As communication gets more complicated and cluttered, confusing and converged into one, I wonder how it is impacting the cultural fabric of our country. Is it impacting in the desired manner? Are we reaching out to the desired target audiences? Are we confusing mass culture with niche metro culture? Are we getting too carried away by the homogenized look of the masses and forgetting that we are a multi cultural, highly heterogeneous, hugely diverse and an enthusiastic populace that is devouring messages by the minute?

How informed are we as sources of communications about our own cultural intricacies ?

Too many questions actually… and they don’t necessarily bother me, but keep me asking for more, wondering how we could customize communication for every bit of that audience.

When you talk of digital communications, it is more or less assumed, (correct me if I am wrong) that it is a homogenized mass of audience. So you could be sitting anywhere in the world, of any religion, region, caste or community, the moment you are on Digital platform, the way you react to messages and information is pretty much predictable. But that is not so in the case of traditional media. There was a time when it was compulsory to understand folk cultures and integrate that in communication plans to reach out to target audiences. I am not sure about how many today are even aware of the various forms of communication, which trust me even tooday are not redundant and are very dynamic and effective forms of communication.

Traditionally we are still very rudimentary in the way we absorb information. We are driven culturally in how we absorb information; there is lot of semiotics at play and communication is multi layered as you tread deeper into the country. The sensitivities are different, issues and priorities are different, geographies are disputed and history is questioned. And yet in all of this resides the consumer we are targeting and the stakeholder of our Clients’ companies. How do we reach out to them?

I don’t know how many of us in the PR or rather communication’s business understands the intricacies of our own cultures? Of how diverse we are, what we read, what we like, what we watch and what we need to know… Knowing the regional media list is one thing…tapping audiences on social networking sites is another thing, but reaching out to the diaspora in their own setting and convincing them of our Client’s profiles and needs is a different ball game altogether.

I would like to leave this discussion open ended. I am not an expert to conclude it in any way. For many of you digital media could be bridging the gap between the heterogeneous mass of audiences… for many of you, traditional media and folk media may still be doing the trick of reaching out to the last man standing…the choice is ours, the call is ours to take…but I would be sad to know that we are homogenizing India to believe that we all have access to internet, we all can read and write and all those who don’t have either of the above i.e. have an internet connection and are literate are not the ones using the goods we sell and services we offer.

Customizing our messages is just the first step…finding alternate forms of media (am not talking of new age media) could just be step two.

It’s appraisal time almost everywhere and its also the time when many companies fight the ghost of attrition.

Exit interviews can be varying…compensation, work pressure, work culture, relationship with colleagues and leadership issues as well.

Leadership seems to be one of the most talked about issues these days…just about anyone and everyone wants to talk about it and give gyan about what they think leadership is all about…

Succession plans, motivation plans, incentive plans et al…everyone takes its shelter under the leadership plan…

Here’s my take on it….

Leadership to me is about taking onus…take onus for evrything that is not right with your team, and give away the credit to everything that your team does to them. Leadership is not whether you take the right decision alsways, but it is about taking a decision and sticking to it, come what may, till the very end, whether or not anyone supports you. That will help your colleagues garner faith in you on grounds that you have the guts to stand up for yourself, for your values, principles and for what you think.

Leadership is all about understanding talent, identifying them and giving them opportunity…but there is a catch here…everyone gives opportunities, but good leadership skills mean whether you can give the opportunity to someone at the right time. Opportunity, reward, incentive, and an appraisal to your colleagues if not given at the right time and in the manner justified means of little value to your team. A leader should be willing to take risks with his talents…weigh talent versus experience and not justify everything with experience….Give that 25yr old bloke a chance to lead a team of ten…he has the talent, the intelligence, the attitude and most importantly, he wants to do it…so give him that opportunity…you take that risk…and then stand by him….support him, guide him and see him blossom…And then see the way you motivate an entire floor of people since they will realsie that you have the guts to bring out a talent and go out of the routine to create another leader…it will show that you are not insecure about your teams, it will show that you have the faith and most importantly it will make everyone look up to you as a mentor, a guiding light, a LEADER!

