La fundación estadounidense TED, que apuesta a la innovación para un mundo mejor, otorga por primera vez su codiciado premio anual a una idea: la ciudad del futuro.

El premio de 100.000 dólares, que normalmente se concede a un individuo, se dividirá en 10 subsidios a las mejores ideas presentadas en el sitio web thecity2.org, una plataforma donde los organizadores esperan desarrollar la “Ciudad 2.0″, ecológicamente sustentable.

WOBI es la nueva plataforma de contenidos se focaliza en 8 areas:  Leadership, People, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy, Entrepreneurship, Sustainability y Global Trends. El Diseño similar a lo que encontramos en Ted (Ideas worth spreading). Lo interesante es su comunidad dividido en italiano, inglés y español para twitter.

Conversando anoche sobre negocios en el comienzo del año en su justa medida a partir de marzo para la mayoría de los países, rebrotan temas de importaciones. Es momento de planificar el 2012, el frenesí comercial del comienzo de las clases ya está lanzado pero se suman distintas temporadas y ciclo de vidas de los productos.

El Trading Business aún tiene para sacar jugo en el gigante asiático sin descuidar los emergentes del ASEAN y el destacado frente de la India.

En definitva aquí os dejo un material que publiqué hace un tiempo y que ya lleva un promedio de más de  5000 visitas. Mi aporte para entender la Comunicación en China desde una experiencia personal.

Meat & Seat la nueva plataforma de KLM para elegir con quien compartir tu vuelo

Compartir asiento con quien quieres y llegar a hacer un vuelo en una experiencia más efectiva para los negocios.

“Meat & Seat permite que veas intereses de otros pasajeros o ver si van al mismo evento que tú usando los datos de los perfiles de Facebook y Linkedin.

El servicio de momento solo está disponible para algunos vuelos y puede ser usado entre 90 días y 48 horas antes del embarque” (Source: markarina.com)

Una forma de adelantarse a lo que sucederá, reduciendo al minimo el Wasting Time en una época que parece que todo va más acelerado; Mucho más.

Lo positivo de este este servicio es la posibilidad de elección por parte del usuario y el concepto de Social Networking llevado de una forma práctica desde el mundo de las Social Media a la aplicación en la vida real (¿?). Las fronteras del mundo digital y el mundo vivo, una rara mezcla de la matrix que cada vez es más atractivo y funcional va en camino de una linea cada vez más difusa.

El libre albedrio, la sorpresa de lo que sucederá en el horizonte digital, ya está previsto.  Groupon, por ejemplo, ya esta anunciando una aplicaciones para smartphones con alertas de ofertas según tu ubicación geográfica, en otras palabras, que tan cercas te encuentras del lugar. 

Quizás el futuro evite las caminatas por las galerias, la búsqueda de la oferta, la sorpresa con quien compartiras tu viaje. Cómo dice el slogan de KML para sus servicios Journeys of Inspiration.

Elegi el destino que quieras.

At some point in your business’ life, you’re going to need the services of a PR professional. Perhaps you’ve got big goals that require getting your message out to a bigger audience — one you can’t reach if you tried to do your own PR, and one you don’t have the staff for.

Choosing a PR partner to help you accomplish your goals can leave you as confused as a kid in a candy store. With so many options and a limited budget, how do you get the most bang for your buck?

In this post, I’ll share with you the considerations you need to make to determine what you really need, and how to find the right PR expertise.

BEFORE HIRING A PR PARTNER

Before you work with a PR partner, make sure to clarify your:

• Goals

What do you want to accomplish through PR? How do you want to position your company in the market? How do you want to be perceived?

• Expectations

Assess the newsworthiness of your products, services, and programs. Be realistic with what you expect from PR. It isn’t a magic wand that will make your products a bestseller.

• Budget

How much can you allocate for PR? Many companies think of PR as a one-off expense to launch a major product or service, but a sustained effort over at least six months is really what will build momentum. Figuring out an overall budget will determine which PR activities can be implemented, and which will have to wait.

PR CONSULTANT VS. PR AGENCY

When you’re ready to outsource your PR, you have two choices. You can work with either a PR consultant or a full service PR agency. Either one can meet your PR needs. It all depends on what you want to accomplish and what resources you have.

