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!

In PR agency workings, client servicing experts would talk about going out for lunches with clients and many other hi-funda things when asked about the best ways to get pally with your client. I won’t go into such advanced details, but focus on two simple day-to-day client contact mediums for an executive or a manager - the phone and the email. What’s the big deal, you’d asked.

Perhaps there’s no big deal. But given that most of the smaller agencies in India (and even some of the big ones) do not have a standardised system of client servicing manual, it’s important for the young PR professionals to know the advantages and disadvantages of both these contact mediums.

Phone -

1. Works well if the client contact is manageable and is the friendly type. You can explain issues and things in proper and in length over the phone than on email.

2. One disadvantage is that you don’t have any written record if things go wrong or the client suddenly turns around.

Email -

1. Many of us in our earlier years tend to think getting into a mobile phone chit-chat everyday with the client will break the ice and help get into a smooth client-agency relationship. Not true for some kinds of clients. If the client contact is the hard-to-please type with unreasonable expectations, make sure your correspondence is more on the mail, copied to his/her boss and yours. On every mail. Why so? Because on the phone, you are more likely to get gobbled up with no very less room for negotiations. For example, if the client contact calls in the morning and asks you to draft a case study and provide it to him/her by the end of the day, demand that she/he send you an email on that. I think most of the unreasonable client demands are done on the phone, hardly on the email. Well, I don’t have any stats to prove it though.

2. Disadvantage is that email is time consuming (writing, sending, receiving, reading), and many clients in particular sectors are not that comfortable with the emailing business.

What do you say? Any more tips. Please share on the comments.

PowerPoints can often make or break a career and we need to master the art of creating good looking PowerPoints, especially if we are working in the corporate world. Here are some good reads and tools from across the web and the blogosphere to help you get started in creating a good design.

Remember like experts say, creating a good PowerPoint is a work of art - the visual appeal and construction of words should harmoniously depict and help in what you intend to say.

1. Office 2007 - Firstly, before anything else, lets get the weapons and ammunition right. I kept on repeating this but the US army is the top armed forces in the world not because the Americans are stronger than the people in other countries, but majorly because of the superior weapons they have. So taking that into account,  how about upgrading our own hung MS Office 98s and XPs to Office 2007 (Microsoft is not my client), if you are not already. The visually appealing shapes, templates, and designs you can create so easily in Office 2007 will seem like impossible in the other previous versions of MS Office.

2. Templates - You can use the MS Office themes and download more from here. However one problem with using these templates is that everyone uses them, so your presentation looks like a college student’s homework. You can break free from the default flashy and extra colorful Microsoft templates and use your own templates. Check out the designs of some award wining presentations here. You don’t need to be a master designer. A white background is suitable for almost all types of presentations. Here is a simple one I have used way back, in a plain white background with one picture.

Ok I realised it looks much better on the PowerPoint, but nevertheless to prove a point, I am not deleting it.

3. Layouts - Chuck the standard layout designs and create your own style. All slides need not have the standard layouts throughout, meaning you can move around where you put the text and the pictures. For myself, I stopped using the default ‘Title’ and ‘Title and Content’ layouts long time back, because I see that layout in every other presentation.

For instance, for proposing a event speaker opportunity to a client, this slide below should be sufficient. The presenter has to know the details of the events at his/her fingertips, or have it in a piece of paper though.

3. Fonts - Personally I prefer Calibri. Yes that’s the default font in MS Word in MS Office 2007. It is a sans serif font, the family that is preferred by experts.

Regarding the font size, everybody has his/her own views on this. Read on what experts say about font here at Digital Inspiration. Though a 30 point font size might not be practical for our PR plan and pitch proposals, I suppose font size shouldn’t go down beyond 16. I said this considering what works basis the sizes of most of the conference rooms I encountered. But this might not be ideal for events. So when Guy Kawasaki says 30 font size, probably he must be refering to big events where he give his presentations at.

4. Content - Most experts agreed on writing in phrases, not complete sentences. One or two phrases per slide should be enough. Now the problem with such presentations is that they need expert presenters. For those of us who are few years into the business, we cannot start talking for 5-10 minutes by looking at a picture. Sure I can talk about my blogging habits for hours, but not on the IT consulting industry’s issues and trends in India, unless I have done a big homework. But hey, maybe that’s the clue - homework.

