“When the going gets tough, those of us who are older often hark back to the ‘good old days’. Of course, there was never such a time. There is no doubt that we can at times find comfort in the past, but there is also a danger that if we cling to the past, we will only half-live in the present, half-experience the present moment…”

There you go with Sister Stan’s thought for the day from her international bestseller “Gardening the Soul: Soothing Seasonal Thoughts for Jaded Modern Souls,” one of three paperbacks that I have on my currently tidied up desk. On particularly mad days, you can find the book buried underneath a pile of newspapers, magazines and an assortment of work clutter. Today it’s neatly sitting at the mid-section of the pile, waiting to be revisited like an old friend.

And that I did today. Flicking through the familiar pages of Sister Stan’s book, I found what I needed to cap the week: a dash of positivity. Ah, Sister Stan knows me all too well. Her words never fail to disappoint.

This makes me wonder if I could actually keep a positive mindset without help from Sister Stan. With deadlines and expectations to meet day after day, the pressure in the workplace could mount to a killing crescendo. If there’s no Sister Stan to whip a magic wand of inspiration, what does one do? Here are a few suggestions that I think might work.

• Chocolate. A friend of mine says chocolate is the answer to everything. She happens to be one of the smartest, most credible persons I know so I believe her and well, because I can personally attest to chocolate’s magical stress-reducing properties.

• Alcohol (or smokes?). Not too much; just enough to get a little buzz in your head going. The right amount of spirit may not drown out the noise completely but trust me it has amazing muffling effects and could even bring you to fits of hilarity if you’re lucky.

• Nail biting. OK this could be disgusting and it’s actually a nervous condition that requires treatment but it feels good. Just take my word for it.

• More carbs, baby. Sugar and starch and everything nice are the ultimate stress busters. Hoard a dozen or so of those delectable neighborhood muffins. They go down well with tongue-scalding café mocca, or for those of you who prefer caffeine served cold like revenge, a tall frap with whipped cream and raspberry syrup.

• Work harder. It is very productive to throw all your emotions and work-related stress into work. Think groundbreaking ‘recycled energy’ which makes everything in this world more efficient. It could earn you carbon credits and even get you promoted.

• Take a walk. But make sure you walk within a 500-meter radius so you don’t stray too far and remember to actually head back to the office! Try periodic trips to 7-11 and buddy up with the storekeeper so you can borrow an umbrella if it suddenly rains.

• Sing (or dance?). Fun, harmless and generally tolerable.

• Spring clean. Discard souvenirs from bitter client relationships or projects you thought you could win. Meanwhile, file the fantastic stuff. It’s a lot like love, really. If it doesn’t work, chuck it out. If it does, make a lovey-dovey album!

• Count your blessings. When you’re running out of patience, don’t just count to ten. Count your 10 blessings and thank God for each of them and for the fact that the weekend is always just around the corner.

Happy Friday!

A presentation slide by Marta Kagan (mzkagan) on Slideshare

The two D’s – Devin and Daphne launched our first team “Lunch & Learn” session last Wednesday with a two-hour talk on Social Media. Although social media is not alien to all of us in the room, there are people like me who have barely scratched the surface so the topic, needless to say, was for our benefit.

My social media habit consists of checking Facebook once or twice a day and changing my status regularly, oftentimes tracking my mood swings, for a few close friends from a network of 302 people to see. I cannot be bothered to connect more on LinkedIn or share updates on Twitter. In fact with just a twinge of embarrassment and no regret whatsoever, I confess to not having accessed my Twitter account in about 3-4 months now. (*Daphne slaps forehead; Sonya mutters “oh she’s just hopeless!”)

A presentation slide by Marta Kagan (mzkagan) on Slideshare

So when Devin said that social media engagement is fundamentally “social conversations online”, I wondered whether my lukewarm participation and sporadic use of the medium can be linked back to personality traits.

I do not particularly enjoy “socializing” in the real world. Does this explain or justify my indifference? Am I not thrilled to fully join the social media crowd because online or offline crowds are crowds and I just don’t like them?

Could be. Or simply because I do not know how to start and keep a conversation going.

Anyway, whatever the reason may be, I do recognize though that the medium is powerful. I still doubt it would replace broadcast or print media, but it will be, if it isn’t already, as influential as its predecessors in shaping world views and trends.

