opinions and 33 % believe that companies running blogs impact their perception positively. However, the
• attitudes vary greatly between China on the positive end and Germany, the US, the UK and Australia on the negative end (see graph).  While these differences are significant, they are differences on a high level. Even in Germany, the least enthusiastic country when it comes to blogging, 1.27 m people arewriting blogs, 1.27 m public voices that simply didn't exist only a decade ago.

2.) Creation and consumption of multimedia content

• 330 m online video viewers worldwide. 65 m in the US, 49.7 m in China, 38 m in Japan and Korea combined, 38 m in 5 big European countries combined. The global average for watching video clips is 63 %. Video already beats audio.
• 124 m downloading podcasts. 33 m alone in China.
• Across the board the interest in the creation of multimedia content is high: music (25 %), video (23 %) and radio (16 %), but the target audience for this content is mainly family and friends.
• Live streaming is still more popular than podcasts. Video podcasts have the same reach as audio podcasts.

3.) Social Networking

• 194 m manage a social network profile. The penetration is highest in Brazil (75 %), followed by Mexico and China. The US (33 %), UK, Germany, Italy and France show less than half the penetration of Brazil.
• The US is still the largest social networking market (41 m), followed by China (30,97 m). These numbers are much lower than the ones claimed by social network owners. Possible reasons: double accounts and the Universal McCann survey only counted 16 - 54 Internet users, i.e. no teens younger than 16 and no business users.
• The emerging Internet world is driving social networks as tools to meet new people, and the space is dominated by 16-24's and students.

4.) What's next?

• Looking at the current overall global use of social media, you probably  won't be surprised to see blogging and watching online videos in the lead position. Surprising to me, RSS feeds do have a very low adoption rate.
• It's interesting to see what's next on the agenda of regular Internet users: VoIP and downloading podcasts (video ahead of audio).

Conclusions
Overall this study is rich with interesting insights.

It's great that it looked at social media beyond blogging, even if it's view on social media tools is still pretty limited. For instance, there is no mention of review portals, messaging boards, wikis, online games or virtual worlds.

It is also great that the study provided a global perspective. It has made clear how the social web is spreading globally, but with strong local characteristics determined by the respective socio-economic environment. E.g. the fact that personal blogging is so big in China reflects both the new sense of community people are getting from this tool, but also the limitation that they can't talk about politics or other general issues in public.

The data of this study confirm the reality of the social web and start to map it out in its global context. Internet users across the globe are highly interactive on a growing multitude of social media platforms. While most of the developed world has reached saturation with a couple of more established tools such as blogging or video sharing sites, the developing countries, in particular in Asia, are still driving their use at a dramatic pace. Business communicators who want to engage with today's Internet users will have to meet them there, and on the users' terms.

Georg Kolb

Technorati Tags: social media, global, Universal McCann

Text 100 Featured in the New York Post

Text 100 was today included in a feature story in the New York Post on New York-based companies that offer work abroad programs. The article provides a great overview of Text 100’s global culture and the opportunities that we provide to employees to work overseas. The Post interviewed James Baussmann, senior account executive, and Kelli Pietrantonio, account manager, who talked about their secondments in China/Singapore and Italy respectively. Sara Hafele, HR manager, was also quoted on the significant number of people at Text 100 who have worked abroad, our cultural diversity training program, and the importance of people feeling comfortable and being prepared for spending time in another country. Also check out the hard copy of the paper if you have it. There are a couple of photos of James and Kelli showing paraphernalia from their trips.

-Radley Moss