The Financial Express today carried a funny snippet in its Eavesdropper column (Editorial Page) called Catch the scribe! For those who missed it, read this-

PR guys in the IT and telecom sectors are having a tough time in Delhi. With the boom in these sectors, often four-five press conferences fall on the same day. Often, the same journalists are covering both sectors, resulting in a dearth of media at these press meets. So, PR professionals have now started accompanying journalists to other press meets, to keep track of them. For instance, three IT meets happened on Thursday. Oracle PR arrived at each, to ferry journos, in a chauffeur-driven car, to their event. Some days earlier, at a Reliance press meet, HP guys hung around. With dollars pouring in and new BPOs popping every week, its a daily affair.

I remember till last year, I used to hoard journalists myself, pick them up from other press conferences (even as the PR people from the other agency looked on with shock) and send Qualis loads to my own from there (or from INS or ITO). What could I say? When you got to do, you got to do. Doing this is not so simple as it sounds though. Depends on how much rapport you share with the journalists. If you can’t handle it smoothly, you could well be humiliated with no defence in front of everyone at somebody else’s press conference.

But well, there’s one thing that I feel personally, young people in PR need to do something like this at least once in their career. Forget the client servicing cheese for a while. This is a lesson in aggression and hard selling. The moment you can pull off a feat like this successfully, it’s a step achieved in your media relations prowess and a story that you will tell your juniors one day.

Talking about feats, I also remember how once no journalists turned up at my press conference, and my client (4-5 of them including the MD, VP, and Marketing Managers of a big liquor company) kept on giving me the looks, while I fiddled away with my cell phone trying to look busy. What could be a worse situation than that? So keep up with the hunt.

Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, India, India Public Relations, India PR, Media Relations,