There is rarely an important event where you don’t have a media desk or room. This is usually manned by a well known PR agency, who may have also arranged for computers, Wi-Fi and refreshments for journalists. But are they being resourceful enough to meet the more critical needs of the media present?

The answer could be a resounding NO in most cases. And this is true for events in Delhi, London, Hong Kong, and other parts of the world – from small ones to those with multi-million dollar budgets. The reasons for this conclusion, from personal experience, are:

1. Where are the pictures? Why can’t media be provided pictures of the event real time? Eiter these are not being taken, or are being provided after a few days or weeks. The media needs pictures not only today, but now – especially online ones. And of course, with proper captions. Needs all of two people to manage this.

2. Why can’t speaker lists and bios be updated? It is normal for speakers at events to be changed at the last minute – these changes may not reflect in the conference booklets. What does it take to provide updates printed from a computer? Saves a lot of confusion, follow-up effort and misrepresentation later.

3. Are you serving the 2.0 media? Imagine if blogs and other online media started covering the event in the form of podcasts and videocasts? A whole new audience may connect in the process. All it takes for PR managers is place audio recorders and handycams at conferences, upload the files on a server and pass on the links. Media can do their own editing if they want to. Would also be useful to those who missed attending the event personally.

4. Conference summaries? The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is quite good at this – they have someone covering conferences and issuing releases based on the proceedings. Particularly useful when there are multiple sessions on at any given time. Surely this can be done by others too?

No doubt PR agencies bill their clients good amount – surely they can do more than just acting as a registration desk. In fact, the PR agencies themselves would be the biggest beneficiaries: The quality and quantity of media coverage can go up substantially if just a few of the above simple things are taken care of. And they can bill the clients for the additional services – this sum would generally be a small fraction of the overall budget of the event which a client should be able to justify.

Ajay Jain is also a freelance journalist and publishes his blogs AjayJain.com and TechGazing.com. He can be contacted at ajay@ajayjain.com

Tech Tags: PR public+relations india