A PR consultant is for you if you’re just getting started. PR consultants are generally less expensive than a full service PR agency.

PR consultants are great if have specific projects you want to hand off. That way, their deliverables and outputs are concrete. You’ll be able to monitor their progress easily and tell if they’re meeting their milestones.

On the other hand, consultants tend to be generalists. They can do pretty much any task involved in PR. However, they may not have the strengths you need.

For example, a PR consultant may be a good writer but not strong in media relations, picking up the phone and pitching to an editor. They may not know how to train you or your spokespersons to face the camera for an interview. Or they may not be up-to-date on how to use social media for PR.

Contrast this with a PR agency, which is made up of a pool of people. That translates to a pool of different talents, each of which can be tapped to address your particular needs. The writer will write your press releases. The media relations person will pitch journalists. The trainer will train your spokespersons, and the strategist will sit down with you to plot your PR campaign.

Also, PR consultants generally have less resources than agencies. As an example, my technology PR agency, Cross Border, invests over $7,000 a year for a media database so we can quickly put together media lists and editorial calendars for clients. Not all solo PR consultants can afford this.

Finally, because most consultants are doing business solo, when your consultant goes on vacation, so does your PR. Or if they land big clients, they can easily get swamped and drop the ball on smaller clients (which could be you).

On the other hand, a PR agency can easily pull in additional staff and consultants to keep the momentum going for all its clients.

HOW TO CHOOSE A PR AGENCY

If you’ve decided to work with a PR agency, here are things to consider:

• Team

Find out who the senior and junior members of the PR team are. Who make up the team, and what are their responsibilities? Will the team be big enough to service your needs now, and as your company grows?

The team members should also be people you’re comfortable with, people you like and trust. You’ll be working very closely with them, telling them the most intimate details of your company and product. So choose the agency with people you like and enjoy being with.

• Expertise

It’s always an advantage when the agency is already familiar with your industry. Ideally they have a good combination of strengths, experience, and expertise so they can hit the ground running with all your PR initiatives.

• References/Reliability

A good PR agency will have a proven track record. Talk to past and present clients to find out what the agency’s working ethics and style are, whether they meet their deliverables and bring a good ROI.

• Long-term vs. Project Basis

Whether you’ll put an agency on long-term retainer, or hire them on a project by project basis, largely depends on your goals.

On a per-project basis, you can complete existing projects, and carry out specific, time-limited PR programs within a predetermined budget.

If you have the resources and ability to plan for the long term, then it pays to have the same team working with you, from strategic planning to execution. With this arrangement, you’ll also have the flexibility to take advantage of PR opportunities you may not have anticipated.

Choosing the PR professional for your business is an important decision. Think of the key points I provided in this post, but also follow your gut. When it comes to PR pros, you have plenty to choose from. Take your time, ask all the questions you have, and go with the one who gives you the most confidence.

source:prinyourpajamas

Public relations is better than advertising at building a brand, argued Laura and Al Ries in their prescient 2002 book, “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.” At the time they were right; advertising had indeed lost credibility while the media still had it. But in 2006, one can no longer be so sure: in an age when video news releases regularly substitute for real news, as the Center for Media and Democracy reports, people have learned to be skeptical about the media’s objectivity.

The media is constantly pressured to compromise its impartiality. For one thing, there is a constant need to produce news, sometimes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition, they are owned by mega-sized corporate entities who are in the business primarily to generate profit: the press survives by selling airtime and print space to advertisers.

These two factors together, in addition to any bias internal to the culture of the media entity itself (e.g. Fox News), leave the media vulnerable to press releases and other prepackaged content put together by private agencies hoping to get the word out about their clients, especially if those clients are willing to underwrite advertising time and space. People are not stupid. When a television segment on health is sponsored by the same entity that is featured in it, it causes the media producer that aired it to lose credibility.

If the media is compromised in terms of its trustworthiness, then Ries and Ries’ argument falls apart: no credibility = no brand.