Incentivising and rewarding is also a responsibility of the leader…but to think that all incentives and rewards have to be in the form of money, to think that everyone of your team member will be happy with that is not a right notion. For some, giving more work is an incentive, for some giving them added responsibilities is an incentive, reward someone by promoting them out of turn, acknolwdge someone by writing a mail of appreciation that goes to the entire organisation also means a hell lot.

Appraisal is not about nit-picking on what your team cannot or has not done; it is about yes, pointing out what they could have done, but that should just be a five per cent of the appraisal review… An appraisal review should be about how good he or she has performed, what they have done beyond their KRAs and how they have taken initiatives which the management has noticed and appreciates. As far as pointing out gaps in performance, that should not be done on the final appraisal table, that should be a regular practice, a quarterly practice…this is something I realised in my days of teaching….when I was teaching in college, to kids who were appearing for their board exams, I could not wait for them to appear for their prelim tests and then tell them that weren’t good students…as someone at the helm of their welfare and academic growth, it was my duty to tell them that much before any exams took place so that they could improve with every passing test and then triumph in their final tests. Isn’t that how appraisals should be done too?

Leadership is managing people, taking risks, motivation and inspiration, but most of all, it is about you, what you stand for, what you aspire to be and about that collective vision that you have for your team and for yourself. We are leaders in our own circles of responsibilities…to a team of one, ten, twenty or fifty people and some leaders of an entire organization….so how much of the above are you doing?

Are you a LEADER yet?!

For most times as PR professionals we are conditioned to think beat wise…the same way as journalists do…and the conditioning more often than not finally concludes itself into a media list for a specific beat and there ends all possibilities of communications…I think so. I will tell you why.

Now let’s say for example, you are assigned a particular Client in the infrastructure space. The first step is to work on a media list of the media covering the infrastructure beat. Similarly you are assigned a Client in the education beat; likewise you start working on a media list for that space. What happens in that process is that we leave out possibilities of generating stories for that Client in other opportunities that are not necessarily related directly to him. But he or she can still have some scope of potential talents and Clients and can have a say and just because we limit ourselves only to think beat wise, the Client loses out on visibility opportunities.

Now consider a situation where let’s say you are assigned a Client in the Aviation space…Now ideally you would only prepare a basic Aviation Media list…But lets say you increase the scope of your media lists to HR, Media and Marketing, Education, CSR and along with that chart out an audience map to see if you can reach out to your TG through alternate and new age media as well as other routes in the communication space. We all in situations of ultimate need and dire adversity do end up working on all those media lists for the same Client…but how about preparing it when the Client is signing you on.

So the Aviation Client could contribute in HR stories related to training, retention, requirements and capabilities for the job, profiling of HR spokespeople who are managing such massive talent in their fields, since Aviation is related directly to people over and above just being a part of the travel and tourism industry. The Client could find mention in Educational supplements in stories related to Institutes from where they hire talent, how to prepare to get into the Aviation industry etc. The Client could find mention in Media and Marketing stories where he could comment on media spends and ad spends on their ATL initiatives, the mass media strategy to reach out to their TG etc…

All am trying to say is that think beyond one particular beat…since most industries today overlap, and work in mutual coexistence. Most organisations today find themselves dabbling in multifarious businesses and all you have to understand or find one converging point and make it relevant for the journalist to think that he should get your Client to participate in a story that not necessarily is directly related to him.

But trust me it all still makes sense…since the TG is not one homogenised group of people…you never know who you could touch and connect with and fructify the purspose of being a communications consultant by availing an opportunity to your Client to give him a relevant platform to get his POV across…it just needs a little bit of your time to see the relevance and think beyond one master beat specific media list.

If you are already doing it…GREAT If not, may be now is the time to start

It’s not been so much difficult writing this but to get people to open up and give their point of view …and since everyone has a right to privacy, that’s a request which has been made to me by most people I spoke to and I will adhere to that. The topic here is about mis-behaviour and mis demeanor with PR professionals by Clients and sometimes journalists too. PR as a profession has long been considered to be a profession that heavily relies on wining and dining and guess it is that perception that drives forward the intent of some people to think that it is okay to act fresh or make advances to people who belong to this profession. Albeit I would like to deny personally that that happens only in PR, since I do know that there are people with lewd mentality every where and you meet them wherever you go. It is how you deal with it, what you come across and the action you take against the person is what matters the most.

