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Nadim Habib belives that a country can´t do a branding program until the people´s menthality is changed.

"Blogs could be a very big Public Relations tool in the future"

Nadim Habib, director of Hill and Knowlton Portugal, was present at UBI, on 7 of December, for an open lesson. In front of an almost full amphitheatre he spoked about communication at H&K. For Urbi @ Orbi he spoked about PR, advertising, brands and blogs.

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Urbi@Orbi: What does success looks like to you?
Nadim Habib:
Success looks like everybody coming to work with a smile and living work with a smile. That’s success.

U@O: So service branding is very important at Hill and Knowlton?
N.H.:
It is everything. The quality, everything we do, the way we breathe, the way we face our clients, it is the energy. We are a people company. We don´t have a product, we only have people. So, if we have the best people with the best energy, with the best ideas, we can’t lose.

U@O: It’s hard to find these people?
N.H.:
Yes, because in the end they are people which means they are difficult to identify. Because in the interview they can be good but it’s how they gonna deal under pressure, when their girlfriend leaves them, when their kid is sick... And we have to understand that, we have to be tolerant too, we have good days, we have bad days. But where is the line between being demanding and being understanding? How does it work? And we discovered that the best way to do that is to let the teams decide. If a head of a department hires for his team, he interviews, he chooses. I don’t get involved. So, by pushing responsibility down in the organization you get better results.

U@O: What client did you want and you couldn’t reach for it?
N.H.:
Microsoft. Because I think that’s a company, they need to do a lot of work. And I don´t think that has been done properly yet and I think that is a great challenge.

U@O: Which one builds the brand: PR or advertising?
N.H.:
It’s difficult to distinguish. On a more basic level, I would say that advertising gives you visibility and PR gives you credibility. We usually say advertising is what you say about yourself, "I am beautiful"...PR is what others say about me. It’s much more credible as a message. The problem is that in advertising I can say "I am beautiful", in PR i can´t guarantee that the journalists would say that I am beautiful. So, PR is more complex, it´s less direct and, because of that, many clients are afraid to invest in PR compared to advertising. In advertising you control everything: the message, the image, where it comes out... However, what we see is that there are situations where PR does a better job, gives visibility. And I-Pod is a classic example. How many ads for I-Pod have you seen in Portugal? Hardly any. Everybody wants a I-Pod. Even if they have an MP3 they think they have a I-Pod.
We have to be realistic. Getting visibility for the sake of visibility is rubbish. If we are not ready for all the visibility it’s silly to do it. When we launched Tom Tom in Portugal we used only PR. We knew that the category of the personal navigation was still very small, that is gonna be bought by what we call "earlier doctors", people who love gadgets, so we sold PR to the gadget magazines and we growed very quickly. This year we are starting to add advertising. But we will continue with the PR, now going to the ladies.

U@O: What do you think about branding the nations? Is this thing efficient?
N.H.:
All this things about all this consultants telling countries how to communicate...I think it’s rubbish. The best communication about a country you have throw it’s people, it’s culture. And that happens by visiting and meeting. If you want your country to communicate well, talk to your people. Because you can have very sexy campaigns on CNN but if the taxi driver that takes me from the airport to my hotel rips me off or charges me too much I am already in a bad mood. If you are going to be late to the dinner, you are all lazy. That’s the world. And that is it. Change on the inside before screaming on the outside. It’s not a sexy campaign that is gonna make a difference. I don´t believe in marketing countries.

U@O: You started a blog. Are blogs a powerful PR instrument?
N.H.:
In my last post I wrote that 40 millions from the Europeans decided not to buy a product because of a blog. That’s quite dangerous. I think blogs are very new. I use a blog to talk to my people. So the people I talk with know what I think about certain things. I use a blog to give information to my friends and to my community. I don´t do it to promote a company. Yet! And I think it is very dangerous for a company to hire a PR agency to do a blog for them. Because a blog is very personal. I think blogs are gonna be a very big tool in the future, I don´t think that a right model has been developed yet for it. We developed blogs for campaigns. But we were very clear: "this is a blog that H&K is doing for...". One of the golden rules in blogs is: you got to be transparent.

U@O: How can you apply the principles of communication in administrating a blog?
N.H.:
Start with a strategy. Why are you doing it? When I decided to write my blog it was: I’m curious how blogs work, one. Two, should I write in English or in Portuguese? No, I’m gonna write in English to talk with my colleagues from the rest of Europe. The third is, how do I make sure that people in my company fell its ok for me to do it. I created a "buddy system", which means every post is read by a person beneath me in the company and he can say "yes, it’s ok, you can put that out". And slowly, you can see that my blog doesn’t have many posts, those are the terms that we are using in terms to get it up and running. And hopefully that will be a way that we can communicate between us.

U@O: How often should a blog must be upgraded?
N.H.:
I’d say 2 or 3 posts for a week. Less than once a week is useless. The problem is content. A lot of people are posting, just for posting.


Nadim Habib belives that a country can´t do a branding program until the people´s menthality is changed.
Nadim Habib belives that a country can´t do a branding program until the people´s menthality is changed.


Data de publicação: 2006-12-12 00:01:00
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