Search the web today and you can hardly find any common website on the India PR industry. The PRCAI website demands you to fill in long forms almost at every page. The only visible place was the PR Watch section at Exchange4media.com, but they hardly seem to bother to update their site. The stories seem to come after long slumbers. There are few web-blogs but again it was unsatisfactory.

And whatever was there, the talk only seem to focus on PR can do this and PR can do that – the Al Ries stuff that we have read in our books over and over again. The dialogues were sweet like Yash Chopra movies. There was lot of corporate air but little substance. There was not any real life PR- about what the hundreds of young and middle-aged PR professionals go through the profession everyday or on what can they do to optimise their abilities. It seems like those who were talking are commenting on some other nice good profession that resembles PR.

I have an European client who conducts a global PR agencies conference call every week and he makes sure that whatever the agencies are doing are getting him tangible results for his business. He emphasizes the point that how they were making a sales pitch and how they secured that sale due to a good media story on his product that his customer was very impressed with. That was the type of PR he wanted – support sales and nothing else. No long term brand building and moulding of perception and all that nonsense. For him long term means no work. He needs quarterly financial results and wants to know how much has PR contributed in his achieving that. This is just an example.

The point is let’s get into the PR for ‘now’ and the ‘present’. No more big talking.

Also, enough damage has been done over the years in over promising the clients, ass-licking journalists, and not doing any thinking at all but being the smiling yes-men and yes-women of everyone. It’s time for a change!

So finally coming back to the point of why this blog, it’s about time we discuss the real PR. Lets discuss what can we do to optimize our performance better in our everyday PR and thus in the process grow the industry. Let’s forget the competition for a while and take this as a R&D project for the benefit of the entire PRkind in India. Otherwise the agencies will keep on continuing their own little competitions of who secures which client and who gets to invite the journalist to lunch.

Think a bit about all the trainees and newcomers who come in with a lot of optimism about PR. Let’s not shatter them anymore and build for them a profession that they have dreamt of in their post graduate institutes.

Of course we have all our respect to the old timers- the professionals who brought in the profession to the country. But the industry, technology, and the thinking have evolved. Needless to add, they must be realizing all these and we can learn a lot from them with a little tweak from our sides.

We don’t plan to have big PR mantras or philosophies here. This is just a place for musings of people who happen to work in the industry under the great PR maharathis of the country. This is just a place to share tiny bit of information that everyone can benefit from. Apologies to anyone that this writing might offend and if it did, it was unintentional. Ciao for now.

Read all of Hobbit’s posts – 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,
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