Chef Leung's Tastebook page

 

 

Tina di Cicco, the inestimable Director of Communications at the Intercontinental Grand Stanford Hotel Hong Hotel, was thinking one day about Chef Leung Fai Hung.   

 

His restaurant at the hotel, Hoi King Heen, is well-known amongst foodies for its upscale Cantonese cuisine, of which he is a Master.   Tina wanted to bring Chef Leung to a wider audience.  

 

A simple idea - create a Facebook page for Chef Leung (which he writes) - turned into something more when a local journalist colleague of Tina's decided to create an event and invite fellow fans to join together at the restaurant one evening.  The idea snowballed and more than 60 came, including many journalists, filling the Hoi King Heen full of people who didn't know each other, but whose common bond was the love of great Cantonese food.

 

What's more, they paid their own bill.  Is this the first press facility in history organised and funded entirely by the media themselves?

 

They've become Chef Leung's Facebook friends.  He posts pictures, gets feedback and alludes to secret ingredients.  They continue to make pilgrimages to the Master.

 

Tina's now in Singapore and you can catch her presentations on using social media at conferences in Asia-Pacific.   Tina keeps it simple, keeps it creative and looks for the impact on revenue!   She is prima bloggerina assoluta.

 

 

If you're sad, please tell your face

I spoke recently at a conference of PR Directors in Singapore, where delegates discussed the aftermath of the bus hijacking in Manila in which eight Hong Kong tourists died.

Rather than the management of the hijack itself, which received blanket criticism in the media and in diplomatic circles, the feature of the crisis that was uppermost in the delegates minds was the demeanour of the President of the Phillipines, Benigno Aquino, who appeared to smile while making a grave statement in response to the tragedy . If you look at the discussion below the video clip, it's all focussed on the President's facial expression and why he smiled. It may have been nervousness, but it led to the smile being a negative focus of attention and not what was intended as a sombre message of tough action by the Phillipines Government.

Delegates compared his performance with that of the Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang, whose grave delivery and measured words commanded respect.  He described the incident as "disappointing" - an understatement almost certainly designed to avoid raising tension in Hong Kong, where there was growing public anger and where large numbers of Phillipine citizens live and work.

There were two lessons from the discussion: firstly that facial expression, demeanour, posture and general appearance will define how your words are judged. Secondly, you need to train and prepare for such a moment.

Yes we can

PR survives or falls on ideas.

Winston Churchill said: "All the great things are simple, and many be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, duty, mercy, hope."

Ideas alone, of course, need to be accompanied by judgement and expert delivery to succeed.  

I meet a lot of people in my job who have learned through tough experience and I want to blog about their ideas and opinions on managing reputations and handling a crisis.

I'm making this a no-bitching zone though.   Who learns anything from the piling-in that happens in the PR industry when things go wrong?