It is a mess and it is all over the place and it is not going away in a hurry. The stock market is toast, the oil price is freaking out in the USD 150s, real estate and financial services are tanking like the titanic! Everyone knows that we are in the middle of a meltdown and the effects of inflation have just about started to ruin the financial results of companies.

The politics of the nation are in the gutter and the uncertainty that clouds all decision making both in the public and private enterprise will continue well into the next year, if and when another government comes into being. A government that is cross subsidising the oil bill and some other future government will reap the whirlwind and some whirlwind it will be for sure, and I quote Rahul Bhasin of Barings in the DNA, where he said, “We are frittering away our gains made in the last 15 years”.

Against the background of this carnage in corporate India, the bean counters are finally seeing resurgence, like desert plants, they have waiting out the decade of exuberance. Today they are rising like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes, and promise to be the bane of many brands, marketing campaigns and other assorted still born initiatives. Austerity is back like the rude shock of a cold water bath in the freezing winter!

When the accountant’s chop does come down on big-ticket advertising, out-of-home and television commercials, these being the pet peeves of the accountant  PR promises to stay untouched. Having said that budgets for travel, off sites, media training, and all those nice fuzzy things are bound to dry up real quick, if not disappear all together. In all this skirmishing, fortunately for PR, most corporates have come to understand that it is not an on-and-off thing and if anything, some might even find it the last refuge of the marketing to reach their target publics in times of budgetary paucity.

The job market for PR professional and Communicators promises to retain traction and the moaning for talent will stay the wail it is, so here is one area that I again see no effect of the slow down, if anything it could lead to many more corporates hiring for the reasons above.

Challenges bring opportunities and usually constitute the need, the same need that spurs innovation and fosters new paradigms and discoveries. These are the times to service your customer better and to vow to be closer to the business and not lose accounts on reasons of tardiness, inefficiency or downright stupidity! I see many avenues that were shoveled into the “not important or urgent” quadrants due the presence of other ‘lazy cheque’ populars suddenly becoming fashionable. The medium I am talking about and maybe one who’s time has finally come in India, is the online medium.

This is the time to knock again and dust off those online plans, whether it is a programme to engage key bloggers in your space, or kick off that e-mail campaign or spend your remaining rupees in the pursuit of a web-only viral marketing or buzz marketing campaign!

I wish you well in these nasty times, so get dug in and wait it out, this too shall pass, maybe not soon enough but you can always take the time to do something you always wanted to attempt, something forbidden, constructive, intellectual, delicious and inspiring! I look forward to comments here!

So you are planning to hire an agency for your company’s social media outreach initiatives? Creating a blog, or a social networking site? Easy. An annual plan, aligned with your overall communication goals? Then it becomes tricky. The social media agencies scenario in India is sadly still in its infancy.

I decide to put down my thoughts on this after seeing a good round-up by Gaurav. It made me ponder a bit. He wrote

The Indian players offering social media marketing services can broadly be divided into three categories:

- Digital advertising agencies offering social media marketing services with a focus on virals, social network apps, social media campaigns etc.

- Public relations agencies/ practitioners offering social media services with a focus on online reputation monitoring and social media outreach etc.

- Prominent bloggers offering, basically, corporate blogging consulting services and workshops.

He has also listed down a few companies that are today engaged in providing social media outreach programmes for its clients. Now when somebody looks at this list, he might wonder which category is best suited for his company. My not-so-perfect take on this is simple:

There’s a media, and there are ways to leverage it for a corporation. In the traditional setup, a corporation would hire an advertising agency to buy ad space on that media and hire a PR firm to engage with the editorial of that media publication. I suppose it wouldn’t be so drastically different when it comes to the social media.

A digital advertising agency today would primarily look at creating blog banners, websites, and applications, while a PR 2.0 agency would look at engaging with relevant bloggers to spread its client’s messaging, and participate in social networking sites and engage with the end consumers.

Both have their weaknesses. While a digital advertising agency might not have the expertise to engage continuously with a client’s target audience, a PR 2.0 agency would lack the technical skills required to say perhaps create a Facebook application.

