By Adam Wakefield

The rise of the Internet and all the bells and whistles it has brought has in many ways changed the way humanity interacts and does business with one another. However, Welman suggests that while the tools may be different, the more communications has changed, the more it has stayed the same.

“It sounds very strange, but not a tremendous amount has changed, and that’s not a popular view. It’s actually FleishmanHillard’s 70th  anniversary this year. If you read their original memorandum of understanding of the business, it says: ‘We trade in human relationships and business strategy and we help people tell stories’. We do exactly the same today,” Welman says.

“The channels have changed. The speed has changed. The efficiency has changed. Your neighbour is the globe now. That’s all changed. Things have just sped up but essentially, we help big clients tell their stories.”

It might be through a Twitter strategy, a media strategy, an internal communications strategy, or a 360 degree video strategy, but at the master level nothing has changed. All that has changed is the channels, the effectiveness and time scales in which strategies are executed.

At a Public Relations Institute of South Africa (PRISA) networking breakfast near the end of November last year, Welman emphasised the importance of business acumen when interacting with a client from a public relations or communications stand point, even to the point of requesting the KPIs of senior figures you interact with. 

Asked to expand on this point, Welman pointed to a rare quality inherent in the public relations and communications space.

“PR or communications is one of those rare industries that from a very young age you get access to CEOs of companies because of the nature of what you do,” he explains. “If you can change your conversation to the conversation the CEO wants to have or any one from the C-suite for that matter, you will start to be value by them and if you are valued by them, you are likely to stay employed by that company for a lot longer. I think it really was as simple as that.” 

To the junior PR manager, getting two articles out is important. To the CEO, the effect those articles had on the business is what’s important. 

“If you asked me what’s important in the office, it’s quite a difficult question to answer, but if you asked me what are my KPIs reporting to my boss, it’s quite an easy question to answer. It’s just simplistic ways of getting the information that you want to get to, and knowing what questions to ask,” he says.

When it comes to the challenges facing the communications industry, Welman’s salient gripe is consultants fail to truly listen to their clients.

“What I think the issue is and it’s a very distinct issue is that consultants, particularly here more than other places, don’t actually listen. They don’t listen, they don’t actually interpret what the client is saying and they don’t get to the meat of the problem before they start telling them what the solution should be. 

There is that beautiful saying about, ‘when the only tool in your bag is a hammer, everything starts to look like nails’,” he says.

“Far too many people only have a hammer in their bag and that’s the issue. You should have a range of approaches and first of all, be accommodating to listen to the client and actually discuss the issue with them,” Welman suggests.

As our conversation nears its end, Welman offers a couple of nuggets of advice when dealing with failure, and surviving in the industry.

“You’ve got to spend a moment on your failure but don’t get caught up in it. If you take things overly personally in this business you will die. You win clients, you lose clients, people join, people leave, and it’s very rare that it’s personal,” he says.

“What I also find, and I say this quite often, we mustn’t take ourselves so seriously. It’s not the case of nobody dies when things go wrong but we just don’t have to take it all so seriously. Do great work for clients, don’t accept mediocre work, but just be real about what we are doing.”

Check our part 1 here.

Are you a communications professional or leader? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.