5. Pictures - Pictures are the soul of the presentation. Without pictures, presentations become such a drag and corporate blah blah. Right pictures help bring out an idea more clearly for the audience. I also read somewhere, maybe Seth Godin’s blog, that your words on the slides are for the intellect of your audience, your pictures are for appealing to their emotions. Anything to grab that contract.

I also have another point. If you don’t write much, you don’t reveal much of your ideas in written if you need to leave behind a copy of that ppt at the end of the presentation.

Alos, Ellen Finkelstein says a very valid point that bullets are boring and if you write in bullets, people start reading them and stop giving attention to what you are saying. She says instead of having three bullet points in one slide, you can break them into three slides.

For examples this slide ….

can be broken into this…

this…

and finally this….

You can find pictures for your presentations on Google Image Search. Or if you worry about copyrights, then Stock Xchng provides free images. For Indian images try Dinodia.

6. Golden Rules to Remember from the Masters - I won’t say much here. Read on from the masters. These are my two favorite posts on PowerPoints. The first is a ten tips list from Garr Reynolds. The second is a post from Seth Godin giving his superb tips. Be sure to check these two links out.

Also are 10 points to learn from the world’s best PowerPoints contest as a checklist. Then here are 10 do’s and don’ts from Micrososft Small Business Center.

7. Tips and Tricks -  Learn how to frame your presentation on a Word file and then later import it into a ppt, with formatting intact here. This will be good to just concentrate on the content without going for the design in the initial stage. Then there are also more tips and tricks on this page as well.

More PowerPoint readings - The PowerPoint FAQ.

Do you have any tips to share, or some nice powerpoint slides toshow off, well share the tips on the comments. You can upload your slides on Box.net or some other place and share the link in the comments. If we have enough of the nice ones, we will list them out on the blog together.

Esha News has started this initiative where each client for each PR agency can have their own webspace and can access provide access to the team and the client. The monitoring agency has started to understand and value of real time delivery clips, specially during a crisis situation, when you need coverage, even before it happens. (Pun Intended).

As a execution person or the Associate, when you have ordered a cd to view the television coverage as to where all they have appeared. You are all excited to showcase your work to your seniors, you know you have done a good job, you want leverage this initiative as a team in front of the client. And what happens, the courier walla has misplaced the CD some where, and you do not know what to do next… sounds familiar.

Esha News has clearly understood the pain points that the PR agency goes through, where the CD does not reach on the designated time or there is late delivery of clips. To see the advantage in better light of this service or as PR professionals how we leverage on this

• With this especially with the instant uploading of clips on a daily basis , we can access it, once the coverage has appeared on television. Don’t know exactly what is the time gap between coverage being on air and the coverage being uploaded and being able to viewed by all.
  
• As multi-city teams, we will be able to access the clips across the cities with no geographical restrictions. Accessing these clips and reports will also not have any time barrier, specially with respect to international assignments. So you share email and let them have a look at the coverage, while you are sleeping.
  
• The client servicing team can download these reports on to their desktop. Download facility adds the icing on the cake, the videos can get attached to the presentation, and have the wow effect. Situation: The review starts with how we achieved, what we achieved, graphs and then videos once they get attached to the presentation, you have the audio-visual presentation, you surely have won the client.
  

• The client servicing team can view clips almost instantly and share it with their clients. Specially at a time of crisis, where information becomes the key and the holder of this information is the king. You exactly know how the media has reacted to the situation. and now you can take the neccessary and pre-defined action.
  

• The team need not worry about the making multiple copies of the clips, since the clips are stored on the server for over 30 days with each PR agency having its own individual webpage and webspace with unique logins for each client.

Let me know, if you find any more advantages of this service. These advantages have been penned down only because "i was there" and faced these issues.

Every once in a  while, there comes the case of a company that is unable to throughput communication in stark contrast to its otherwise brilliant performance indices. I have sought to understand this malady now and again but a chance conversation yesterday with a known genius in the Indian Financial Services space triggered this post. If you are the guardian angel of the Aspirational; the evangelist with passion, fire and a head full of mindgames, the PR kind, then read on…

Perception lags performance, due to many reasons. The causes manifest themselves in three primary reasons. For a Public Relations, Communications or Brand consultant, it is important to understand the terrain before they pick up on a project that seeks to break logjams in the media and perception circuits for a customer.