The one thing I would be very interested to do in the future when I finally get over my lagging adoption and perhaps when there’s time to be an armchair thinker again is to go deeply into the nature of conversations that are happening online.

While I have “partially read” The World is Flat and some other books on the changing communications landscape, I have yet to encounter social media communication theories.

If there are such theories, are they any different from existing interaction theories like Social Penetration, Agenda Setting, Dialectics or Elaboration Likelihood models?

If it’s all very similar to social conversations in the real world, could conventional theories sufficiently spell out the dynamics of online interactions?

Is Social Media Studies more anchored on a “medium” rather than a “content” -slanted analysis? Are we more interested to know about users habits and what they get out of the experience of using the medium rather than the quality and “depth” of the information they are sharing within their networks?

Is it really a democratic, no-holds-barred dialogue or are we just dealing with a new breed of better trained, more subtle gatekeepers?

When we say, we’d like to reach out to bloggers and other e-fluentials to create awareness or change perceptions, are we choosing on the basis of who is “popular” online or do we gauge based on expertise and influential in the real world?

For controlled communications (as in PR, Advertising, Marketing), where do the lines of online and offline communications outreach blur, intentionally or otherwise?

Some presentation slides were shared during our “Lunch and Learn” sessions, courtesy of Marta Kagan on Slideshare – do check them out here and here and see what you make out of Social Media.

Photo courtesy: NZTE

We were in Kuala Lumpur recently supporting our client New Zealand Trade & Enterprise during the signing of a Free Trade Agreement between Malaysia and New Zealand. It has been a demanding but rewarding four weeks of planning, brainstorming and joint implementation with the NZTE that we at Rice Communications are proud to be part of.

In tandem with the NZTE teams in Singapore and Malaysia, we managed to run a tight, successful media campaign that included back-to-back interviews for NZ Prime Minister John Key and Trade Minister Tim Groser on Bloomberg TV Asia Pacific; interview for NZ Trade Commissioner Grant Fuller with the Malaysian News Agency, Bernama; published a commentary by NZ High Commissioner David Kersey in The Star (Malaysia); and arranged interviews for the business delegates with key Malaysian trade publications.

Leading up to the signing in the evening of October 26 at the Hilton KL, there were media site visits to New Zealand companies Fonterra and Datacom, and business forums arranged for the NZ and Malaysian business delegation. The local and foreign press of Malaysia then came to cover the FTA signing ceremony, following a press conference at the Prime Minister’s Office in Putrajaya organised by the Malaysia International Trade & Ministry’s Office.

The platform provided multifaceted angles and opportunities to engage the media. However as it was anchored on the premise of bilateral partnership, we also had to face a fair amount of skepticism from the press. When I was pitching the FTA story to a journalist from a key regional business publication for example, I got this rather caustic comment that all FTAs are the same. “What’s exciting about it? Same story being repeated over and over and it’s just motherhood statements.” Refusing to get drawn into a losing battle, I skirted the issue by offering another viewpoint.

It’s true; “partnership” is probably one of the hackneyed terms in the PR lexicon. However where appropriate, as in the case of FTAs and other forms of bilateral or massive corporate undertakings, partnership may sound like another motherhood statement, but it accurately depicts the essence of the initiative.

That Malaysia is New Zealand’s 8th largest export market accounting for almost a billion dollars in exports in 2008 did not happen overnight. It is the by-product of partnerships: of public and private sector building the linkages, capacities, and conditions that allow for economic gains to manifest and for people to partake of their benefits in the long-run.

Trade agreement bolster what has already been established over time. Having had a brief stint in the legislative branch of government, I know for a fact that, albeit politicized sometimes, trade agreements are inarguably the result of intense and thorough study, deliberations and collaborative effort.

Without trade agreements, it would take longer for nations to competitively expand offshore and harness collective strengths to achieve sustainable and inclusive economic growth. On the other hand, with it in place, nations can embark on deeper engagements economically, socially, politically and culturally. And, it is this nature of trade agreements – encompassing and characteristically hopeful, that sometimes warrant motherhood statements.

