PR Week usually features inhouse and agency communications people so I thought that I would throw the net out a bit wider and get an external perspective. Salim Mitha is an entrepreneur who can tell his own story as founder of Wahanda. Until December 13 he is giving a 10 percent discount on all the health and wellness services to readers of this post if they provide with the code KITTENS to be used at the checkout. 

KBSF: I've known you for a while, but why don't you give us the Salim Mitha elevator pitch?

I am one of the co-founders of Wahanda, an online health, beauty & wellness resource. I started the company just over one year ago with my business partner Lopo Champalimaud because we wanted to create a comprehensive wellbeing resource for consumers to help them:

• Find every possible business & professional in the space (we want to provide listings of every spa, salon, gym, therapist, personal trainer, physiotherapists, etc in the world),
• Share and learn from reviews, blogs and user generated content, &
• Connect consumers with these businesses & professionals through bookings, special deals, offers and online transactions.

We feature any service treatment provider that helps you feel good from the inside-out (like meditation, yoga, nutrition), to the outside in (facials, massages, hair appointments, etc). Who doesn’t want to feel better, look younger & live longer….so whether someone is trying to find a spa day in London, learn about the Alexander Technique, find a personal trainer in New York, or acupuncture in Switzerland, we are trying to help connect consumers with those providers all over the world.

As a shameless plug, we have a ton of great Christmas spa, beauty & fitness gifts, spa days, and our own Wahanda gift voucher which is accepted at over 500 spas, salons, gyms, yoga & Pilates studios nationwide (making it the most flexible and widely accepted voucher in the UK). Oh, and we just launched Wahanda USA. :-) And for those who like freebies, we are giving away a fantastic prize every day in December with our Wahanda Advent Calendar, in case you wanted to check that out.

Before getting the courage to finally start my own company, I gained an immense appreciation for web businesses & user experience in my role as the European Director for Yahoo! Search & Social Search, where I worked with a diverse and great team of people in the UK, France, Germany, Spain & Italy across all disciplines. I also have a deep interest and love for consumer products & technology having helped launch a biotech consumer brand in Europe called Microban, and also through various projects in the music, film and technology industries. Although I carry an American passport and lived in the States for most of my life, I was born in Pakistan and I have been in the UK for almost ten years.

KBSF: Start-up founders are known for being much more hands on in their approach to social media and marketing, how does it compare to other roles you've done before at a new business like Microban and the larger corporates that you have worked at?

I do think that to be a successful business manager, you need to be able to put yourself in the customer’s shoes and really understand how they interact with your product, and what possibly could be the innovation or service that will attract more customers and retain the ones you have.

I have always found that one of the best ways to gain this valuable firsthand insight is to be on the front lines of your business, and this involves speaking directly with consumers, suppliers, competitors, partners, employees and more. Social media is just the latest tool that allows a business owner like myself to interact and connect with all of these constituents. The latest tools allow me to get more real-time feedback, and are proving to be more scalable.

I blog & micro-blog more frequently than I did at my other managerial positions, but the “blogging” of that time was limited to meeting with traditional press & radio journalists, speaking at conferences, attending consumer research panels and focus groups and of course face-to-face meetings with suppliers & partners. Interestingly, when I started at Yahoo! in 2004, it was prohibited to have a product blog AT ALL! (how times have changed!). When we did launch one, all of our European blog entries had to be cleared by PR in HQ (in California), Jeff Weiner (former Head of Search Globally) and by Eckart Walther (VP of Product at Yahoo!). Can you imagine that only five short years ago, posting to a corporate product blog required word by word approval by the highest execs in a company! And now having a corporate blog is as commonplace as allowing employees to use a phone to contact a consumer and the level of interaction is so much more organic and frequent. Interesting how press releases continue to operate in the old manner.

Social media has helped to bring organisations closer to consumers at all levels in real-time. It also makes it incumbent upon old school executives, to step out from behind the oak desk and get involved in the front lines of the business. Additionally, I find that blogging and interacting via other social media channels allows people on the outside to realise that the people who work at Wahanda are real people with a variety of passions, interests and ideas, even beyond just our business pursuits. Adding this human element gives consumers and partners a unique insight into how we do things.

KBSF: What are your favourite social media services?

I love using my Posterous account because it allows me to compose my thoughts on email, attach videos or pictures and send it to one account, which then pings and distributes my content and update notifications to my Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress Blog, Flickr, and even my Linkedin (indirectly). Very cool. That being said, I still find almost all blogging platforms clunky and difficult to edit, or use so I still think there is room for a killer blogging platform in the space. Of all the things I use, I think Twitter (which I access primarily through Tweetdeck), is revolutionary…I have stopped needing to use RSS feeds on Google Reader or MyYahoo! because of the amazingness of Twitter. I also use Twitter as an opt-in GPS, consumer research tool and Q&A platform all in one. I still use Yahoo! Bookmarks and del.icio.us, but to be honest, I prefer Y! Bookmarks because of the easy-to-use tagging functionality (which I find much better than delicious). Performance/speed is still an issue, but it’s a great way to capture my bookmarks and catalogue all the cool things I find online. I also love Youtube for the user edited content…finding that exact scene from a movie is a joy when some user has.