Breaking gridlocks and logjams for late entrants to the perception game requires special skills, the tricks  and tactics have been there forever, question is have you ever thought about it, enough to elevate it to strategy?

Changing share of voice in the media and lecture circuit from a inane buzz to the screaming roar of a Ferrari or shepherding your customer (internal or external depends which side of the table you are sat) from the mind-numbing terrors and traps in the media, triggering a turbo boost for your spokesperson in terms of messaging uptake and effectiveness, is what this post is about.

Firstly, an inability or fear of dealing with the media due to a past bad experience can make efforts hard or non-starters. Media Relations is an art that requires constant practice, the ride comes with bumps and smooth stretches, sporadic crises thrown in for spice.  You give, you get, but you always talk! There is media out there that is out to trick you out, will they hesitate to rubbish your carefully build reputation for an exclusive? Absolutely not for a second! Can PR change the game for your business? Absolutely yes! Good comes with the bad, package deal like with most things in life. If you are going to get anywhere, you need to get started! Tell them like it is, chances are that they take risks in business everyday and will grow into the act with a little hand holding from you, the specialist!

Secondly, there is a clique out there as in most other domains, these ‘usual suspects’ then pretty much control the share of voice in the media, and this maybe specific to a beat. The media is most times too lazy to do any hard digging when mapping a business space and again relies on the ‘usual suspects’, who maybe be convenient darling MDs, CEOs and other assorted rabble rousers. Awards: every publication and their mother has an award stacked with their favourites, breaking into this game needs perseverance, a nose for ‘distress sales’, finally being able to work the apex bodies like CII, FICCI, NASSCOM, etc, for advocacy and influencer relations.

Third and last here, is clearly a lack of process internally at the client organisation be it in terms of communication superstructure, even if one does exist, its ability to deliver strategic advice to management may be suspect in hierarchy driven situations or where communicators are too junior to be taken seriously. Some people use external consultants to tell them what is known already as it brings a credibility they lack.

Anyone can tell you that game changing maneuvers are few and far in between as stereotypes and ’safe’ options abound but if you as a PR professional were ever able to affect changes that made a company’s perception congruent with its performance as benchmarked against its peers, then you indeed deserve to be in the hall of fame. If commitment is your destiny and you can help tell a story that is true and ethical but inconvenient, then you are indeed one lucky person!

We need our heroes just like we need our war stories to feel good about the tribe and what it does, so come on give!

I am a little tired of rants including mine so here is a contrarian view, as you can see I do this contrarian thing quite well (or badly depending on your world view today).  This post originally started as a comment and as it grew embarrassingly large, I decided to claim back my Friday from Madhavi and actually graduate this to a post instead of the original comment it was meant to be!

Client and PR relationships are like marriages, they feud, but can”t stay without each other and more or less work out if both parties give it a half decent shot. There are exceptions on both ends and so let’s not go there today for the sake of the majority. On the specific question of clients not paying or paying too less or other grouses, I see essentially see this phenomenon in two parts.

Product or Services Differentiation

Firstly, it is an ability to differentiate your self in positioning. The PR Firm market has been a commodity market for the longest time with no entry barriers for hole-in-the-wall mom-and-pop shows. I saw this happening 10 years ago and today is no different. There is room for both and it is good that entrepreneurship is still a possibility in the market place. What is the big difference in working for the big 5 PR Firms in the country (if you can actually figure out ever who they are by number of people employed or revenue in a transparent fashion, beyond claims) and the home office 2-3 people outfit, one can argue. I am sure there are a lot of differences in offering and durability in time of intense attrition but we who profess to be champions of branding do a rubbish job of its when it involves our own brand characteristics and touch points across websites, corporate identity markers from business cards to collateral branding including electronic collateral like the microsoft power point, the one leg of the one legged, PR Industry are all pretty crap.

How many people can recall different practices in a large popular PR Agency unless they happen to be a specialist firm? If I take names I will be slaughtered as these are all friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues, so I’ll be prudent and duck my tail in on that but there are no many opportunities lost because no one in the leadership is really thinking about it beyond lip service and also-ran measures. Practice differentiation is not something just to do as a business whenever a fat client with a fat retainer demands it or when a project turns  into a reusable solution offering. It too needs the branding and marketing that will differentiate it as an offering and help you charge a premium for the effort in doing so.

