Public relations veterans Bob Pickard and Janice Mandel have teamed up with pollster Nik Nanos to launch Signal Leadership Communication, a social PR firm that aims to help CEOs improve their social media skills.
“It’s pretty clear right now with digital disruption that a lot of leaders need to improve their leadership communication,” said Pickard (pictured above, right), who returned to Canada last year after 12 years in Asia.
Pickard said the intersection where social media meets corporate communications is an underserved part of the marketplace. While social media is increasingly driving communication, many CEOs remain fearful and cautious about online PR risks and unsure about opportunities, he said.
Many top executives “are absent from social media and many of them are struggling. We’re going to help them change all that.”
Although several PR firms say they provide social media expertise to executives, “it’s not their singular focus,” he said. “Our industry suffers from a creeping generalization trend where we have too many jacks of all trades and masters of none.”
Senior executives need trainers, coaches and advisors in social communication and “we have the expertise and the intellectual property which we can bring to bear so that we can outperform the marketplace.”
Pickard and Mandel are the managing principals of Signal Leadership, while Nanos (who remains Nanos Research chairman) is playing a counselling role as a partner.
Having Nanos onboard will help the firm develop data-driven communication programs for clients, Pickard said. “We need to provide the advice that clients can actually use and that has to be informed by the numbers, the insights and the intelligence that we’ll be able to get from access to Nanos Research.”
Signal Leadership plans to release a Nanos poll soon on social media and how it can make or break one’s public image. It will also release a study by Ryerson University on the behaviours and participation of Canadian CEOs on social media.
Pickard and Mandel began their careers as colleagues at Hill & Knowlton in Toronto, where they both served as vice-presidents in the 1990s.
Mandel, the president of String Communication for the last five years, has also worked at senior client-side positions at companies like Proctor & Gamble.
Pickard has a quarter century of experience including 12 years in Korea, Japan and Singapore where he held senior roles with Huntsworth, Burston-Marsteller and Edelman. He was the only Canadian on PR Week’s 2015 Power Book list of “the most important people in the global PR industry.”
The firm has clients in the renewable energy, real estate and aerospace industries that Pickard would not name. Signal Leadership will also represent international PR firms in Canada.
