Corve DaCosta – coast to coast ~

I met Prudence Simpson around my birthday this year. It feels like more than a year though. When I thought of having this feature called the Last Word I had to include Prudence Simpson – the tweeter behind Jamaica Pegasus on Twitter. As users of social media we are so caught up with the updates, tweets and replies that we forget the real people behind each profile. I have come to appreciate Prudence because of her genuine personality. Many will respect her professionally, but, on a personal level, she is a wonderful woman with a big heart that shines through all the time. I think Ms. Simpson (that’s what I call her) can take some credit for what my blog has become today. Her push for always reaching out and being novel inspired me to try and do the same with my own content (I doubt she knows that little fact).

Today, I present Prudence Simpson, Director of Sales and Marketing at the Jamaica Pegasus. Later, we will celebrate at the Jamaica Pegasus in the Gardens at their second Tweetup, hope to see you there.

Corve: What was your childhood like?

Prudence Simpson: [chuckles] Oh my gosh… I grew up in Clarendon. I was a wonderful, happy child. I attended primary school at May Pen Primary and I went to Glenmuir. I was very active and involved person.

CD: How was Glenmuir?

PS: Glenmuir was a great experience. It was just a wonderful high school. I was in the choir. So, I did all the things and went to every festival. Festival was a big thing for me. I did speech festival, dance festival. I was always going, even if I wasn’t taking part. By the time I finished Glenmuir, I remember I used to pride myself that I knew every parish in Jamaica, except Hanover.  By the time I graduated, I hadn’t gone to Hanover. It was a big thing.

CD: You travelled all over?

PS: Yes! I remember us going to Munro to play a cricket match. I was always doing those things. Yes, that meant a lot to me. I always had this people thing.

CD: Who would you say was most influential?

PS: Throughout life?

CD: Yes.

PS: You know, when I went to CAST, I did Business Administration and my Marketing Lecturer, Carol Anglin, I think, is still the one person that has had the most influence on, where I am today. She was just such a great lecturer – very disciplined. She’s the one person I can think back to who has changed me the most.

CD: How has motherhood changed you?

PS: [laughter] I haven’t changed. I don’t know. I guess I’m a fun mother you know. The funnest mother in the world. When I think back on how my mother raised me. She was really strict. You know? I haven’t been that kind of mother. But in some ways I think this generation has failed. When you look at how young people today don’t have the same values. I think somehow we failed, but I have happy children. I think I could have done a better job but I don’t know if I’ve changed. I’m still the same.

CD: Do you have an open relationship with your children?

PS: Yeah, we do, my son has his girlfriend and he brings her over. We have a great relationship and my husband is like that as well. But we done what we could for them, given them a good education. I think I could have done a better job.

CD: You’re a senior executive of one of Jamaica’s top hotels. Are there challenges you’ve found in this position as a woman?

PS: As a woman, I don’t think so. I don’t see those barriers. If they are there, I really don’t see them. Luckily, in this organisation there are more women at the top. Although we haven’t had a female GM [for general manager], we don’t feel that the gender bias is evident here. There are other challenges that certainly have nothing to do with the fact that I am a woman.

CD: How would you characterize your leadership style? Do the employees run from you?

PS: No sah! [chuckles] Nobody runs from me. I’m cool. I have an “open door” policy. It works for the most part, I think. The problem with my style of leadership is that, when you need to discipline, sometimes it poses a challenge. But I’m easy. I set my barriers, they know them, people deliver and I assess them… and I think it works. It works because of my personality. I see other managers here who don’t have it and they get what they need to get done. But I think people appreciate my style.

CD: What was the experience like working on the ICC World Cup Cricket in the Caribbean?

