Expand your regional reach

I’m a consistent reader of President and CEO Richard Edelman’s blog.

The yearly Edelman Trust Barometer reveals how individuals are increasingly more likely to trust other individuals with whom they share a common interest. This, along with Mr. Edelman’s consistent support of social media, provides a professional underpinning to my interest in the blog.

Outside of this, I like how the blog pulls together a number of my interests, from international relations and business to public policy and politics. The combination of content is important, engaging and prescient. The most recent post describes Edelman’s lunch with Jim Hoge, the editor of Foreign Affairs, the well-known publication that influences the influencers with regard to foreign policy.

Foreign Affairs, in conjunction with other established publications like The Economist, provides the circulatory system to the international body politique. The publication covers the bulk of foreign policy issues, feeding the important points to the four corners of the increasingly interconnected globe. Circulation is fast and multifaceted, both on and offline. And, according to Edelman’s information, it’s about to get better.

If Foreign Affairs makes up the main arteries of influential foreign policy, it is now branching out into the capillaries of foreign influence. Always a global guru, the publication is going regional.

In the tradition of the “Long Tail” and knowing your industrial niches and nuances, Foreign Affairs plans to engage with local publics about international issues. So the publication is upping its interest in social media, with planned policy discussion boards and platforms. At the same time, Foreign Affairs is contemplating versions both on and offline in local dialects. The idea is to engage each and every individual in such as way as to invite feedback and dialogue. The publication knows that general global knowledge is important. But these days, even for James Bond, “the world is not enough”. It’s the regions that matter, and the first to engage the locals will be blessed with the knowledge and the know-how that the individual has to offer to the world, instead of simply offering the world to select individuals.

This trend towards tracking the local communities is growing among global giants. Telecom companies were among the first of the industries to recognise the power of the emerging market, and many are hard at work on methodologies to promote effective local engagement. Telecoms are expanding fast in the developing world, establishing their brands, products and services as connectors within the local community.

Telecoms are also involving themselves in the local linguistic communities here in Europe, promoting their brands and services at the community level and listening to local consumers that, in their initial push towards globalization, may have been left behind in terms of accessibility. Industry leaders in telecom, foreign policy and PR are not limited by local or global initiative; success can best be found through engagement with both.

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