Some time back, Twitter launched Twitter lists for its users. Now Twitter users can assemble other Twitter users that he/ she likes into groups and follow them. This I thought was a fantastic way for me to sort and follow people, if you are following a large number of people and you don’t want to use any third party apps.  For instance, I follow more than 11,000 people and used to have Tweetdeck to sort out users. Now I can do it directly on Twitter and also share the lists for other people.  I created a list of digital marketers in India to keep up with their tweets.

The possibilities are endless. There are many interesting lists already. One lists I found that could be very useful for PR professionals is this list of Indian journalists. Check it out.

Let us know if you found any other useful lists for PR professionals. By the way, you can follow India PR Blog on Twitter and here is also my Twitter profile.

Further reading on Twitter lists on Mashable here.

Some of the best brains in the PR industry today have no formal qualification for doing their job. They hold no diploma from any communications institute nor any management certificate. But when it comes to PR strategy and execution, organizations seek them out. What is it that they do? Do they have some practical lessons that can become a part of every institute’s curriculum? I could think of five such points a PR school could adopt to make their students ‘future ready’. They are listed below, in no particular order. And if you are studying at an institute this information might be useful before you start job hunting.

1. ‘Presentation Skills’ – One of the most important weapons in any PR pros’ arsenal. You are judged by how you speak and present your ideas. Clients and colleagues form lifelong impressions within five seconds of you uttering the first sentence. In fact once my boss had whispered to me in an ‘X Files’ kind of tone: “They are always watching you.” Therefore before you accept your diploma, ensure your presentation and public speaking skills are top notch.
   
2. ‘P2P Networking’ – Here PR students have an unfair advantage over others. If they look around in their communications institute they will see editors, senior reporters, special correspondents of the future learning the ropes in the journalism classes. Right now they are approachable and ready to be friends. Ten years hence you will just read their by-lined article or see them on the prime time news. So start making right friends right now.
   
3. ‘What to do and what not to say’ – As a PR consultant, you are in touch with company heads and senior management, and there’s a ‘certain’ behaviour expected from you. This may include how to handle difficult questions, how not to offend people, how to shake hands, how to initiate and carry on a polite conversation, how not to get unnecessarily provoked etc. It sometimes takes years to master the art but the sooner we make a beginning, the better it is.
   
4. ‘Dress up and play the part’ – A PR consultant inspires confidence in her clients. They seek her advice and trust her judgement. Again, this is a skill honed over years but you can start immediately by dressing up the part. Always be aware of the silent signals you give about your personality by the way you dress up. I once heard an industry veteran say: “Before you pass out of your institute, ensure you have at least two business suits in your wardrobe.”
   
5. ‘Sell yourself, gracefully’ – Promote yourself and do it with style. For example, even as a student you can share your business card at formal occasions. It can carry your name, contact details and institute address. Learning early how to effectively use sites like Linkedin.com is also an asset that will go a long way.

I am sure there are institutes that already have these lessons in their curriculum but there are others who can think about them. After all a little practical work never did anyone any harm.

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?

This level of success of public relations campaign will depend on immediate reaction that you will receive or you desired to receive from target audience. The best example is getting our event listed in the events and listings section. A press conference would not be a ideal event to be listed in this section. Listing would be recommended for a children’s workshop in a book store. The outgrowth would be the number of participants for the workshop. Event participation would be the measurement tool.

The other forms of Outgrowths are:

Dip stick study: A dip stick study in the form of the recall of the particular brand, corporate or spokesperson vis-a-vis the competition. Which is the top of mind brand recall for the media in a particular industry? It should be the brand that you are working on, if it isn’t then you need to work harder.

Call ins: If there is a particular interview that is being broadcasted on the radio and the floor is open for call-in interviews with the celebrity. The number of callers would be the measured as a success rate.

Contest Entries: If we are promoting a particular contest, the number of contest entries. A corollary to this would be the number of SMS received as votes for the winning contestant – Indian Idol, Nach Baliye.

Focus Groups: A focus group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their attitude towards a product, service, concept or advertisement, immediately after they have been exposed to the messages of the particular element.

The other would be candidates appearing for walk-in interviews after reading the classified section in the newspaper. The number of visitors to the company website increasing after the company has made a new announcement. Case in Point would be the launch of the Tata Nano and the number of visitors to the website that were increased due to the announcement. Another observation was Tata Nano, Tata Motors, $2500 car being the top 25 searched keywords on Google as on January 10, 2008.

