High-tech spinner

Friday Interview:Galway woman Aedhmar Hynes may well have been destined for a career in theatre. Her sister, Garry, helped to set up the Druid Theatre Company and her late brother, Jerome, was director of the Wexford Opera Festival.

Instead, Hynes's career path took her to the polar opposite of the performing arts - technology. A native of the Galway suburb of Dangan, she now runs Text 100, one of the world's largest technology PR firms, from New York and has advised companies including Xerox, Visa, eBay, Yahoo! and IBM.

Hynes (40) has risen through the ranks of the European PR agency to oversee about $65 million in revenue and 550 employees in 31 offices worldwide - a far cry from Galway's theatre milieu.

Hynes graduated from University College Galway with an arts degree and did a Fás marketing programme before moving to London to join Text 100 in 1990.

Unlike many of her Irish contemporaries at that time, her motive for moving to Britain was not the lack of opportunities for graduates at home but her ambition to live and work in other countries.

"Text 100 was developing offices across Europe, so I got to work in these different countries," an impeccably groomed Hynes says in an interview. "We were young and ambitious."

After helping to establish Text 100 as the dominant technology PR company in Britain and expand its European business, Hynes volunteered in 1997 to set up the agency's first office in the US and exploit the tech boom of the late 1990s in Silicon Valley.

It was a perfect opportunity for Hynes, who had counted Xerox as her main client in Britain and was eager to live in the US.

She moved with her husband and two children to San Francisco and set up an office in Parc, a research and development company in Palo Alto that began as a division of Xerox. Hynes was keen to take advantage of US multinationals' desire to navigate European cultures by hiring PR firms with local knowledge.

"The PR industry has its origins in the US and these firms entered Europe by buying up existing operations and building up a network that way," she says, "but Text 100 wanted to set up its own global network."

Hynes was appointed chief executive of Text 100 in 2000. The timing was dismal - the dotcom bubble began to unravel a year later. "I always wondered whether my predecessor had fantastic vision.

"There was no company that was not affected, but we hadn't been too engaged with dotcom start-ups so my comfort level at the time was the fact that we were working with large companies like Xerox."

Text 100's fortunes took a massive turn for the better in 2002, when the still relatively unknown PR company won the pitch for the biggest global account of the year - IBM. The coup catapulted Text 100 into the industry limelight.

"We were perfectly positioned at that stage as we were setting up our own offices worldwide and we were so strong in technology," Hynes says. "The hallmark of our company was that we were European and all our employees spoke different languages."

After winning the IBM account, Hynes racked up more technology giants to her client list, often by pushing Text 100's niche as one of the few PR agencies with a global presence that specialises in technology.

The firm's main competition comes in the form of Waggener Edstrom, although Text 100 has more offices across the globe.

Hynes also attributes Text 100's success to the company's hiring and retention strategy.

In the US, where most workers are lucky to receive two weeks' annual holiday, Text 100 offers European-style holidays to help attract the brightest and best.

Employees are granted five weeks' vacation after a year with the company and three months' paid sabbatical after six years.

"This differentiates us from other agencies when it comes to hiring great people, who more often than not are not just motivated by money," Hynes says.

"That's what defines my leadership.

"If an employee has a personal issue that they need to take care off, they can have the day off. We have duvet days so people can call in if they don't feel like working, instead of taking a sick day.

"If you hire people with similar values to yourself and treat them with respect, they will repay you twice as much, such as by working weekends when we have to."

Hynes also applies the same flexibility to her own life. This has enabled her to build and run a business while raising four children, a rarity in America's notoriously tough workplace culture, where female business leaders are often expected to sacrifice family life to climb the corporate ladder.

Hynes and her family relocated to New York City two years ago. She believed Text 100 needed to be in America's capital of media and PR to raise the company's profile, but there were personal reasons too.

"I wanted my four children to be closer to Europe. We can now easily fly to Ireland for a weekend."

Hynes was in Ireland recently to address the Public Relations Institute of Ireland on how the Irish PR industry can best prepare and exploit developments in technology.

"Some PR directors feel that unless they have technology clients, they don't need to bother with technology," she says. The industry needs to take note of how technology develops in Ireland, as each culture communicates in different ways.

"For instance, text messaging is much stronger in Europe than it ever was in the US. Research data show that blogging took off in the US after 9/11 as a lot of people felt the need to reach out and share their experiences with others.

"Blogging evolved rapidly because Americans were willing to publish their thoughts. Europeans don't want to share their feelings as much."

The PR industry needs to realise that they have to communicate differently with a "digitally native" generation that has grown up surrounded by technology, Hynes says.

"This generation does not trust the government, religion and institutions they way their parents did.

"This generation is more likely to make a decision based on what their friends say than the newspapers. It's all about peer group discussion on online communities.

"They also have a much stronger right of reply. Instead of just writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper, they can be vocal in so many other ways if they disagree with something."

The channels available to PR firms to distribute information have multiplied, compelling the industry to make the right decision as to how it communicates different messages to the media and the public.

"When I grew up, the house went quiet when the Angelus and the news came on at 6 o'clock," Hynes says.

"This generation is spending as much time online as they do watching TV. Add in blogging, citizen journalism, virtual worlds and community-based information sources like Wikipedia and you have a compelling challenge with communication."

On The Record

Name:Aedhmar Hynes

Position:Chief executive, Text 100 PR

Age:40

Family:Married with four children

Interests:theatre, opera, cooking

Something which might surprise:Originally wanted a career as an artist

Something which you might expect:member of NUI Galway US Board

Why is she in the news?Hynes, whose firm won this year's PR Innovation of the Year award at the industry awards in New York, was in Ireland recently to advise how the Irish PR industry can best prepare and exploit developments in technology.