KBSF: What would you prefer to see from PR people (that you may not see already)?

Most PRs I meet fall into one of three categories:

1. “traditional” PR – the ones who still claim to be able to get their clients into every publication and newspaper, radio, TV, etc and love press releases or picking up the phone to get column inches;
2. “Digital” PR professionals who love to build microsites and do virals and throw around buzzwords like SEM/PPC and even SEO; and finally
3. social media and “online” PR types who fully embrace social media platforms and all of the cool community applications and technologies, and even the importance of the blogosphere.

From my experience, and I realise this is a broad generalisation, you have the #1 (Traditional) agencies buying up the #2 (Digital) agencies and claiming that they now understand digital and the internet and can provide a broad range of services. Then you have the #3 guys poking around and charging obscene amounts of money for their services without really offering some of the benefits of the #1 & #2 guys. And all the while, the top execs at these companies, I have found, are not cross-trained across all of the disciplines. Gluing together #1, #2 & #3 without having truly cross-trained individuals and an organisation that can provide solid & transparent tracking leads to an inconsistent experience for clients, and frankly a ton of overhead that clients end up subsidising.

So, I think there is a massive disconnect between agencies or PR professionals who perform “traditional” PR, and those who are more attuned to Search & digital, and the more nascent social media PR world. I actually find that this division is more persistent in the US because large traditional clients have subsidised the #1 & #2 agencies, so they have not had to cross-train, get lean and adapt the practices of the #3 skillset. In many ways, I think these three divisions also reflect the development of the web. First you had offline (print, radio, TV) broadcast mass media, then you had Web 1.0 which was machine driver, and now the human-powered Web 2.0 revolution, and each type of agency I have described above evolved as a result of the breakthroughs.

KBSF: If you were a PR person taking on a start-up as a client, what are the key things you think that they should look at?

Building upon my previous response, what I would like to see if a truly cohesive offering because a start-up business today needs to be good across all elements discussed above, and probably most importantly, an agency and a PR professional needs to be able to communicate effectively the return on marketing investment, and to be able to make informed recommendations that instil confidence in the client. Trust me – we (the clients) want you to advise us…but not because your gut tells you so…but because your diligent analysis + experience + creativity leads you to that conclusion. Better understanding the value that agencies create will help both parties, especially when it comes to costs. There needs to be better transparency and links between the pay and performance of campaigns and services. Helping a client understand the value driven by PRs will only help us use your services more.

KBSF: Who do you most admire from a social media and marketing perspective?

I think Guy Kawasaki has done an amazing job both with his blogs and his use of Twitter to support his alltop business. I also read Seth Godin quite avidly, and find his insights quite instructive and honest. In a world of black hat SEO, spamming, and other unsavoury tactics like those used by some gaming companies (as recently covered by Techcrunch), its nice to find voices that help to clarify and provide support for notions of decency that a lot of businesses bring to their customers.

KBSF: Aside from Wahanda, what is the brand that you most admire?

I have always admired Innocent juices for the honesty of their packaging, product and campaigns (except the one where they used the dodgy guy in the moustache). I also like the fact that they are about health & wellness, a lot like Wahanda.

I also really admire what Amazon has done. Incumbents and competitors tried to copy them, Amazon just kept innovating, and eventually the competitors gave up because the DNA of the companies were just different. Listening to Jeff Bezos speak is very inspiring because of his honesty and unwavering attention to the user experience and customer service. Now, when people think online retailing, they immediately think Amazon. My goal for Wahanda is that when people think ‘health, beauty, wellness’, that they think of Wahanda.

Is there any product or service that you want to promote to a bunch of PR people?

I have done enough pimping of Wahanda earlier in the blog. One thing I will say is that if you read this blog and want to buy something on Wahanda and have made it this far, if you use this discount code by the 13th December 2009, you will get 10% off anything purchased from our Wahanda Shop. Just use the code KITTENS at checkout.

KBSF: Kittens, babies, sunsets or flowers?

• Kittens: I find that I prefer watching videos of kittens
• Babies: I love looking at pictures of babies, but only if I know them or their parents
• Sunsets: Nothing is more humbling than watching sunsets (or sunrises) live and in person, and I really enjoy reminiscing over photos of them if I have taken the photos
• Flowers: Giving flowers to someone in person is still quite classically heart stopping because you have to hide them behind your back…you get to experience the fragrance and the reaction it gets.