Now as a corporation, you would probably want to hire a firm that is good in providing both the services.  Why have two different service providers? As PR agencies have been handling your communications programs with other media, you might perhaps want to work with them and combine your traditional media approach with the new media. But is that so simple?

This can be one reason why I could imagine a lot of partnerships between digital advertising agencies and PR 2.0 firms in the near future. This might work out in a way where PR agencies are outsourcing the technical part of the job to application developers and website creators while they take care of the messaging and maintaining a particular property with the target audience.

Also it is interesting to note how PR agencies  are ramping up their processes to offer social media outreach services to their clients. An improvement from my last post - dare I say

Apart from Fleishman Hillard and Edelman that Gaurav mentioned in his post, we have  Weber Shandwick starting its social media division Screengrab in India. Then we have 2020 Media, Redifussion PR, Adfactors PR, and Genesis Burson Marsteller starting their own.

So when all these are happening, the biggest hurdle would be lack of good manpower - professionals who know how to handle the communications of a client as well as understand the social media well. That goes for the another post. Till then let’s wait and watch and smile a bit. What’s you take? Leave a comment.

Your favorite PR Blog has some new web addresses. These are:

India PR Blog: http://www.indiaprblog.com

India PR Blog Job Board: http://jobs.indiaprblog.com

India PR Blog RSS feed: http://feeds.indiaprblog.com/indiapr

This is a master feed of the latest posts from India PR Blog, latest jobs from the India PR Job Board, upcoming PR events from India PR Events Calendar, and latest pictures from the India PR Flickr Group Photo pool. (Thanks to Yahoo Pipes)

The old urls are still valid (except the job board old url) as they will point to these new ones automatically, in case you have them in your feed readers or bookmarks. Thanks a lot to everyone for your understanding and support.

The 2006 Weblog Awards are on. What are these awards? It is said to be the world’s largest blog competition, with over 1 million votes cast in the last three years for nearly 1,000 blogs. This year’s edition is the biggest ever with 45 categories to choose from. Nominations ended November 24, and voting began December 7 and will end December 15.

For the category for the Best Asian Blogs, there is one finalist from India- Desicritics. It has been a pleasure for me to be one of the desicritics for the past few months and I have contributed some pieces too.

To me, when we talk about this nomination to the finalists list, we are not talking about Desicritics only, but we are talking about India’s blogging talent in the Asian region. It would be a prouder moment if we win. I have voted almost half a dozen times already over the past week. So people, please do spend a minute and post your vote too.

To vote, visit this link, select Desicritics and click vote.

How come I’m writing this post on this blog - you are right to ask. Well, the blog/ web 2.0 technology has come on to become one of the latest tools of the PR profession. No other professional practice is using blogs to its advantage than PR - whether we are talking about corporates using blogs to make their statements, or individuals blogging to build their profiles. It’s time the industry returns the favour. And when Indian blogs win such an award, people start realising the importance of blogging in the Indian market place. These ‘people’ might consist of potential clients to the Indian PR industry….all of which will help grow the Indian PR industry, bring more business, etc., etc. …..Ok, I’m just tying to make a connection It’s just that I felt like requesting everyone to vote for the site I like and write for. Cheers.

Well, this is not a post on PR. Got a mail from one of the readers saying he didn’t like the new look of the blog. I told him I’ll ask some more people and if nobody likes this new look, we will go back to the previous. So a request to everyone. Drop in a comment on what do you think.

I thought this 3-column would be better considering there are a number of links to be added in the side column besides the posts. In a 2-column, the length of the webpage was becoming long. But yes, the 2-column was definitely neater. Well, what do you say?
Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, India, India PR,

Anyone interested in writing for The India PR Blog - anonymous or otherwise? Till now, it’s been just one-two persons with inputs from two dozen friends or so in the PR industry. But a blog calling itself The India PR Blog written by few is somewhat uncomfiting.

Those who want to drop in a piece, please mail it to hobbit.hob at gmail.com. Can be anything from the grapevine, developments, pitches, etc., etc.

Those interested can be regular writers to whom the password to this blog can be shared, and he/she can write and upload the writings anytime he/she wants. Or if anybody prefers to just contribute occasionally, they can just drop in an email.