Yet one can go much further than this. I would argue that the role of PR was never really to build a brand in the first place. Rather, it is to do no harm to it. PR is inherently a tool for building a great reputation, as PRinfluences.au writes in “A strong corporate reputation is increasingly a PR responsibility.”: “Image can….be generated through an advertising campaign or a corporate document or the look of an organization’s premises….[while] reputation is….built through developing relationships and what an organization does. It is largely what others say about you.” One implication is that PR grows the reputation to protect the brand.

Just to clarify: Reputation—which can loosely be defined as trustworthiness—is not brand. Brand is image, while reputation is reality. What this means is that everybody knows that brand is fake, or has elements of fakery, while reputation is closer to reality. Therefore, brand is best conveyed by a consistent sales/marketing/advertising “core message,” while reputation is best conveyed by transparency.

Now transparency, which is the real job of a public relations professional (though they may not be able to express it in practice), means to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the organization, and in so doing to portray the organization as trustworthy. Therefore PR is actually the antithesis of branding, which is to tell a very partial, even propagandistic, truth. Really, branding is pure selling, aimed at owning a single idea in the audience’s mind. No matter how they are written up in The Wall Street Journal orFortune, the brands of Nike, Disney, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola have little to do with the real world inside their organizations, and much to do with the image they represent to the public.

There is one exception, and that is where PR and transparency comes in. As mentioned above, PR uses transparency to build the reputation of a brand, to insulate its image against damaging attacks. So when Starbucks embarks on PR-driven corporate citizenship campaigns like “fair trade coffee beans,” the effect is not to build the brand but rather to enhance the company’s reputation. Let’s face it: Starbucks doesn’t get $2 per cup of coffee because of its coffee bean policy, but rather because it represents something completely different and special: “time out for myself.” And the Starbucks brand is primarily built by all the activities it undertakes to promote this image. One example would be its television commercials showing harried mothers taking time out for a Frappuccino, or a young worker in a rush to get to the office, but taking time out for a refrigerated Starbucks DoubleShot espresso.

To reiterate: The only reason for reputation-building activities, or PR, is to protect the brand against being damaged by scandal. Nike has not been skillful in this regard, and the “just do it” image suffers from the company’s association with sweatshop labor. One illustrative story is the MIT student who sought to personalize his Nike sneakers with the word “sweatshop” and was refused (seehttp://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/nike.asp). In my view, his challenge to the company’s reputation effectively damaged Nike’s brand because Nike hasn’t effectively defended its working conditions in the consumer’s mind. It may be that Nike working conditions aren’t as bad as people think, but as long as the PR doesn’t transparently show a safe, clean, fair working environment, the damage to Nike’s reputation will continue, even though it remains a superbrand.

Thus far, we have established that PR does not build the brand, but rather defends the brand’s reputation. But one can go even further than this. To go back to the initial discussion of the media’s tarnished objectivity: PR has a new hurdle to face in defending a company’s reputation, and that is to actually deliver transparency. It is no longer sufficient for PR to develop and disseminate “white propaganda” (the truth, delivered with a credible source, but emphasizing only the positive). Rather, to counter the perceived bias of the media, PR has to deliver objective information about an organization to the media, even when that information sounds negative. Otherwise, jaded viewers will know that the media has been corrupted by a PR message, and will simply tune out.

And another step further: advertising should not be perceived as a blockage to building a brand. For branding is an image-building activity, and advertising is explicitly an image-building technique. The audience expects advertising to try and “sell” them. In addition to this, advertising clearly acknowledges its source and sponsor, whereas this does not necessarily happen in the media. So to come full circle, Ries and Ries may be incorrect when they say that advertising can’t build a brand because it lacks credibility: it may be that people trust advertising more than they do the media.

One final point: I think that people enjoy the brand-building activities that advertisers create. They like a good advertisement or television commercial, and they enjoy finding out about a product or service that is new and interesting. What they don’t like is to be tricked, fooled, or enticed to buy something from a company that is unethical or that doesn’t deliver on its promises. Steering consumers away from those particular dislikes is the job of a good PR specialist.

Source: Dannielle Blumenthal, Ph.D., is a public affairs specialist. Dr. Blumenthal is the author and co-author of several books and has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Brand Management. l Brand Channel