2011 has been another great year of building brands and deepening client relationships –  everything from supporting seven different billion dollar brands, to helping launch visionary startups.

During this time we’ve won awards, grown our client base, developed new capabilities and kept clients and our staff happy. We’ve had a lot of good times but we’ve never really stopped to say too much about ourselves – and we’re not going to start now!

We talk in our business about how the shift from broadcasting to conversations has transformed how PR pros and marketers do their jobs. Dwelling as we do in this new Conversation Age has inspired us to transform how we market our own agency, too.

You can’t tell brand stories without listening first. It’s what we do for our clients, and we’d like to do it for you, too. From now until the end of the year, we are offering free, no-strings-attached PR micro-consultation sessions.  It’s your chance to discuss any issues in the consumer PR world that you think we may be able to help with – it’s 30 minutes focused only on you.

Here’s how you’ll know if our micro-consulting offer is right for you:

·         You are a marketer or in-house PR professional representing a company or a brand (we don’t handle individual or celebrity publicity)

·         You seek consumer PR counsel (we don’t do investor relations or lobbying)

·         You don’t work for a company who competes with one of our clients

At DeVries we consider this the start of the conversation age, a time for great brand stories, but most importantly a time to listen.

From November 1st we’re offering completely free , no obligation consultation sessions.

To arrange your session, please contact me by email ssmirnov@devries-pr.com, or write a comment below.

We love new challenges and having a chance to make a difference. Hope to hear from you soon – we’re all ears.

Thanks,

Stephanie.

Stephanie Smirnov is the President of the agency and can also be found at her personal blog LiketheVodka.com

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Each Friday we work hard to bring together the hottest topics in the world of PR, media, marketing and pop culture. The best finds on the Web are contributed by different members of the agency and brought together to create a list of must-see topics. This week’s topics were contributed by Managing Director Meryl Cooper and myself. Here’s what’s on our radar this week.

DeVries works with a number of brands that have long histories of creativity and entrepreneurship. Last year we helped to launch a conversation surrounding one of our clients Pepperidge Farm and their interesting history. This week we were excited to see another client’s innovation and history being discussed. Business Insider highlights how Procter & Gamble invented the idea of branding.

Whenever we talk about innovation and creativity in the business world we cannot help but think about Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has a long history of taking career risks and exploring innovative ideas that allowed him to create some of America’s favorite products. Here is a great slideshare full of stories and quotes from Steve Jobs showing how you can implement his techniques into your life, career, and business.

Mashable took us through a step-by-step look at the campaign behind the latest Toy Story film and how their social media efforts paid off.

Social media is always taken with caution in order to protect brands from any sort of crisis. This week the American Red Cross had a bit of a social media crisis when one of their employees accidently sent a tweet that was meant to come from their personal account. The honest way that the Red Cross handled the crisis led them to be somewhat of a hero in the social media crisis communications world.

We have all heard about the love-hate relationship consumers have with Facebook. This interesting relationship is being outlined and discussed over here.

More and more brands are trying out new social networks, specifically picture sharing services like Instagram. Brands have begun using Instagram to share stories and information with their consumers. This week MTV took to Instagram for Grammy coverage.

Cassie Boorn is the Social Media Coordinator at DeVries. You can also find her writing regularly at her personal blog.

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Stephanie Smirnov our President and official PR Mama brings us a great post about “How to Lose New Business (but not your soul)”.

She originally posted this on her blog

The previously mentioned new business hooplah unfortunately did not end well. This happens. Ego aside (I hate to lose), it was probably for the best given this particular client but nevertheless…I hate to lose. We got the news on a Saturday morning so I had all weekend and a bonus snow day to lick my wounds. And find comfort unexpectedly on the Starz channel, in a terrific documentary about Pixar.

I watched The Pixar Story through the lens of this new business failure, marvelling at how the studio succeeds again and again (sometimes against great odds) and gets back up again when they’re thrown a curveball.

Was amazed to learn that Toy Story 2 almost got trashed before John Lasseter and team stepped in and rescued it — essentially turning the whole production around and getting the film to market in eight months. Which is insane. I also am inspired to see that in fact, mastery and genius CAN be replicated in teams – Lasseter has done it (cf. Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton.) I am neither a master nor a genius but what I take away from this is a) you can get the crap kicked out of you and still come back with a big win and b) creativity and presentation “magic” must reside with more than one person on a team – and that the sum of a team is greater than its parts.

Speaking of crap-kicking, perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from our new biz miss was that you must never – EVER — go into a pitch being anything other than the agency you are. Do not hide your light under a bushel, as my mom used to say. Don’t apologize for anything — your size, your history, your client roster, your specialties. Be who you are, and you will win the right business.

And while it’s one thing to stretch and be courageous, it’s another thing to try to shoehorn yourself into the image of the agency you think the prospective client wants to see.

So. Who are we? We are mid-sized. Not a boutique, and not a big multi-office shop. We have a luxury heritage. An upmarket, style-informed sensibility informs everything we do, regardless of the category or distribution channel. We have a lot of big, iconic mass brands on our roster. Not niche brands, not cult brands. We do consumer PR really, REALLY well. We will not try to convince you that we do lobbying, investor relations or public affairs.

