The financial/business media are bent on getting numbers from companies. So during interactions, the questions which journalists from the financial dailies ask would most probably be like - what is your investment this year? What is your market share? What is your earning this quarter? Earning on a particular product? etc. etc.

Now there are various reasons why some companies wouldn’t want to share these figures. If they are a publicly listed company, they have to be extra careful before speaking out anything publicly. Maybe they are not doing well with one particular product and they don’t want to share any figures on that product. Maybe they don’t have figures on one particular market but have figures of say the APAC region. so what if our clients do not want to share figures? Does it mean they lose out on coverage in the financial media.

Often PR people are caught in between these tussles. One way to wriggle out this is to provide percentages. So for example a company spokesperson can say they are investing say 10% of the global spend in India, or that India contributes so and so percentage to the APAC region and the APAC region in turn contributes so and so percentage to the global earning.

Journalists nowadays seem to be slightly more ok with this approach than in the yesteryears as they seem to increasingly understand that MNCs and publicly listed companies particularly do not want to share figures very openly. It is not a perfect approach but at least something is better than nothing.

Also today there is an increasing space in the financial media for stories on trends and reviews, where we don’t need to share figures. The guest articles and reviews in the Network page of The Economic Times on Thursdays might be some examples. Then there are those occasional personal profiling stories.

What else? Can anybody share some of his/her experiences?