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What makes a successful international PR network? For one, a strong leader. Strong international PR managers are good at building and leveraging their networks. They are also able to inspire people with very different styles and beliefs and bring them together in the interest of a common cause. Although very simple in essence, these concepts are not that easy to manifest in reality. What does it take to lead an international PR network successfully? Let's take a look at some best practices and behaviors that can deliver big results for those with international PR responsibility.  

Right team, right organization
As a prerequisite, you need strong PR skills and local knowledge on the ground in each key market. Strive to staff every country with local market experts with demonstrated communications skills appropriate to your company and products—which shouldn't be too difficult, except in some fast-developing economies. However, you'll also need practitioners with the right multicultural strengths. They should understand the cultural subtleties of their market and know how different concepts, ideas and tactics will be received there. They should also understand how to gain support for PR among other internal groups in their companies, how to successfully partner with a PR agency and should bring a strong contribution to an international virtual team.

Rely on strong but simple management processes and practices. Crystal-clear documents on global public relations strategy and communications plans, regular conference calls and a common format for planning and reporting are a bare minimum. Support information sharing by developing a table of HQ deliverables with timelines, and make that and other materials available via a globally accessible portal site such as Vocus, if possible. If deemed affordable, face-to-face team meetings, either global or regional, help develop collaboration and team spirit. Also, use all available communication channels to drive exchange of best practice among the team, and never hesitate to merchandise and applaud team success frequently.

Right content and activities with strong cultural sensitivity
Most forms of communication—written, spoken and pertaining to gestures—are strongly dependent upon language and culture. Rather sadly, this fact is often overlooked by communication and marketing teams. For example, Europeans, including the British, don't really like press releases authored in the U.S., and the reverse is also true. Americans and Germans, including many journalists, like big come-together events, large trade shows and so-called "leadership" events. In many other countries, this format simply doesn't work, and media ignore them. As the manager of an international network, make sure that each local team has latitude to localize both content material and the format of local activities. In terms of written material, avoid the trap of systematically requesting a full translation back into your own language, which costs too much and creates a lot of frustration. Of course, this is only possible if you can trust the skills of each local team—being culturally open does not mean that you should be naïve or lenient, but you need to find the right balance between control and delegation.

Right messages, properly conveyed
Whereas you should be highly flexible on activity formats, you can afford to be far stricter on how well company-wide messages (corporate or product/solutions-related) are conveyed. Formal and informal reports from your local teams should provide very clear information in this regard. Of course, if your company brand or product brands have attributes and associations that vary strongly by market, you should take this into consideration.

Shared and transparent way to analyze results
International PR has a more complex set of stakeholders than local PR, especially within the company itself. As such, it is even more important to focus measurement on quality rather than quantity. Be very clear with your team, but also with management of other functions about what you measure, how and why. Don't let internal stakeholders be driven by the raw number of clippings or by a single disappointing article. This will work only if you have an effective reporting format coupled with a strong and regular communication channel between you and all your internal stakeholders.

Technology—a PR portal or blog, for example—and research, potentially a regular survey about how your themes are picked up by the target media, are very powerful tools that will add a lot of value.

Once you've mastered (or at least made some progress on) these international account management basics, also consider the following:

• Build an international media database (define relevant criteria on the type of target press and analyze potential deviations at the country level) so that everyone on your team understands who the key influencers are worldwide and can map local activities with that understanding in mind.
• When running corporate campaigns, make sure themes and execution are properly localized. Always have a dialogue on how the storyline and format can be adapted in a given local market before deciding whether it's feasible there.
• When using spokespeople from the HQ in regions or countries, brief them with some fresh and relevant information on the visited country. Provide them with not only facts related to your company's business there, but also with facts that matter to local citizens. Properly used, this will help establish contact with the journalists.
• Leverage other local and international programs, especially customer reference and business partner programs, and mine them for useful content.
• Allocate budgets to the regions/countries so that they have autonomy, but keep a "central" repository to ensure flexibility to take advantage of opportunities and to support and reward the most successful teams.