My next article will highlight success based on the other measurement techniques under Outcomes!!

(This is the second in the three part series on measuring the success of a Public Relations Campaign)

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india

Three levels of measuring public relations effectiveness have been identified by Dr. Walter K. Lindenmann, Senior Vice President and Director of Research at Ketchum Public Relations. He labels the basic level “outputs”, the intermediate level “outgrowths” and the advanced level “outcomes”.

1. Outputs measures message transmission and the initiative response
2. Outgrowths measures message reception with immediate reaction
3. Outcomes measures attitude and behavioral change

Outputs

Outputs of a particular PR campaign will be with respect to the initiative that was undertaken; like that of a press release announcing a product launch being sent out and ‘x+1′ number of publications carrying it. A direct impact of the proposed plan of targeting ‘x’ number of publications. The client is quite satisfied since we send him the scanned copies of clips as well as the detailed status on the achieved media coverage. This is termed as Target Media Reach. Few more ways to measure the output and the success of the campaign are:

Circulation – provide the circulation figures in case of print media. Similarly, providing TRP for television on real time basis and listenership for radio, this is revised on a weekly basis. The possibility of the total potential exposure to the message in the feature or the news article can be hence calculated.

Target Audience Reach – have you targeted the right media to reach your target audience? Case in point would be a cornflakes company targeting parents highlighting the nutritional value. In such a case, it is imperative to include niche magazines like Parenting, Prevention and other vertical publications in our media plan. One challenge here, that could be faced, is that of periodicity of the magazine. We could look at creating and including customized initiatives around the vertical magazines to gain mileage and required publicity. This will surely help in reaching out to the desired target audience with the desired, customized messaging, rather than merely relying on coverage through a press release being sent to them.

Impressions – the number of times an article has appeared in a particular publication should also be calculated. These articles should be checked for all the right messages. Then, these articles then should be multiplied with circulations figures.

Delivery of Message Points – We are in the profession to form the right impression. For that, we need to create the right messages, in the right media and to the right audience. If all the messages that were designated (or desired) to be published, are published, we would be successful in our campaign?

Competitive Analysis – All the above mentioned parameters can be used similarly for the competing brands and evaluated and compared to our brand. From a tactical perspective, this helps in gauging the competitor’s media presence in terms of media type and frequency, which helps us implement our own media plan much more efficiently and effectively.

My next article will highlight success based on the other measurement techniques under Outgrowths and Outcomes!! Let me know if you want to add any other parameter to Outputs.

(This is the first in the three part series on measuring the success of a Public Relations Campaign)

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india

Happy since we knew that that was coming and like I mentioned earlier, the Agency that I work for has always driven us towards working on Integrated Communication Stratgies… we were always made to understand not only the PR mandate of the Client, but understand his business goals, his business objectives, his need to reach out to various stakeholders and then create a Communication Stratgey that was more holistic. So a lot of research, industry awareness went into all our strategies that gave the Client an insight into what he could expect and what would be the end result. The strategy would not only reflect our understanding of the Client’s market. his audiences, his products and services but give the Client an insight into how we would achieve them. The Communication Strategy would thus include Vanilla PR Strategies of course, but also try and move it to the next level of PR…which was contact programmes, associations, networking meetings with industry audiences, blogging, online discussions, emphasis on collateral creation, events, meet-n-greets with stakeholders and not to foerget CSR. CSR is fast becoming not just a philanthrophic concept, but a crucial tool to reach out to the serious audiences as well… and we integrate a lot of that too at various levels, local,. regional, national and international…

Now why would we be anxious…anxious because this level of advanced Public Relations strategies needs expertise at the work force level and that is somehow missing. Talent is in dire poverty and that sometimes hampers the standard of execution and the convertability of plans into actions. Understanding of basic communication theories is crucial and I am not too sure how much in-depth knowledge do the kids have today to take PR to the next level. You can train resources in-house to understand the ushering new technology and how innovation is quickening the pace of communication…but communication theories by Harold Lasswell and Marshall McLuhan are as relevant today and need to be understood to be able to implement modern technology and inovation into mass communication strategies and make PR more effective.

