No matter how good we are at what we do, only what we know is never good enough for us. That’s why April was a month to our liking, because it was full of events where we updated our business and communication knowledge, especially through local contextualization.

Minio @Forbes reINVENT Summit 2022

Although they never stopped performing, CEO Ioana Mucenic and Cristiana Pană, Head of Strategy and Growth at Minio were curious to discover the perspectives of other entrepreneurs on a 2022 that looked only slightly better than the previous one.

And because a good experience is not complete if it is not shared with others, Cristiana told us the highlights of the marathon conference with 16 guests in 2 hours.

The experience of this year’s Summit was very encouraging, especially coming after a rather difficult pandemic context for many businesses, but also for the people behind them. It was an event full of positive energy, stories and success stories, but also stories with less expected endings. I liked the transparency with which many speakers opened up to the audience, especially the stories of Răzvan Crișan ( Co-founder Kane Group), Bogdan Lupu ( Loyalty and Mobile Director at Carrefour) and Ciprian Stancu (Founder Republica Bio). The key words from their experiences during this pandemic period, which has brought a lot of instability, uncomfortable decisions and courage in business, are rather focused on 5 big ideas that we all have been feeling on our own skins:

1. The courage to say you don’t know what’s next for the team you work with

2. Transparency and commitment to everyone involved in your business, whether suppliers, customers or employees

3. Authenticity to expose yourself as you are as a business or professional and to take ownership of possible failures in your initiatives

4. Determination to see something through to the end, even if previous initiatives have failed

5. Passion to put your ideas into practice, even when the market goes against your decision

Minio @HR 2.0 – Preparing for the Future of Work

The removal of restrictions on the one hand, but also the increasingly turbulent social context on the other, are challenges that a good HR person knows they have to adapt to. That’s why one of the things Ana Velea, Head of Operations and HR Manager at Minio, did was to attend the conference organised by wall-street.ro to find out what’s new in the industry.

And because part of Minio’s culture is this knowledge sharing, Ana also told us a few things about her experience at HR 2.0 – Preparing for the Future of Work.

Clearly the hot topic has been about how we attract talent and the new way of working post pandemic. In the current labour market context, employers need to prepare themselves with an attractive set of benefits, and the event provided ideas in the tech area, which is migrating work processes towards full digitisation. All efforts are focused in the area of “remote way of working”, which opens up massive opportunities in recruitment by unlocking space barriers.

For me as an HR person, operational at heart, it has been a useful to have a community of people in the field talking about the same “challenges”. On this occasion I realised that we were on the right track in the change we were also going to make, i.e. moving to a hybrid working system: Work from Home & Work from Co-working spaces.
In the next phase we are going to open a new recruitment process, adapted for the “Future of Work“.

Minio @PR & Communication Summit 2022

Influencers, press releases, collaborations, partnerships, shares and re-shares, live stories from actions – these are all things that Marius Marin uses with ease every day at Minio. But like any good PR Manager in the industry, he knows that the most important thing is to keep up to date with everything that’s going on, both on a micro and macro level.

So on 7 April he was in the front row of the PR Summit Romania so that now he can share with us what’s new in PR for 2022.

I can say that I really liked the fact that it was mainly about the PEOPLE working in PR and less, compared to past years, about how well we tick KPIs, how we strive for organic visibility in a campaign, how we still impress with PR Blitz, what cool X brand did and how many influencers we managed to engage.

The focus was more on how we feel, how anxious we’ve become, how more and more people in agencies have reached burnout and are going to therapy. We also talked about the change in the way we work: how we have integrated WFA (work from anywhere) into our lives, the fact that we feel more and more the need for socialising, for group meetings, but also about that category of people who want to work only from home.

Of course, it’s pretty much all because of the context: “coming out” of a pandemic that has drained us of energy in the most recent 2 years, a war close to our borders, all this overlaid with anxieties that everyone has.

To try to draw some conclusions, the discussions were mostly applied on case studies done by agencies and brands & less on “how you should” or “why you should keep in mind”, because they came as examples of good practices from what I saw presented.

It was learning PR through the power of the actual example of the campaign/campaign in question. I liked how Catalin Ionita from BCR presented their actions to support Ukrainian refugees, who needed support and information on how and where to exchange their currency. It was an example of good PR, generated from an honest intention to help and a concrete action of the bank: they exchanged people’s hryvnia into lei.

I also appreciated the experiential PR campaigns presented by Golin, which demonstrated how important the experience a brand offers to consumers is, whether it’s a financial service, a fast food or an NGO (applied to FAIRO, KFC and Habitat for Humanity).

Because PR is closely related to Media Relations, through the example of exclusive articles and interviews by Urban.ro, Cristina Bazavan drew attention to the professionalism and discipline that a Romanian publication needs to show in order to be in line with international standards.
In terms of influencers, the campaigns and results presented by the PR agencies at the event confirmed to me how important it is to relate to influencers as a channel in itself, with an important role, with a mission, where their presence must be well defined to justify and perform.

There was also a discussion about trends and I must say that I really appreciated Ioana Mănoiu’s presentation from GMP PR, because she summarized pretty much all the important trends we are seeing now: from mental health, work revolution, to the evolution in digital – either SM or digital PR.

As she rightly points out, it was also the pandemic that accelerated the digital transformation, with “the July 2020 McKinsey Global Survey of Executives showing that digital product development accelerated by 7 years”. Of course there was also talk of the Metaverse and alternate realities, with examples from brands that have already implemented: Nike – NIKELAND on Roblox, Gucci and the only digital bag sold on Roblox or the virtual land purchased on The Sandbox, FOX Entertainment’s Alter Ego show – where participants can be whatever stars they want via their avatars.