Business & Blog

My travel around Europe brought to me now in Brussels and in Amsterdam, two great cities, two different approaches to Internet PR: Brussels H&K, as you can imagine, is totally focused on Public Affairs, while the H&K office in Amsterdam focal point is large companies service.
Even in the usage of Internet the 2 close countries have different habits. In Belgium facebook is strong, but local platform, Netlog, a Belgium based social network with millions of users worldwide, is number 2, with its strength among teenagers. In Netherlands the social media landscape is dominated by Hyves, local player.

According to Vincenzo Cosenza Worldwide Map of dominant Social Networks, the Netherlands are among the few countries where number 1 network is not facebook.

A lot of nice conversations with my colleagues. In Brussels the priority is to undestand how Social Media can change the way public institutions can easily reach more citizens with contents and interactivity. Everything still to be studied. In Amsterdam the focus is more on the large corporations and Internet PR services in that country.

Last week I visited Paris where I met our colleagues of H&K Paris and RPCA (yes in Paris the group have separate 2 PR agencies). Historically one of the largest blogging countries in Europe, social networks are expanding brutally. They are close to 10 milion facebook users with a penetration close to Italy. As it is happening in Germany, they explained to me that national platforms, Viadeo and Skyblogs and others are slowly going down in comparison to the US champions like Linkedin and Facebook. Skyblogs is still impressive in numbers especially for teenagers.

In terms of internet pr activities, it seems the market is close to the Italian one. Bloggers events are popular. Monitoring of blogs and forums are requested by companies. Forum are still very popular in specific vertical markets.
Strange to say, in France companies are not used to upload press releases on their websites, so PR Agencies use their own sites to distribute the clients releases. So RPCA is selling a service to its clients to create “pressrooms” on a rpca extranet site where journalists can read and download press releases issued by companies.

Second visit is to Munchen at the HWP Office. This is one of the 3 offices H&K has in Germany. The other 2 are in Berlin and Frankfurt. This is usual in Germany, a polycentric nation (lke italy) where companies needs be present in multiple towns. Talking with Thomas, the digital leader in H&K Germany, I discover a lot of things on Internet in his country:
- First of all, the blogging phenomenon is not so important as it is in the other European countries. I cannot understand why. If it s a cultural difference or the lack of high qualified bloggers that created a consensus around theblogosphere. But things are rapidly changing in the country: for the first time ever a blogger has been appointed top journalist of the year.
- Local platform are more important than international one. XING is still number one business-to-business community. Much stronger than LinkedIn. StudiVz is still more important than facebook especially among teenagers. In the future will these national platforms in Germany and elsewhere capitulate to the USA superpowerful platforms?
- There is a strong link on internet between Austria and Germany contents but Switzerland is out of the game. Even if they speak German, the collaboration is poor. Is Schwyzerdütsch so difficult to read?

Other news on Germany to come later.

I start my travelling in Europe with a visit to the Portugal H&K agency in Lisbon. It is a relatively small office (approximately 14 professionals). It is a 2-days meeting. First day for internal training, second day on a meeting with Nokia Portugal.
The training is on Internet PR and Social Media for all employees, all afternoon. It is a pity I did not bring a camera with me (next time I will do it!). All employees follow my speech with lots of questions. They seem more interested to Internet than my H&K colleagues are in Italy

Portugal is a peculiar country. Most of the web contents come from Brazil (there are much more internet users in Brazil than in any European country!! ) and this is why it is the only country in Europe where I heard of Orkut.
But now in Portugal Twitter is the hype. Even H&K started its Portuguese twit. The journalists are using it and this is very important for our work. Facebook is also popular even if there are still few users (approx 182.000).

Second day, I visited Nokia Portugal where we showed the work done for Nokia in Italy, like Kiamanokia.it and the Facebook app. They were not aware of our success with Nokia Italy and seem very interested. They want to start with a monitoring service using VoxPopuli.

I have been recently appointed EMEA Director of Interactive strategy for Hill&Knowlton, I would like to use Business&Blog to tell what I see and what I learn travelling all around Europe, talking with my colleagues, visiting clients. So you will see my blog posts after each travel and each meeting I do all around Europe.

I will tell how my colleagues see the Internet and Social Media marketing in their own country from a public relation perspective. Stay tuned.
I hope you will enjoy it and comment.

Stairs in the H&K European Headquarter in London.