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Remembering what scribes wrote in their previous stories - a media relations tip
By Editor on Nov 6, 2006 in mediarelations
Well I found this story in the Sunday ET about how corporate CEOs, politicians, and needless to mention PR professionals reading and remembering certain newspaper columns and quoting these whenever they meet the respective columnists. This rarely fail to impress the scribe. It does not take too long for the feel-good factor to trickle down into positive reportage. We are all human…went the story.
Some more from the article….The PR guy told me after his nth drink that he made it a point to read all the bylined articles and columns penned by the scribes working for a newspaper before he ventured into its office.
‘Some of you,’he said, ‘like to take home the gifts which are dished out at press-conferences. And some of you’ll consider yourself so gifted that the only way of influencing or impressing you’ll is by quoting the stuff you write! You’ll remind me of my seven-year-old son whose day is made each time the teacher scribbles ‘Very Good’ on his homework!’
On first read, I couldn’t agree more. A good media relations lesson. So whenever I meet any journalist, I’ll probably tell him what a great article he wrote the other day on so and so.
Then I wonder if this was the right approach. Playing on the scribes’ emotions to get a good story out. Stuffs like this make us question the basis definition of the PR profession. PR seems to hang on a fine balance of personal relationships and creative thinking. Personal relationships become a burden if we just keep on harping for stories without any substantial plot, yet it opens doors for us. Quickly. And it saves us in crisis situations. But again is that entirely the foundation of the PR profession? What about creating, organising, and arranging the messages of an organisation and communicate them to the outside world in a manner that will benefit the organisation? (Well, we all have our own definitions. That was just one I felt like writing at the moment.)
Whatever way, good column, Mr. Krishnan. I know how to approach you next time 
Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, India, India PR,
On Nov 6, 2006, meech said:
Hello again. i wrote last week asking if anyone has tips to finding a decent media list as i working from North America placing a news story and websites there do not provide very much contact details. Although i am making my way through it by calling general numbers, i cannot find general numbers for ET or Times of India anywhere so cannot call news desks - can anyone provide me with with these? Any help would be appreciated. Thank you kindly.
On Nov 7, 2006, Angus Young said:
Hey hobbit, firsly great blog and to all ye respondents, great comments.
Dudes & dudettes, isn’t it that at the end of the day, it all boils down to coverage. So even after making a great strategy presentation on key message aligning & other forms of PR gobbledegook, the client will ask for number of clips published. So maybe clients need to be taught what PR can really do for them.
On Nov 7, 2006, Deepak Aneja said:
@Angus, Bang!!!
Yes, Quantity scores high than Quality, here in India. “Client must be taught what PR can do”, for this we need to MEASURE the PR.
One thing is clear to me; PR Analysis has failed to get on
. Sure, clients want to talk about how well things
the PR agenda
are going and they even want charts showing what a great job is being done for the money. But the sad truth is that PR MEASUREMENT still doesn’t command a meaningful part of most company’s budgets.
Furthermore none of those that do measure have a well defined budget for measurement when planning programs.
A broader look at ANALYSIS / MEASUREMENT shows that many people do use firms like Delahaye or Eikona but even then from what I can tell the PR staff tend to pay little or no attention to the results these services provide unless of course they think it will help with some internal presentation to justify the funding of the department. We shouldn’t blame our clients for the sorry state of affairs here.
After all, how much effort do most agencies put in to being measured?
We are the ones who make money from doing PR so we are the ones who should make sure our clients use tools to make sure that what we do is actually worth the money.
My own view on this is that we need an industry standard form of
measurement in the way the ad industry has. This means we need to
know what we are to measure?, how often we measure it? etc…We also
need to start to establish an agreed way to invest in measurement.
I would love to see such measurement be carried out in such a way that work done in PR could measured alongside work done in other areas of marketing so that we can finally start to see just “HOW PR STACKS UP AGAINST OTHER FORMS OF MARKETING.
The current thinking on measurement seems to be to let everyone just do their own thing. Let’s face it this isn’t working. Now I know some PR people don’t want measurement because:
A) They’ll have to do some work for the fees they charge otherwise
they’ll be found out.
B) Funds applied to measurement will likely be taken out of the money they would otherwise have been given to run programs, host lunches etc.
C) They argue that PR is to hard to measure accurately anyway, so why bother? My response to these people is if we don’t adopt measurement then we can expect PR to lag disciplines like Advertising for many years to come.
I’d love to see publications like USP Age, Pitch or PR Week as well
as organizations like the PRCAI take these issues on and really move the needle.
ANYONE ELSE WANT TO SEE THIS HAPPEN? [/:)]
Deepak!
On Nov 7, 2006, hobbit said:
Hi meech, ET and TOI are from the Times Group of publications sharing the same office. Their general board number at New Delhi is +91(11)23303000. In case you need any further info, do drop me a mail at hobbit.hob@gmail.com and I’ll provide you all info I can.
Thanks for writing in, Angus. We have been talking about client education here and need to focus on it as you say.
Deepak, I have had some email exchanges with one reader recently on PR measurement. It is indeed something we need to discuss. Personally, I’m for some sort of standardisation in the industry.
On Nov 8, 2006, Deepak said:
Right Hobbit, Benchmarking is essential.