I have been speaking to branch heads, team leaders and heads of organisations I know to whom I posed the question in terms of what would they do if someone from their team was treated in any way that was vulgar and sick. Almost all of them said that they would immediately take cognisance of it and bring it to the notice of the senior most people in the organisation both at the Client’s end as well as the agency. And if after warnings, the problem persisted, they would give up the account no matter what. Some of them have given up accounts because the problem persisted.

But again the discussion is not so black and white…mis behaviour, mis demeanor and harassment is not always one sided. It is very much a function of how each one of us conducts ourselves, how we behave, how we talk, our mannerisms, the signals we pick and give out and if there is anything that makes the other person feel that one is ‘available’ issues such as these crop up. However there have also been instances when guys have been harassed by female Clients and that’s when I realised that gender issues are no more about just women…they are beyond all lines and rules…it’s all individualistic and very dependant on situations and people themselves.

Some rules that I try to follow as a girl in this profession….

• Never go alone for Client meetings or media rounds unless you know the people really well

• Always go with someone along and have the team anyways with you….so that you are not just in good company but also do not have to come back and summarise the meeting details to your team

• Try to meet Clients and Media in their offices and if you are meeting them outside for lunch or snack meet at a place which is more fun, casual and crowded instead of restaurants with a certain ambience

• Dress appropriately…. This is a profession of not just overt communication processes but of informal, subliminal and behavioral communication. Dress decently to not attract any unwanted attention

• Be professional in your behaviour and conduct • If in spite of all this, you are faced with an uncomfortable situation, do not shy away from talking about it, but bring it up to the notice of your seniors

• Do not get hysterical while reporting about the incident but state facts and get both parties involved

At the end of the day, stand up for yourself and if you think no one is taking an action against the unfair treatment, take a decision that protects your integrity and self esteem. Since nothing is more important than your self esteem.

Madhavi Mukherjee

The Indian PR industry was livid last week what with numbers being thrown at them which do not belong to them…bus kya… there is something called research and credible source of information and the so called body who made the numbers public did not care about either of it…

There are respectable people and organizations who make up this industry and even bigger Clients who align themselves to the industry. By publishing wrong or inflated figures, the body is not doing good to anyone in the industry. It only makes them less believable.

This gives us all the more reason to take an onus on how we represent the inudustry, on taking a stance to collate and generate statistics and facts that can be made available to everyone for reference. To let everyone know that the PR industry is growing, that there are experts who are ceaselessly working towards creating brands that make good read as global case studies, that there are more youngsters today that are eager to join this industry, that there is growing acceptance and respect by the media fraternity for the PR professionals, that there are organisations that have innovated on services and have taken PR to the next level of an integrated communications service…

For all of us who are livid, irritated and think this report was not just misleading but utter rubbish, have an assignment to fulfill…

The assignment to get the points across…

Just a thought…Can all of us combined send an open letter to the editor of the publication who carried the report stating the facts and getting some authentic data out! Coz many may refer to this report and that surely is not the best reference reckoner, to my mind.

Cheers

Madhavi

Clients paying Peanuts?!

Missed this space in the past couple of weeks…was all over the place with events, plans and new business pitches.

Now that am back was too restless to wait for my turn over the weekend.  So am back with my thoughts.

Sometime ago I had written about how it was important for the media to understand the importance of PR as an industry and respect its professionals. And how without their help it would be difficult to give PR it’s due importance. But there is one more entity who plays an equal role and needs to give PR it’s dues, which I mean literally and that is Clients!

As much as we may all want but pitch fees is still utopia to expect but what is not Utopian and is even justified is for Clients to agree to give PR agencies at least the fee they so deserve and not haggle over monies. Am sure all senior PR professionals would have experienced this at various points in time at new business presentations. The plans and concepts presented are seldom just the ordinary and I know that many of us burn the midnight oil, brainstorm and research a lot to present the best of pitch concepts and plans. The Client is all too eager and excited to lap it up the first instance…but the moment the commercials are put across the table the Client cringes to an extent to make you feel as if you have asked for the moon. As much as the fees may be, trust me, PR is still asking for peanuts as compared to all the money that the Client spends in other forms of communication. When you are invited for a pitch you are told that the brand is incomplete without you, which we agree…then why the discomfort to pay the right dues?