Text 100 first changed the retainer landscape in the country in late 1990s with retainer values far in excess of what was then ‘going price’ for retainers in the Tech PR game at least. Again without taking names, there were enough nay sayers who never thought such retainers were possible or rated the survival chances of Text 100 in India. When the dust settled, history had been made with the Microsoft Account and there were many red faces. To be fair Text 100 came with an international mandates, best practices, processes but whatever local clients they picked up too came at larger retainers.

They were leaps and bounds ahead in differentiation, branding, positioning, and clients loved them and paid too. This gave hope and eventually benefited so many other legacy PR Firms who over a period of time started to attain similar retainer values because they moved up the value chain and comparing. This is when they had all along been largely sedentary about the possibility of a retainer being more than a lakh or two. There are many other examples of large retainers in Automotive, Financial Services, and Real Estate etc. 

Let’s talk for a minute about the client perspective here. What clients complain about is a lack of employee stickiness and just getting legs and no brains when they employ a PR Firm. If you sit on the client side which I have many times with multiple PR Agencies, these issues become important, so there are two sides to this coin! Don’t kick what you eat as there is seldom a one sided argument and there is no smoke without a fire!

So it isn’t like clients don’t pay. If you think you have an offering that deserves more (and good old vanilla media relations ain’t going to hack it partner) Pitch it right, be bold, be brave, and state your value proposition up front, brand your offering and you can get away with a screamer for a retainer!

Lack of Employee Stickiness and Intellectual Capital Capture in Public Relations Firms

The second important aspect one would do well to consider here involves employee longevity. Measures that arrest attrition including real dedication to employee training, specialization in vertical or horizontal practices, succession planning and an ability to see the next step-on-the-ladder.

There are philosophical and conceptual question there - what profitability are you after in terms of a gross margin is something that needs to examined in the interest of growth and scaling up. ‘Reverse price arbitrage’, this time in favor of employees and an inconvenient analysis of employee cost-to-company, as compared to retainers will show the employee wage bill as a percentage of revenue. What an owner, or promoter forsakes in terms of pay and work environment can only be good for the business but it is a question of rationale and greed.  I have seen many owners and promoters lash out about a lack of loyalty and commitment in employees while they themselves have zero empathy in return. Why is loyalty and commitment only an attribute expected of the employee and not the employer? If you want your people to stay please take care of them, treat them like individuals with aspirations and pay them right! Pay peanuts get monkeys - sound familiar?

So that is what I meant by garbage in- garbage out. Although there are good things happening out there in pockets, I am inherently in love with the idea of a consolidation based on market and supply dynamics, big names with standard global practices coming in can only mean better things for the industry and things moving to a new equilibrium.

The culture of crony PR firm associations has no done anything for the Industry or maybe I have not seen it and inconvenient issues never surface as these may not be in the best interest of constituents.

Let us embrace change and not stay shackled to the hackneyed tenets of a accidental birth, as India moves into the spotlight with its integration with the world economy, the future is bright for all of us!

Much have been discussed about PR agencies’ yearning desire to protect their intellectual properties they share with a potential client during a pitch process. Typically the problem starts when a company starts inviting say 15 PR agencies for a pitch, ask for rounds of presentations to finally select one agency. This sounds ideal from a hiring company’s point of view. they get to select the best agency and gets tons of free ideas and tips for their communications requirements. But for the rest of the 14 agencies that didn’t get selected, imagine the time and resources wasted.PR agencies have not been able to make much headway into addressing this issue. Earlier a post on Open RFPs and a reader commented that charging a pitch fee could be a solution. The comments is as follows:

RFPs which look at the PR consultancy’s understanding of the business environment a client is operating in is a good idea. As far as RFPs with ideation are concerned, Consultancies should ask for a pitch fee which if the account is won by the consultancy can be adjusted against the retainer, and if not, it would be fee earned for work done. Putting this into practice will also enable PR consultancies to gauge the seriousness behind an RFP and clients will also understand that for PR consultants time is money!

It would be great to see clients apply the same methodology towards their advisors such as KPMG/PwC and the like.. surely they would not put forth a strategy without agreeing on fees and signing on the dotted line!