Now why would anybody do it? I don’t know. I’m just experimenting. Maybe to pass on an idea, a thought, a development, or share some nice with fellow PR professionals. There is just one rule - everything should be on PR, the profession, the practitioners and the industry. And yes, we might have to tone down a LOT on mentioning names of PR professionals in the blog, otherwise it is becoming a bad gossip zone out here
Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, India, India Public Relations, India PR, Marketing,

This is one story about the top Indian media houses launching their own blogs that I picked up at Desipundit. A short extract:

News channel CNN-IBN was the first to launch blogs - IBN Blogs, made by CNN-IBN employees. NDTV Blogs is a blog hosting site where the general public can register and post. But the posts are moderated before they can appear on the site. Times Now has its blog called NOW BLOGS. The blog posts are written by the channel and readers can only comment on those. Postings on ExpressBlogs of The Indian Express are mostly done by employees of the Indian Express group. But readers can also post subject to moderation. BS has a blogs section written by its employees and invited authors. Surprisingly the focus of the blogs is not on business blogging. It even has a mobile blogging section where anyone can post by sending a SMS or an email. The Times Group has a blogging site for anyone to create and publish their blogs called O3. TOI and ET have sparsely updated blogs. DNA has a section called DNA BLOGS. It is nothing but a blog post aggregator where posts on a topic are handpicked from the Indian blogosphere. HT seem to have pulled their blog down.

It would be interesting to see what the Indian media and journalists blog about, although there are many individual journalist bloggers already. Of course we have the famous and gossipy WarFor News. We also have EditIndia.

One more thing I want to add just for the sheer reason that I couldn’t resist feeling funny about it and need to off load myself. It’s ironical that The Times of India can have a story called Bloggers’ rubbish but hosts a blog service on their own site - it’s another story that how ill-informed the author of the story was. Maybe that’s why it’s called the Slimes of India Well, check out the bloggers’ reaction as well.
Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, India, India Public Relations, India PR,Marketing, media,

Search the web today and you can hardly find any common website on the India PR industry. The PRCAI website demands you to fill in long forms almost at every page. The only visible place was the PR Watch section at Exchange4media.com, but they hardly seem to bother to update their site. The stories seem to come after long slumbers. There are few web-blogs but again it was unsatisfactory.

And whatever was there, the talk only seem to focus on PR can do this and PR can do that - the Al Ries stuff that we have read in our books over and over again. The dialogues were sweet like Yash Chopra movies. There was lot of corporate air but little substance. There was not any real life PR- about what the hundreds of young and middle-aged PR professionals go through the profession everyday or on what can they do to optimise their abilities. It seems like those who were talking are commenting on some other nice good profession that resembles PR.

I have an European client who conducts a global PR agencies conference call every week and he makes sure that whatever the agencies are doing are getting him tangible results for his business. He emphasizes the point that how they were making a sales pitch and how they secured that sale due to a good media story on his product that his customer was very impressed with. That was the type of PR he wanted - support sales and nothing else. No long term brand building and moulding of perception and all that nonsense. For him long term means no work. He needs quarterly financial results and wants to know how much has PR contributed in his achieving that. This is just an example.

The point is let’s get into the PR for ‘now’ and the ‘present’. No more big talking.

Also, enough damage has been done over the years in over promising the clients, ass-licking journalists, and not doing any thinking at all but being the smiling yes-men and yes-women of everyone. It’s time for a change!

So finally coming back to the point of why this blog, it’s about time we discuss the real PR. Lets discuss what can we do to optimize our performance better in our everyday PR and thus in the process grow the industry. Let’s forget the competition for a while and take this as a R&D project for the benefit of the entire PRkind in India. Otherwise the agencies will keep on continuing their own little competitions of who secures which client and who gets to invite the journalist to lunch.

Think a bit about all the trainees and newcomers who come in with a lot of optimism about PR. Let’s not shatter them anymore and build for them a profession that they have dreamt of in their post graduate institutes.

Of course we have all our respect to the old timers- the professionals who brought in the profession to the country. But the industry, technology, and the thinking have evolved. Needless to add, they must be realizing all these and we can learn a lot from them with a little tweak from our sides.

