Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Rather than do a runthrough of this year’s PR disasters, I thought I’d highlight the two initiatives that impressed me during 2008 quickly.

Movember - Thinkhouse PR’s Movember campaign was the best PR camaign in Ireland this year in my opinion. The official website encapsulates what the initiative is all about:

Movember (the month formerly known as November) is an annual charity event held during November. 

At the start of Movember guys register with a clean shaven face. The Movember participants, known as Mo Bros, have the remainder of the month to grow and groom their Mo, raising money along the way to benefit men’s health - specifically prostate cancer. 

Movember culminates at the end of the month at official Gala Partés, Mo-Office and Mo-Town parties where Tom Selleck and Borat look-a-likes battle it out for their chance to be the Man of Movember.

Straight forward enough, but I haven’t seen anything take off as naturally for a long time. Thinkhouse PR position themselves as an agency that specialises in youth communications. Sounds rather fluffy, but through their connections they drew the right crowd for this initiative which made charity cool and resulted in tabloid news editors walking around with handlebar moustaches and an art auction of some amazing images topped off with taches. Lots of media coverage, online buzz and much needed money raised for a good cause. Heck they even employ Chewy, the man who sports Ireland’s finest moustache

Connector - Conor Lynch managed to build a personal brand Connector this year, which developed online and evolved into a monthly meetup. Conor sums it up as follows:

connector.ie was created as a personal blog about the people & communities I connect with in Dublin. I also organise ’social networking social events’ so the Facebook, MySpace & Bebo generation can meet face to face in the real world.

Many of the people at ‘Connector Monthly Meetups’ in Dublin are self motivated web savy professionals with personal projects looking to make new business & personal connections. You can expect to meet a multi-national mix of bloggers, marketers, designers, web designers, photographers, musicians, digital filmmakers, PR people & much more.

I ended up bumping into Conor at countless events this year, got to an early Connector event and marveled at how he managed to scale it to create a regular networking event. This all sounds straight forward, but few people will appreciate how hard it actually is to draw a crowd together. Building an online community is tough, but actually getting them together in real life is another hurdle altogether. Conor literally played the connector by bringing different groups of people together after numerous meetings and hard graft. He has now developed a property to rival traditional networking associations. Seriously if I’m going to attend a number of Connector events next year, but maybe one PRII event only, it makes you wonder. Not to go off on a rant about the PRII, but Olivier Blanchard penned some interesting commentary recently about the rise in new types of business communities.

In the B2B world, doing your part to ensure that your business community is healthy, informed, well connected and engaged is probably the most important thing you can do to foster the type of environment most suitable to create net new clients.

This has traditionally been the role of Chambers of Commerce, but we are starting to see that Social Media are giving rise to new types of business communities (Or as Seth might call them, business tribes.) This isn’t to say that the Chamber of Commerce model is dead or dying - far from it - but it is important to note that the dynamics of how and why business communities come to be are changing.

How can Chambers of Commerce remain healthy and relevant in this new age? Simple: Reconnect with the communities they serve. Shed the “business club” image, let the networking become landscape rather than focus, and engage their communities in a way that will truly elevate them. This is clearly a ‘leadership through service’ type of mission as opposed to a “build it and they will come” vision. Some organizations are already there, but many still haven’t made that transition.

Remember that thing about leadership in action being an irresistible draw? This is what organizations need to tap into. Don’t worry so much about membership growth, “relevance” and networking. Just get out there and make something happen. Act as the catalyst and the connector. Leverage networks to recruit volunteers, not members, and help them connect through projects they can really sink their teeth into. The self-serving rewards will come, but only if you don’t make them your focus.

Individuals like Conor Lynch or Damien Mulley have shown that there’s a gap in the market, with people growing tired of the standard industry events and turning to alternatives which are more of a draw. Less of the sales pitches and awkward handshakes in 2008, more discussion about interesting topics and informal networking opportunities open to individuals from various backgrounds please.