I couldn’t agree more. I think it is high time there is a serious discussion on whether PR agencies should start charging clients pitch fees. One factor that seem to have work against this is the intense competition in the PR market and agencies feel that if they are the only one to ask for a pitch fee, they might lose out on important RFPs. This could be addressed if PR associations like PRCAI and PRSI take this pro-actively and if some of the bigger agencies start charging. That could be a start.

On a realistic note, I know it’s easier said than done. Unlike the ad industry, there are no ‘INS accreditation’ tag that agencies would fear of losing. So nobody would listen one another. But there is no harm dreaming.

I would love to hear what some of the industry leaders say about this.

Militant as I sound, it must be the general pall of slow down in Bombay, IPOs tanking, doomsayers with the recession din, the taxi strike, the weather, and the general non happenings of the week.

The only things that I am a little excited about are some tools for research that I have had a chance to play with recently. These have long been used international PR firms and it is quite interesting to to see their slow acceptance and investment in these tools by Indian PR firms too.

We live in a world of Information Overload and Insight Scarcity. Have you ever wondered when a 26-year old from a management consulting company presents at an industry forum, leaving everyone spell bound by trends and the insight he or she spouts? Similarly how investment banking professionals get the detailed information to discover synergies that decide when to merge and acquire companies, or top Sales people to design and sell solutions for their customers? These are the tools that leading professionals use to know about their customers, markets and industry in real time!

I don’t have the time!

In the PR business, whether it is preparing for a meeting with your client; writing a new business pitch or presentation, or writing a pitch note for the journalist, there is always a chronic shortage of time. In a landscape dotted with delivery milestones, reviews, internal processes and various other mundane activities that are urgent but not important these reserach tools come really handy. They help save time in searching for information, time which is then saved for analyzing and surfacing insight to finally arrive at a positioning statement or stance in the media. It further helps do a snapshot of where a client is at, and where he aspires to be in terms of peer group companies and competition. If you have the first two licked, finding a workable communication strategy to reach these objectives finally comes on the horizon.

What is required is actionable intelligence to optimize your communications strategy, this intelligence today is not just about the good old print medium but requires media analysis across traditional and social media. The ability to benchmark competitors, find PR weak spots, defining focus areas-which sectors, which markets? Finally an ability to track the drivers of your clients’ corporate reputation!

I am referring to the information databases, news aggregators and news wires, prominent among which is Factiva, a tool that is an effective news aggregator and search tool. Besides the latest news on a Company or topic that you may be researching across sources of media reporting on a company or topic, the issues at hand, stick price changes, key executives and a lot of other information it would take you weeks to gather from multiple sources.

In addition, Factiva has something known as Search 2.0 that throws up graphs and through other pictorial visualization tools like heat maps really useful to depict trends. Trends that can help you understand the success of your PR campaign; the effectiveness of your spokesperson and measure your success to show bang for the buck!

There are others such as Datamonitor, Hoovers which are again general business research tools. In addition, you will discover deep dive tools for different domains such as a Gartner, Forrester, IDC, for Information Technology, and Ovum for Telecom related information. Similarly for information of a financial nature there are tools like a Dow Jones, Reuters Knowledge, Thomson Financials, and Bloomberg. I can go on and on but will close here to say that there are best-in-breed research tools out there for pretty much most domains and these can change you life if your information needs are critical for your business decision making and survival in reputation management.

In a time often replete with 25 hour work days; these tools help you climb a growth curve which would be pretty much uphill if not impossible as a PR professional, without the help of these tools. In these days of consolidation in the PR space, it may well prove the magic bullet to enable the local tigers and independents to hold their own as they scale up the ladder to compete with their MNC peers who are old users of these tools.

The challenges in adoption are of overcoming inertia and building a research-based PR culture besides of course having some bean counter sign a cheque. Mind you some of these databases do not come cheap but the benefits in time saved and the value of the information that news aggregators provide, more than justifies the investment.

The information age is here and the question is does your organization have an information strategy and tools to take the next big leap?

A strong correlation has been observed between a company’s corporate communications and the company’s ranking on Fortune magazine’s ‘World’s Most Admired Companies’ list. The professional background, communications priorities, and inter-organizational relationships of the corporate communications head are also indicators of the ability of a corporate communications department to make a positive impact on a company’s reputation. These are some of the results of a survey ‘The Rising CCO (Chief Communications Officer)’ of 141 corporate communications executives from Fortune 500 companies in the US and Europe, conducted by global PR firm Weber Shandwick, executive search firm Spencer Stuart, and KRC Research.