We don’t plan to have big PR mantras or philosophies here. This is just a place for musings of people who happen to work in the industry under the great PR maharathis of the country. This is just a place to share tiny bit of information that everyone can benefit from. Apologies to anyone that this writing might offend and if it did, it was unintentional. Ciao for now.

Read all of Hobbit’s posts - 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,
Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, India, India Public Relations, India PR, Marketing, Client Servicing, Media Relations, India Resource, Open Source PR,

At the inaugural session with Dr S S Badrinath and Dr K M Cherian initiating the Seminar ‘Public Relations in Healthcare’.

1-Day Seminar on Public Relations in Healthcare held in Chennai

The Public Relations Society of India - Chennai Chapter, the 37-year old apex body of PR practitioners held a 1-Day Seminar on Public Relations in Healthcare, on 21st April, 2006 at Hotel Savera, Chennai. The session marked the celebration of ‘International PR Day’.

The inaugural session was presided over by Padma Bhushan Dr S S Badrinath, Chairman, Sankara Nethralaya, while Padma Shri Dr K M Cherian was the Chief Guest. In his presidential address, Dr Badrinath interpreted that in the healthcare institutions like that of Sankara Nethralaya, PR was more driven to be Patients’ Relations than an initiative in corporate brand-building. It involved close interface with patients and their families to ensuring that all their needs were fully met with. “With 1500 patients on a daily basis and 150 major operations every day, doctors may not be able to have the time to meet all patients’ needs”. He admired the work of PR professionals and held that they are responsible for creating the image. But, at the same time he maintained that brand building is not the domain of a single member or a PR department. PR in hospitals should not be a marketing gimmick, he added.

In the keynote address, Dr K M Cherian, Chairman Frontier Lifeline Pvt Ltd and noted cardiologist called upon the public relations professionals to create awareness on organ transplant. “Indian surgeons have carried out just 30 heart transplants because there is acute shortage of organs. Against this, availability of organs in the case of UK and USA is high and in the rate of 18.8 per million and 23 per million respectively”. Citing the high death rates in road accidents, he held that a heart is good for transplantation even after 48 hours after a persons’ demise. He urged that public relations people in hospitals should generate spreading of awareness of this aspect.

The days’ session had participation from about 100 delegates representing PR and administration managers from city hospitals and members of PRSI. With 6 sessions and 9 speakers, the attempt was to provide an all-round appreciation of aspects and issues that a PR person faces in the healthcare sector.

Speakers included:
Dr Nalini Krishnan, Director - REACH and Ms Manju Wadwalkar, PRO PGIMER, Chandigarh on ‘Social Responsibilities’
Mr K M Padmanabhan, a Chartered Accountant, on ‘Medical Insurance’
Mr Ashok Ananthram of Apollo Hospitals on ‘HealthTourism’
Mr Krishnan Iyengar of SPIC and Dr Arjun Rajagopalan, Trustee and Medical Director, Sundaram Medical Foundation on ‘Medical Ethics’
Dr B V L Narayanan, Railway Traffic Services on ‘Medical Logistics’
Dr R Prem Sekar, Paediatric Cardiologist, Frontier Lifeline presented a case-study of a heart surgery over a 3-day child, while Mr Satyan Bhatt, MD Prism PR, presented a PR case study.

In the day’s valedictory address, incorporating quotations from Sanskrit as well as sayings of Mother Teresa, Dr K P Misra, Director Medical Education and Sr Consulting Cardiologist at Apollo Hospitals, Complemented PR practitioners for their work. He also urged them to reach out more, with love and sincere compassion, to the needy patients of their hospitals as its true ‘Patient Relations executives’.

Earlier in the day, welcoming the delegates and the chief guests, Mr V S Ramana, Chairman, PRSI (Chennai) and Head - Corporate Communications - L&T (ECC) referred to the growing healthcare sector in India and especially with Chennai emerging as the medical capital of India.

“This is throwing greater challenge to PR practitioners - in their Public Relations and Patient’s Relations role, in the light of creating global brand awareness, and the PR fraternity will grow in their role, very ably” he added.

Back to Public Relations India
Technorati tags: PR, Public Relations, India, India Public Relations, India PR,Marketing, Client Servicing, Media Relations, Writers directory, PR directory, Business directory,Writers Resource, India Resource, Open Source PR, PR Events,