PS: How do you know that? How do you know I worked on cricket? [asks comically with an air of surprise] It was the experience of a lifetime. It was awesome. I was employed to a company based in Singapore. I didn’t work directly with ICC so I worked with a company called Nimbus Sport which was the company that had the rights for sponsorship –  the television rights and sponsorship rights. Actually, it was a company owned by Rupert Murdock. I reported to a lady that was based in South Africa, and a boss in Singapore. My immediate boss was French so it was a whole new world of different cultures and working across time zones. When we were going to bed South Africa was waking up. I think what I got out of Cricket World Cup was the passion for the internet and how to use it effectively to run the world because we used Skype exclusively and that was in 2005. We were doing conference calls, emails… we had a paperless office. I was in charge of sponsorship for the Caribbean so I was selling sponsorship to Trinidad, Barbados and North America. Those were the persons I was interacting with – the heads of marketing for sport companies. So it was an opportunity. I firmly believe that young people should travel. I think that one of the limitations that Jamaican people have is that we don’t get enough international exposure. If I could go back and live my life over again, I would have worked in another country. But having not had that opportunity, Cricket World Cup gave me that and more. It just gave me this opportunity to be working with people from India. I remember one morning I was on a conference call negotiating with Scotia Bank and they were in Canada with all of their executives doing the deal. My boss was in Singapore, the head of the company; my immediate boss was in France, Gabby, who was the legal person, was in South Africa. I was sitting in an office on St Lucia Avenue and we were on this call. Of course, these were negotiations at the highest level and we were just about clinching the Scotia deal. When the call was finished and I hung up, I said, “Oh my God! I would do this job for free!” It was just an awesome experience sitting and talking with all these people, negotiating deadlines, everybody back and forth and I had a lot of information because I was the local contact. It was just great. So I came out of that on a high. I know that when the history books are written, it probably didn’t deliver. Of course the organisation that was developed didn’t pay enough attention to marketing, understanding the Jamaican culture and putting that in. It came with the strictures from the ICC and they didn’t change a lot of that. But I would do it all again tomorrow.

Corve DaCosta dropping by Prudence's office to celebrate her birthday.

CD: You’ve been tweeting behind the scenes at the Jamaica Pegasus on Twitter, has it been challenging managing the page, and ensuring the regular duties are completed?

PS: Yesterday morning my sister called and said she saw a feature on CNN that said Twitter is the new caffeine. People get addicted to Twitter and I am addicted.[laughter] I don’t want to miss a tweet. I think last week was the first week when two days went by and I didn’t read a tweet. I’m now learning that you don’t have to read every tweet and in life you can go back and look at people’s timelines and see what they had to say. But at the Pegasus, we’ve had to embrace social media-internet marketing. Before Cricket World Cup, I worked here and then I left and came back. When I became Marketing Manager back in 2001, I did over the organisational chart for the department and I created a post called Sales Executive – Internet Marketing because I’ve always known, especially for this travel industry, that the internet was the way to go. All the surveys were showing that people were increasingly booking their travel online. So it was very important to have your website. Of course most of our bookings come through Expedia and Travelocity. So the internet is something I’ve always felt would increasingly get more of my marketing budget. Whenever I hear anybody’s coming here to bring down anybody to offer a course in social media, chances are I’m going to say: “Yes. I will sponsor you.” That’s how I get to negotiate to get our staff to go to the courses. So I went to one – I think that’s where I met Ingrid Riley – and I was introduced to Twitter in that forum. I couldn’t understand the concept of it and so I went back and did some research and shortly after, we started. I got a lot of help from Mr. Bremner’s son Cliff because he’s really the one who came around and showed me Twitter. I think it’s good, I think we’re using it well. I saw one of Ingrid’s post entitled Why Jamaican companies should stay away from Social Media. I read it and it meant a lot to me because a lot of times I think I’ve gone ahead of the organisation. So, although the organisation is saying yes we embrace it and I have a lot autonomy to do my tweets and my TweetUps, at the end of the day, when this new audience comes in, I don’t rest well at night because I know out there where the service is delivered they’re really not at the level that I’d like them to be. But we are taking strides and we’ve brought in trainers to do more training to try to sensitize them. In a sense, I’ve gone about it back ways, but its a pull strategy because the fact that I am out there doing it and my GM is seeing that and everybody is seeing it, they are seeing the new crowd that is coming in and they are realising that “Hey! We can’t sit back. It’s not the same old fogies coming through the door anymore and these people are more demanding.” So, yeah! I am excited about it.