The research also found that communications executives in the world’s most highly regarded companies have more prominent organizational status and longer tenures than their counterparts in contender companies. Additionally, approximately one-third of CCOs from the most admired companies cite corporate reputation as their number one priority for 2008, compared to fewer than one-quarter of CCOs from contender companies (34 vs. 21 percent, respectively). Contender company communications executives said they were spending more time working on product-related issues and crisis communications, while most admired CCOs said they spent more time on corporate social responsibility and building corporate reputation.

Based on Fortune’s 2006 Most Admired Survey (March 19, 2007). In general, Most Admired Companies are the most highly ranked companies in an industry on overall reputation. Contender Companies are ranked in the industry’s bottom half.

Other key findings are:

1. CCOs’ responsibilities will increasingly shift from tactical to strategic. While CCOs are carving out their role as strategic partners at the highest levels of business, they view work today as predominately tactical (58 percent tactical, 42 percent strategic). This imbalance, as reported by those surveyed, is sure to change as focus shifts from financial communications, media relations and internal communications to the broader strategic issues of environmental/social responsibility and corporate reputation. The tools used to perform their jobs will expand as well, with blogging/social media and corporate Web sites becoming increasingly important.

2. CCOs hold prominent positions at the world’s largest companies. Nearly one-half surveyed report directly to the chief executive officer (48 percent) and are visible to their boards (had a median seven interactions with their board during the past year).

3. CCOs and CMOs are friends and rivals. CCOs’ dynamic relationship with chief marketing officers (CMOs)–often a main rival and ally–reflects the growing influence of communications in today’s marketing mix.

4. Measurement of CCO effectiveness is predominately qualitative. The vast majority of those surveyed report being measured on qualitative measures such as “positive” media coverage (75 percent) and CEOs’ “gut” feel (73 percent). They are least likely to be measured by quantitative metrics such as the number of media mentions (35 percent) and ability to control costs (32 percent).

There are CEOs and there are CEOs. I meet many quite often and was told by one of them very recently that becoming a CEO and remaining a CEO requires only one quality - ability to make profit, profit and more profit. Well, he may be right and I don’t blame him either. That’s the way global corporations are designed - shareholders driven! A CEO juggles with many things, so does he or she has a time for the PR guy? How do you make sure that a CEO listens to you and engages with you so that you can make your PR more effective and beneficial for the organization. Let’s try to find out.

I have a very simple suggestion to make here. Talk to a CEO like a CEO. Let me explain what it means.

Who is a CEO? A CEO is a person who has been given a responsibility to run the organisation (and make profits) and who is expected to know all aspects of the business - typically finance, manufacturing, sales & marketing, expansion, new product development and so on. The list is endless. In the limited 24 hrs of a day he/she has to juggle through all these and more. After all, he’s/she’s also a human being! Okay, let me admit that this sounds too much but he/she has team of people to do all these and more - he/she just need to make sure that the people are doing the right ‘work’ and in the ‘right’ direction.

So, here comes our statement - talk to a CEO like a CEO. If I go by what my friend said about profits, I would suggest you talk to the CEO like him/her - about profits the PR can bring to his/her organisation. Can PR be a profitable exercise? Yes.

We all know what a good public relations exercise bring to the organization - it generates goodwill, it generates interests in investors, it generates positive response from trade partners, your sales process becomes , your advertising spend reduces, your employee satisfaction increases, it brings you more customers, it can open doors to policy makers, you become famous and may be some other bigger, better company would hire you as a next CEO! Isn’t it exciting enough for CEOs to listen to you now?

CEOs respect the sound advice coming from a sound professional and now many CEOs are looking forward to PR for advice on things more than media relations - they are seeking inputs on government relations, investment options, CSR, global warming, carbon credits, internal communications, connecting with consumers and so on. They want all these from a PR guy! So, Mr. PR - be ready to play the role of a trusted advisor to the CEO. Learn his/her business, understand his/her issues, find solutions, and offer concrete ‘workable’ advice and I am sure many CEOs and any CEO would want to listen to you!

After all, we have all learnt this early - ‘Give me an idea and see how I can sell it to you in less than five minutes!’

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india