The haggling goes on for days on end…(am sure to get a lot of …Madhavi, it is a part and parcel of this profession..comments) but what am saying is it is not fair! People negotiate and renegotiate…they want all regions, they want dedicated resources, they want all the activities mentioned in the pitch and then they confess about menial budgets for PR. Why should you have menial budgets for PR? Why shouldn’t you understand the long term positive effects and the equity you will enjoy as a brand after a successful PR campaign and allocate budgets for PR likewise?Why would you not understand that it takes a lot of effort, a 360 degree understanding of various media operations, people skills, industry knowledge and a news sense to get your brand the required limelight…so why would you not pay?!

And the even better part is that when Clients do agree to a commercial, they start negotiating on the size and position of coverage, when it will appear, the headlines and content?! Suddenly one wonders if the Client is equating PR to Media buying?!

Even while the PR professionals study and increase their competency to understand the Client’s domain and communicate to the Media, just as we all expect the Media to respect us for what we do and not treat us as mindless mediators…we also need the support of Clients to understand that PR is a knowledge exercise… Public Relations is the Art of communicating with the masses and formulating a Scientific approach to reach out to your target audience to enable the publics have better understanding of an organisations’ objectives and intention thereby building a favourable image.

It’s a humble request to all the Clients all over who engage or want to engage PR teams and professionals…Do not haggle and negotiate to an extent to drain the communications experts of their enthusiasm and eagerness to work for you. When you are agreeing to a retainer or project fee, you are respecting the talent, the ideas and the resources that is being dedicated to build your brand. It is not a high perk, high paying, high on revenues and billing industry. But that does not mean the work and effort, the brains and sweat are any less…so just do the needful…Give PR it’s Dues

Cheers

Madhavi Mukherjee

PR se Pyar!

Am writing a day early this week since I am out of town tomorrow and may not be able to put up something for Monday….

The cue to this week’s write up comes from Tushar’s write up… Love for this profession.

I am not sure what was in my mind when I joined PR to make it my career. I have been a student of communications throughout my college life. I graduated in Communication and Extension Education and then pursued a Master’s degree in Communication Studies and trust me… it was all for the love of communication or rather…Connection. Communication is about connection! My innate need to stay connected and reach out to as many people drove me to delve deep into what this faculty had to offer. Communicating with people of varied languages in the absence of a common language, in the absence of literary skills, in different cultures; in different socio economic and ethnic groups…it enticed me all. And while many thought that I would join Advertising, I did not. I taught Advertising in my tenure as Lecturer in Wilson College but yet my fascination was in becoming a Public Relations professional. The whole idea of cultivating a brand to achieve a position of faith in the minds of the target audience and cultivating relationships and friendships excited me. I had no idea of PR when I joined except that I knew my writing skills and my interest in working on Communication Strategies would be my biggest asset. And I grew!

Am proud of whatever little I have made out of myself and am grateful solely to this profession for giving me a platform as big as this. We as Communications Consultant and PR professionals are the only source of guidance to our Clients to help them understand the complexities of the mass media. We sit across the table with CEOs, MDs (when most of the times people within an organization do not get to meet these people at the helm of affairs) Corporate Communications Heads, Vice Presidents and are given the responsibility to explain how to reach out to target audiences. Isn’t it absolutely wonderful?!

PR is not just about press releases and conferences. We are making a mistake if we get entrapped in PR tools… …we need to realize that the way the world perceives our Client is solely in our hands. On the Client’s side we meet people whom we have probably grown up watching them on television or reading about them, we meet people who embellish the boardrooms of the largest democracy, we meet the brightest of minds who are oiling the nation’s economy everyday. That is one part of our world. The second group of people is the Media…again the brilliance of whose pen gives our Clients the shelf life to become a name in history. They are the ones who are meticulously helping us all the way to grow our Client’s name, create brands out of them, heighten their market value and most importantly the Media is the one who by their enquiries, questions, research and analysis push us towards knowledge. They get irritated when we know less, they love us when we are well versed in our business…It’s a team work…the team is Media and Us…the objective is building Client’s perception. The revulsion of the Media towards PR professionals is hardly because they are competing with us for anything…No! The angst is because they want us to do better and we don’t prepare well enough.