CD: Were you surprised about the feedback you received with the second tweetup?

PS: It blew us out of the water! It took us only 8 hours to have over 250 people. We knew our followership had grown, but that told us that people are tweeting. They are actually sitting there and reading and knowing what’s going on, you know they are not getting left behind. People are excited about it; a lot of kids but a lot of professionals. I’ve found it a new way to meet people. Advertising is getting less of my dollars because I am reaching people in a more personal, direct way. So people might comment and say “what a way they do a lot of giveaways”… I saw @sweetpersona. She went to some hotel in the country last week and sent a simple tweet saying “Lawd I wonder if di bed big and fluffy like Pegasus.” Those things are powerful! That’s a personal experience reaching a whole heap of people. You can’t discount that.

CD: What has been your greatest success although you’re still on your journey?

PS: I think that the thing I feel most satisfied about is that when I took over as Marketing Manager we came out of a period of five years of straight losses. In the first year we reversed it and since then we have not had a year when we’ve made a loss. I don’t know about this year because the ‘Dudus’ thing affected us badly. This quarter was bad and a lot of it was that we never put our cost-cutting things in place ’cause normally, when occupancy falls, we do layoffs or we put the staff on four-day work weeks. When the Dudus thing came, we continued to operate with this very little… So, you know, the back of the bus thing. We’ll come out of it. Yeah! I was really happy when the trend was reversed. We’ve been able to weather the storm.

CD: What’s a typical day for you?

PS: I come in for a meeting at nine – we have a briefing with the senior managers every morning at nine. I’m not a morning person so I’m always late. So I rush here to get to my briefing and then during the day I am constantly ‘doing’ people – on the phone taking calls, meeting and greeting people coming in to the restaurant, hosting somebody for something. So my day is a lot of interaction and then it is not until 6 o’clock that I really get to sit down to clear up my to-do list, emails, my proposals. A lot of my job is doing that because we have 300 rooms to fill. A lot of it has to be group business. That’s our strategy to attract groups and I don’t like to start a month without having some group business on the books. So, I spend a lot of my time doing proposals and chasing. And then in the evenings I get a lot of invitations to social events.  I try to go to the ones put on by the embassies. So, yeah, that’s pretty much my day. So usually when I am going full throttle I am here until 9 o’clock at nights. I have long days.

CD: The series is called the last word because each participant is given the chance to close the interview with whatever he or she would like to say. For your last word can you tell us about the Tweetup that will be on September 3, 2010? Is there anything you can dish on the event?

PS: You know this Tweetup thing is something where I really just want people to come through our doors. This one is going to be in another location –  in the Gardens. I really want to have good weather because I want people to appreciate the outdoors and the fact that we have this venue.  The TweetUp cannot fall below the last one. The worst thing that could happen is for people to leave and say “Lawd, it neva nice like di laas wan.” I also want to give people something so I am working on what is going to be the high point of the evening. I am trying to find a presenter to leave something in people’s minds that they don’t just see this thing as a Friday evening party. This is really it so we are not putting pressure on anybody.

THE END*****

GRAND PRIZE

At the end of the LAST WORD interview series, which runs from September 3-10, 2010, a lucky winner will be randomly selected from among those who commented on the blog or provided at least one mention or retweet on Twitter. That very fortunate person will attend the ultra-chic and über-fabulous Tuesday on the Grill weekly event at the Pegasus in the company of three other persons of his or her choosing. Comment and retweet to win your shot at this lovely dining experience for four.

SURPRISE PRIZES

In addition, there will be sporadically awarded prizes throughout the week, but you won’t know when, why or who until the announcement is made… so stay tuned!

You may contact the Jamaica Pegasus at:

Telephone: (876) 926-3691-9

Fax: (876) 929-0593

Address:81 Knutsford Boulevard
Kingston 5
Jamaica W.I.

Website: www.jamaicapegasus.com

Twitter: @JamaicaPegasus

Follow her boss Eldon Bremner at @GMJamPeg