All of which is just fine. Great, in fact. We love our clients, and we love who we are. When we allow that to shine through, we tend to win new accounts. Good to remember this, and also very good to keep ego out of it because BOY is that not helpful. (Unless you’re an Oscar-winning Pixar director, maybe.)

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Did you know that you can follow our president Stephanie Smirnov on Twitter? She can also be found posting up a storm over on PRMama.

Her latest post sums up our latest client win, enjoy!

From today’s edition of  O’Dwyer’s online newsletter (subscription required):  DEVRIES SUCKS UP HOOVER ACCOUNT.

Best headline announcing new business win ever.  Worrisome to imagine how that collection of words could have gone awry…but it didn’t!

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For the past year, I’ve served on the NYC board of Nest, a non-profit organization that provides micro-finance loans to female artisans in developing countries to help them create sustainable entrepreneurial businesses. As repayment for their loans, our loan recipients make their crafts available to Nest, and these items are incorporated into the Nest line of merchandise. Nest also obtains funds by selling unique lines of clothing, accessories and other merchandise created by well-known domestic designers. In this way, Nest draws together artists from across the globe into a cooperative network of women who share a common goal of sustaining art and design based businesses.

When Rebecca Kousky, the Nest founder, invited the board members from all eight cities to go on a trip to Guatemala and visit the women who have benefited from our loans, I immediately jumped on the opportunity.

Our group of five board members, traveling from Chicago, St. Louis and New York, arrived in Guatemala City and met up with our facilitator, Ian. An exporter of Guatemalan crafts, Ian has connected Nest to various artisan communities throughout the country, and we were fortunate enough to visit these communities throughout our trip.

The first community we visited, located in San Antonio Palopos, was run by a man named Andres. We spent hours in Andres’ community, looking through his workshop at the beautiful scarves his community had woven in a collaborative spirit. We met with Andres’ family, as his workshop is also his home. Nest had connected Andres’ community with domestic designers Proud Mary to create a line of tote bags, and while we were there, we choose a few collections of Andres’ hand-woven scarves to sell at our upcoming Kate Spade event in New York.

After saying goodbye to Andres and his family, the group headed to the Morales community, located outside the city of Panachel. The Morales community was a group of inspiring women who had the motivation and desire to work and produce their woven textiles for sale, but didn’t have the means to purchase enough raw materials to make any profit. It was clear that these women and their families lived in extreme poverty. They spoke an ancient Mayan dialect, and we had to have two rounds of translation to communicate with them, from Mayan to Spanish and then Spanish to English. In our brief meeting with them, we explained what Nest was and how we could help by providing them with a loan so they could purchase the raw materials needed to weave more fabrics to sell. We also suggested they take an organic dying class at the weaving school Nest had set up in Antigua, as this technique allows textiles to be sold at a much higher price. Once we had answered all their questions, the group of about 20 women made a democratic decision amongst themselves within minutes, deciding that they would send two representatives to take the class, spending the rest of the loan on the raw materials. Our group was fascinated with the way in which they came to this decision and couldn’t believe how so many women could come to agreement so quickly. As a symbol of their appreciation, they insisted on serving us food, which consisted of cinnamon spiced coffee and delicious jam made from local fruits.

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You can keep an eye on all of the DeVries related content on the web and become our friend at http://friendfeed.com/devries

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I just returned from Zambia, after three weeks building homes as a member of a Habitat for Humanity Global Village team and I’d like to share a little about my experience in hopes that I might encourage someone to put their life on hold and help people, no matter the place or what capacity it might be in.

I’d like to start by sharing that I have always had a love of Africa which includes a fascination with the history, cultures, wildlife and landscapes. I was inspired to travel to Zambia, a peaceful country in South East Africa that borders seven other countries and was previously British-ruled, because I wanted to do more than send money to help a family in desperate need of a sound structure to call home. I wanted to see first hand how people live, work and interact with family while physically helping to create a home for a family in need. While I volunteer locally with Habitat for Humanity, this was my first international trip and the adventure was humbling. I was fortunate enough to meet beautiful, spiritual and hard-working, welcoming people who immersed me in their culture and I’m so grateful for this amazing experience.

It took over 30 hours to fly from JFK to London to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia and I couldn’t have been more anxious to get there. I met my teammates in Heathrow airport, all of whom were Canadian. Once we landed at Lusaka International Airport, I thought I might explode with excitement. The customs line seemed like the longest line of my life. And then suddenly, Visa in hand, we traveled 30 minutes by bus to the building compound, a community called Tiyende Pamodz. The Africa I saw was straight from my dreams – green Acacia and Baobab trees and yellow countryside for hundreds of miles. Our arrival was very emotional for me – the village children and women surrounded our bus and greeted us with bright smiles and open arms. Everyone hugged us and held our hands. I still can’t believe the strength of the little children lifting cases of bottled water and heavy items such as our bags off the bus and carrying them into our house. I could barely snap a photo because I was shaking so much. I couldn’t believe that after wanting to be here for long that I was finally in this moment in this place.

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