I love this profession for giving me this platform, for getting me introduced to people of such high intellectual repute (Clients and Media) and most importantly I love it because it helps me Communicate, helps me connect and reach out!

Cheers

Madhavi

Very recently the Publicis Groupe one of the world’s most respected and bigger Communications Group picked up stakes in one of the best PR agencies in the country…Hanmer&Partners. Given the fact that it was a big acquisition, that it was going to have a change of identity, that it gave MS&L a larger footprint in India and Publicis the commitment to expand in high growth markets, it was a pretty significant news. Am sure it must have been as significant a news to the industry when Burson Masteller acquired Genesis PR and many other acquisitions that have taken place in this industry. And yet they are passed of as just another news. It’s not that all of the media did not cover these news items, but everyone did not.

Many publications do not carry news of the above mentioned types or rather never profile PR professionals, or talk of PR case studies et al in the country. One meets with answers such as these from publications, “As a policy we do not cover PR” and while one refutes saying, “but you do have a media page or an ad&mktg page” but to no avail. So the reasons to not cover PR in mainline dailies and business dailies can be as creative as you want them to be. So you have to disguise and say that it’s not a PR agency but a Communications outfit and if you are lucky, you could get written about.

We need the media industry to recognise the fact that we are contributors to the process of communications and shaping brands almost hand in hand with brand managers and creative directors in the creative agencies. Try placing an authored write up by a Creative agency guy on brands and there is a 100 percent chance of him getting published. Try that with a PR Agency counterpart and chances are you will be told that PR is not covered.

Thank God for the trade publications, yet not all, in the A&M space who are now beginning to recognise PR and getting their POV too. PR is a sunrise industry in this country…so while everyone is talking about giving that valuable lift to sunrise industries because you see potential in them to take the country forward, how come you don’t see PR contributing in the larger scheme of things?!

PR professionals will no more be about CEOs in their cabins only when you have the rest of your peer group give you the same respect and stature that PR so deserves.

I’d like media to discuss this and let us know as to the real reason for not recognising PR as an industry and giving regular updates about account movements, people movements, great case studies and speaker opportunities?! Is it because the account wins do not run into crores of revenues and the people are not as large in stature as the Prasoon’s and the Piyush’s of the world?! But isn’t PR about non paid form of publicity and hence PR fees seldom run into crores or billings?! And isn’t it media who give the exposure to people to become who they are and grow in stature to the creative people mentioned above?! So how will you ever have leaders and PR gurus if you don’t get the world to know about them.

The other day a Media professional (that is a journalist for you) came to our office as a guest speaker and pleaded us to not think of us as PR guys but as Media professionals because we were supposedly their better halves in the communication process…oh how I wish everyone in the field of journalism, advertising and marketing thought of PR professionals as such since somehow that does not translate into action.

This article is not to moan about why we are not treated well or respected as an industry..this article is to get a discussion on how we can get to be as well profiled and get our place in the sun as PR professionals and as contributors in the larger process of communications.

Cheers, Madhavi

  This is apart from the usual Communication theories that I write about and it concerning us in everyday life…something that we all could do with…we all in the PR profession.  And this ‘something’ is called simplifying the message…still not getting it, eh?! 

Okay, here goes: This came to me from a close friend of mine who is a journalist too. He said, “Mads, I only wish PR professionals could simplify the brief. Simplify does not mean talking down to us. When I say simplify, I mean stop reading from a Client backgrounder note or a press release. Give me the story, tell me what you understand the tale is all about, give me the reason why I should write about your Client or rather, why is what you are saying newsworthy?” 