Am kicked about the new year since I have been lucky to have Clients that are not just media savvy but understand the ethos of communication, know what their end consumers or audiences want and are not happy with mundane text book PR…and why is that good news? Since my team and I are now gonna juggle with some great strategies and bring them to life with encouragement and support of my Clients…and as far as talent is concerned…looks like a session or two on the traditional communication theories will only enhance what we have to offer.

Cheers and have a great new year
–
Madhavi Mukherjee
Senior Consultant and Practice Head Media&Entertainment
Hanmer&Partners
Email: madhavi@hanmerpr.com

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india

Dear Pratibha:

You asking us a question on this blog is the power of digital PR. Don’t you agree? Okay, I have just one suggestion to make – please read through our blog and you will become an expert of digital PR. In fact, one of my previous posts on the same subject would give you some ideas to begin with and there were quite a few posts on the subject available on our blog from my fellow contributors. But since you have asked this question, let’s discuss about how it all started and where it is leading to.

All through the 20th century, most of our communication was using old media vehicles and in a monologue form. It was a top down approach (even today we follow that model largely in our agencies, don’t we?) We developed messages and bombarded poor consumers with all jargons we can find in marketing and business books.

In the beginning of 21st century, we saw the emergence of web based communication (which was fondly branded as web 1.0). We saw emergence of news portals, email marketers and groups and forums. We saw new breeds of online editors and journalists and most of the newspapers, magazines went with this model.

Somewhere around late 2004 or early 2005 this new age communication called web 2.0 has started. It was all about user generated content (UGC), social networks, not moderated – not edited – not regulated content, the humanisation of communication happened – people uploaded their personal videos and became superstars, people uploaded their songs and got recording contracts. This is what we are witnessing now and taking full advantage of it (at least, some of us are). Now many companies and brands are taking advantage of this phenomenon – that is called digital PR.

Now one doesn’t really know what would be the future of PR in 2010 but I think based on the trend the technology is following – many think it would be mobile. Communication on the go, there will be so much to choose from, it would be more personal, instant, individual dialogue based communication.

Or the way technology is evolving – it would be something else. Whatever said and done, but Pratibha believe me that technology is going to play a very important role in whatever you or me are going to do. So my advice to you is to keep yourself updated on technology and acquire knowledge in all areas possible. Tomorrow will belong to the people who will command technology+knowledge.

All the best!

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india

SMS or Text Messaging is fast becoming a method of interactive PR and Marketing. The evidence of its popularity is all around but no one has really grasped the significance of this new tool that bridges the online and offline world for consumers. Text messages today can include graphics, video, and the infamous MMS.

So what are the numbers out there today? With a 213 Million mobile subscriber base growing at nearly a million year-on-year as opposed to an abysmal banking penetration of 30 per cent and an internet penetration of 60,000,000 Internet users as of September 2007, 5.3 per cent penetration, as per ITU, and 2,520,000 broadband Internet connections as of September 2007, as per IWS. Mobile marketing has really been what is know as a ‘push’ game so far, with an inability to get delivery reports or replies back to a text message.

All this is now changing with the technology becoming available to enable ‘pull’. The latter really being an ability to link responses to a campaign, thus making for very exciting possibilities. Internationally, the uses of the sms as a tool are many and some that impressed me most include Televox, Smile Reminder, among many other innovative uses of sms or text messaging.

In India, The traditional use of bulk messaging has been traditionally made by large consumer facing companies in the credit card , DTH, consumer loyalty application, job portal and airline space. Bulk sms brokers, Google, Service providers include all mobile operators including GSM and CDMA (…and I am going to save the current controversy on 3G spectrum for another post!) who provide short codes such as the ones we sent sms’ to for polls and interactive programming on TV etc. A popular show like Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) generated 58 million SMS over a 3 month period.

Some quick and dirty research on the IAMAI portal on statistics and VAS although a little dated was revealing. The companies that own a short code (e.g. 8888, 3456 etc) which is basically sold to a third party client for some keyword, and for a specific period have a tie up with multiple operators to ensure customers of all operators send the SMS to the same number.

There are around 10 national level players and several regional players in this domain. The entry barrier is very high because of high initial deposit and need to tie up with each operator for each individual circle. Our research reveals that most operators also ask for a deposit of Rs 2 million and a minimum guaranteed volume of half a million SMS per month for entering into an arrangement with a Short Code owner.