Malaysia/Singapore, 10 September 2009 -- The International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT), the first global public-private initiative for cyber security, recently announced the appointment of Rice Communications as its global communications partner. The team at Rice will support IMPACT with strategic counsel and media relations.

Established in 2008, IMPACT brings together governments, industry leaders and cyber security experts to enhance the global community’s capacity to prevent, defend, and respond to cyber threats. Early this year, the alliance launched its global headquarters (GHQ) in Cyberjaya, Malaysia. The IMPACT GHQ also goes full speed as the operational and physical home of the Global Cybersecurity Agenda, a framework for international cooperation initiated by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Commenting on the appointment, Philip Victor, IMPACT’s head of Communications & Outreach said, “In the short time provided to respond to the brief, Rice demonstrated a thorough understanding of IMPACT’s present and planned positioning and was able to bring fresh ideas to the table. We look forward to working with the team and hit the ground running with a number of key events in the pipeline.”

IMPACT cited the thorough research and audience dipstick surveys that Rice conducted to develop a comprehensive communications proposal revealed invaluable insights into how the alliance’s key publics and stakeholders perceive them.

Rice’s Media Perception Audit covered 15 senior editors, journalists and correspondents in Asia Pacific, Europe and North America. The team also connected with analysts and government influencers that yielded interesting results on global cyber security issues.

The Professor of Professional Selling Neil Rackham was in Singapore recently for a workshop sharing his internationally-renowned sales effectiveness methodology called SPIN® Selling in the context of the global downturn. Huthwaite, the leading sales performance improvement organization, presented the event in partnership with McGraw Hill, the Singapore Institute of Management, and the American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore. The half-day session attendees comprised mostly of sales managers from multinational companies.

Rice Communications had access to the workshop as their communications consultants.

One of the discussion points we found particularly fascinating focused on the three types of sales models or approaches – Transactional, Consultative and Enterprise, which Neil Rackham had previously expounded on in one of his best-selling business books Rethinking the Sales Force.

In simple terms, transactional selling is all about “commodity” selling, whereby the goal is to serve intrinsic value customers. Price and convenience are the drivers of the transactional model.

Consultative selling meanwhile takes the sales process to a higher plane by focusing on problem solving and creating tailored solutions for specialized needs. According to Neil Rackham, integral to effective consultative selling is the ability to ask the right questions that help customers not only make sense of their situations but more importantly recognize their unseen problems and the implications of failing to address them.

Transactional selling prevailed in the olden days while the 80s and 90s saw the rise of consultative selling. The more multifarious enterprise selling model that involves an integrated approach for a longer-term seller-buyer partnership began gaining ground in recent years.

What had us thinking during one of the workshop station breaks was whether the Public Relations sales model was a transactional or consultative one; or if it even had in fact evolved to the enterprise level.

Sonya Madeira-Stamp, Rice Comms Managing Partner, held that Public Relations has and will always keep an inherent consultative, problem-solving nature. Services such as press release development or event management may be marketed in a “transactional” manner by ad hoc publicists and direct-to-customer online press release distribution channels, but this is more of an exemption rather than the rule.

The strategic thinking that comes with effective messaging and tactical planning in professional Public Relations is anything but transactional. Rather it is a process that requires deep immersion into the client’s business and demands advanced skills from PR consultants.

Unlike advertising, which is more often tied to or subsumed under marketing, Public Relations serves a broader strategic management function in an organization. Assuming a perception management role, it encompasses both internal and external communications for such purposes as corporate brand marketing and promotion, stakeholder relations, all through to crisis and reputation management. This wider ambit consequentially makes it imperative for Public Relations professionals to create rather than merely communicate value for their clients.

At Rice Communications, we encourage the growth of the “hybrid consultant” – one who can proficiently apply PR skills as a value creating brand ambassador.

As the partner of one of the region’s fast-rising mining conglomerates Middle East Coal, Rice Communications offered flexibility and went beyond media channels to build their corporate profile. We tapped high level industry profiling events and brokered relationships to introduce the MEC leadership to media and potential investment partners.

The counsel for the Mobile Marketing Association, on the other hand, has been creating tangible value. By strategically marrying on-the-ground in-country events with regional media outreach and Social Media strategies, Rice Communications contributes in raising the membership and expanding the networking base of the industry alliance.