And I immediately realized what he was saying…he was asking PR professionals to stop being talking parrots. We are the closest conduit of the Client to the Media. We are supposed to understand the industry, the sector, the Client’s business, the competitor’s, the relevance of what the Client is trying to the masses et al. So the only reason you are probably reading out aloud from a document is because you do not know the above. And this is exactly the point where we have probably switched off’ the journalist on the other side of the call… 

When in one of my previous articles I spoke about cultivating media, this is what according to me would be the crucial element in the entire Cultivation process…knowledge about your Client. And it is this lack or background knowledge about your Client that compels the media to scoff at PR professionals.  You cannot keep telling the journalist ‘I will get back to you’. If you did not know, then why did you call him in the first place?! Padhna tha na pehle, samajhna chahiye tha pehle…uske baad jaatey story pitch karne! 

There is a document that we usually work on when we begin working on a Client… It’s called the Creative Brief. After you have been briefed by the Client, come back nd write down what you have understood the brief to be, and then spell out the Client’s expectations or the mandate to be fulfilled. If you have doubts, send the Client a list of questions for him to help you understand. You could also anticipate the questions that the media may have in mind and prepare a FAQs document that you can provide to the media. 

The media also appreciates if you can give them some cues about what other players in the space are doing, if you have some news about the competition doing something similar to what your Client is doing, or if you can gather some trend or research data concerning the space for the journalist to go through, he would appreciate it, trust me. Or else, there could be a fabulous story to be told, but just because you failed to stir interest in the mind of the journalist, a good story is left untold and the opportunity goes waste.  

And trust me, you don’t have to go out of your way to help the media …all you have to do is do your job well. Read up a little, be aware and think on your feet. Most importantly, have the attitude to help…helping the Client get his message across, helping the journalist do a good story and help yourself to be respected for what you are worth.

Cheers

Madhavi Mukherjee

We as Public Relations professionals need to do beyond story pitching and disseminating press releases…garnering respect from peer group or rather the industry would not be so difficult then…albeit respect is not the topic today.

We are to be blamed I think sometimes for the way people perceive us, to some extent for sure. We limit ourselves to executing and thinking only about press releases, pitching stories, media meetings et al. But I am sure there is a bigger picture that we are missing out on and PR professionals could do some learning and adoption of it.

What are PR professionals? They are the ones who are (to some extent) designing people’s perceptions. Now how about giving our Client’s mandates a bigger facade and a larger reason to be spoken about?

I will give you an example; let’s say there is an organization in India that is the world’s leader in micro irrigation and the only manufacturers of complete drip irrigation systems in the world. Now as a PR professional I could either just go about speaking to the media (my key influencers and first primary target audience) about the products, the company, the properties et al; or we could do something beyond this since we are so capable of doing it too. Understand first of all how in today’s day and age does micro irrigation help? Micro irrigation helps in High water distribution efficiency, Minimized soil erosion, Lower labor cost and early maturity and a bountiful harvest (season after season, year after year). Now set an Agenda (Agenda Setting is an important theory in Mass Communications) for the organization to achieve and communicate it to the public. The organization’s bigger agenda is to conserve water, increase land fertility, lower the cost of labor and improve the quality standards of the crops. At a time when the world is going all public demonstrating it’s Go Green and Save the world Naara, you would be doing an efficient job of yourself by conveying the innate qualities and benefits of the Client’s business to the masses. Impress upon the Client to talk beyond himself and his company and talk about the bigger picture at hand…this way you will not just stop being a delivery guy (doing only what is asked of you to do like disseminating releases and following up for coverage) but doing what is actually expected of the likes of someone like yourself. Strategic thinking and thinking beyond the parameters set for you.

Impress upon the Clients and media that there are larger issues that they can talk about, which can be related to their business and yet could be a channel for doing an overall good to the society.

Agenda setting describes a very powerful influence of the media – the ability to tell us what issues are important.

Bernard Cohen (1963) stated: “The press may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about.”

Conceptual Model

Agenda Setting Theory

As a PR professional you would have to expand your focus, think laterally and think how you can get more out of your assignment. Read up, get informed, do some research on your own about the Client’s business, think big and influence others (Clients, Media, Peer Group alike) to think big. Issues will come to the fore, discussions will emerge, opinions and feedback will find a place amongst the masses and you will be able to play a small part in the larger scheme of things, of initiating change!