All this is fast changing with a recent use of mobile marketing as a tool by the Anti Corruption Bureau in Mumbai, India recently. The arrival of mass usage of technology is clearly evidenced when the babudom (India term for the bureaucracy) starts using it. Like I said above, the trick is to find the technology with the ‘pull’ factor in addition to the ‘push’.

Imagine a press briefing where you could in addition to sending an invite to the media; also receive replies back from them via the same short code that could then integrate back into a database, which sent a report with the numbers of invitation deliveries, special requests, confirmations, regrets and so on. Sounds like a boon?

Internationally there are already associations such as the Mobile Marketing Association are the Industry bodies that bring together the myriad parts of this business as well as rules that govern its members. The MMA is a global organization with over 500 members representing over forty countries. MMA members include agencies, advertisers, hand held device manufacturers, carriers and operators, retailers, software providers and service providers, as well as any company focused on the potential of marketing via mobile devices.

We need something similar in India quickly to address the regional topicality of the market. With the new NDNC regime and the added concern for privacy and text messaging spam it will be important to lay down the rules governing mobile advertising and consumer protection guidelines to ensure that the channel does not get embroiled in controversy before maturity so that the full potential of this application can be felt in the market mix. Maybe the IAMAI will address this?

So clearly the time maybe right for a classic disintermediation enterprise, maybe from the VAS space, with both the push and pull aspects of the technology in place, as well as interconnect agreements in place with all GSM and CDMA network operators to offer this as a service.

Imagine a web portal where you can go and pay by a payment gateway, enter your mobile number database, send off a campaign with pre-determined templates, as simple as sending a greeting card! Imagine the ease of an inbox, sent box and a report folder with responses! I know that there are people on the anvil to do this as I write this from a recent visit to Hyderabad, anything beyond which could be violation of the NDA.

It will be interesting for me to see who will be a first mover in the PR business to use this for inviting media to press conferences, stop press notifications and use as a heads up tool. Of course with the opt-in permissions in place to avoid peeving some of the more aggressive journalists as we all have known to at some point!

Note: The author has no stake in the above space!

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india

Using Google News to get the online coverage of clients in a particular country or publication

We all use Google News and News Alert to get information on new developments. As a PR professional, many of the News Alerts I used is of clients’ coverage. However, if we are handling MNC clients, then often many of the coverage are on news portals outside India.

What if we want Google News Alerts on only coverage of our clients that appeared on India-based news sites? What if we want to see the coverage of our clients on only a particular news portal? Or what if you feel like comparing the coverage you got for your client vs the coverage its competition got?

We can get that too. It’s simple using Google Advanced News Search.

These are the steps involved:

1. Click the ‘Advanced news search’ link below the search box on the Google News site.

2. Now when you see the ‘Advanced search box’ like the picture below, type the name of your client in the ‘Find results-with the exact phrase’ box. Then type ‘India’ in the ‘Location-Return only articles from news sources located in’ box.

3. Now when you click the ‘Google Search’ button, you will get only news coverage of your client from India-based news portals.

4. You can subscribe to the ‘News Alert’ of this configuration (link on the left hand side of the Google site), so that Google sends you updates whenever there is an additional coverage.

5. Instead of the country, you can type the name of a publication in the ‘News source- Return only articles from the news source named’ box if you want to see coverage on that particular site only. You can see a list of the top news sources of Google in this recent post here.

Note that Google News gives you news links on the current month only. If you want to see older coverage, you have to use the News Archive search service.

Now if you want to skip going to the Google Advanced Search page and use only the Google News Search box instead, you can type the following to get the desired results:

“xyz abc” location:india (where xyz abc is the name of your client. You have to used the quotes too) For example: reliance location:india

“xyz abc” source:cde (where cde is the name of the publication. Put an underscore between words if the publication source is more than one word)For example: reliance source:business_standard

Using Google Trends to study online searches on our clients

What is Google Trends? This is the Google explanation – With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.

How can we use this to compare searches for our clients and their competition? Let me demonstrate with a simple example. I typed the terms – Hutch, Airtel (two competing mobile phone operators in India) – on the Google Trends homepage. This is what I got:

The graphs of online searches conducted on these two terms:

Further below is the searches by countries:

and cities:

and languages:

So anybody wants to have a look at these results and try use it for planning the next Tier II cities campaign?