Having a look at the top media relations tips from this blog in 2007:

1. Best media relations practices by PR professionals: What is the best way to issue a press release? What time of the day do we issue a press release and on which day of the week? How do PR professionals pitch for a story and what are the most-preferred options? Recently we conducted an online survey ‘Media Relations Best Practices’ on this blog and it was responded to by around thirty PR professionals and journalists who are readers of this blog. Here are the results.

2. 15 media relations tips by PR professionals and journalists: A list of select media relations tips from PR professionals and journalists who participated in the recent online survey ‘Media Relations Best Practices’ on this blog.

3. Pitching to media - 5 key factors to keep in mind: What does it take to sell a story to a journalist? These are some key points gathered from interactions with the scribes over the years.

4. Media pitching advice from the media: “Read the magazine, and send us a relevant idea, supported by key facts and no waffle” - an advice to all those pitching to the media, summed up Stuart Bruce of a pitch guideline from Real Business magazine. Works well for all PR folks across the globe I guess and in India too.

5. Getting the best out of press releases: We have heard about press release optimisation for the web, which in simple words means you write your press releases stuffed with keywords that search engines like Google and Yahoo are likely to pick up. This helps in having your press releases come out in relevant online searches and in turn helps boost your marketing and sales prospects from the web, besides the pure coverage factor.

6. Media relations tips for spokespersons: Here are some good media relations tips for company spokespersons.

7. Online PR - fast 5 Q&As with Sally Falkow: Adopting an online PR strategy is a must today if you are handling a technology client. That said it is not restricted to technology companies. There are dozens of lists of companies outside the technology vertical that have successfully benefited from well-planned online PR campaigns. these are some good tips by Sally Falkow, President of Expansion Plus Inc., a renowned Internet marketing and PR company, on how to successfully manage an online PR campaign.

8. Best time of the day to pitch a journalist: Often as PR professionals, we wonder when is the best time of the day to pick up the phone and pitch a story to a journalist. Getting a journalist at the right time increases our chances of getting a successful pitch. You might not want to catch a journalist when he/she is interviewing someone, writing a story, or running around in the field. But if you caught him/ her at a good time when he/she is in an open frame of mind and willing to listen to ideas, you can explain properly what you have in mind. This post explains how a day goes for journalists and what time of the day PR people should contact them to get maximum attention from them.

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

10. Top 10 reasons why PR professionals should pitch to small blogs: There are big blogs and small blogs. PR professionals are seemingly on the lookout of top league blogs to pitch their client stories. What about the smaller ones - the B list blogs? Here are the top ten reasons why you might want to start considering pitching to a small blog.

11. Developing relationships in the World Wide Web: Some people fondly call it PR 2.0, in few western PR markets they have even moved to PR 3.0 and some call it Digital PR. What exactly is it? Does online PR exist? Can we develop relationships in the WWW? Well, let’s try and find out.

We have some good developments at India PR blog in 2007. Firstly, we have the India PR Job Board launch that is used by many leading PR agencies and read by hundreds of PR professionals today. Then the formation of India PR Blog writer’s team with PR professionals and journalists from across organisations, formally to be announced soon, came as a significant milestone that is pushing the blog as an industry platform for free and frank discussion.

Among all the posts at this blog in 2007, we have some posts that stood out from the rest in terms of readers’ participation and page views. These are the top 12 PR posts at India PR Blog in 2007, one for each month:

January 2007:

15 media relations tips by PR professionals and journalists: A list of select media relations tips from PR professionals and journalists who participated in the recent online survey ‘Media Relations Best Practices’ on this blog.

February 2007:

Corporate Blogging - Making a strategic approach: Should your organisation blog? Can you benefit from engaging with the emerging social media? Should your engagement be proactive or reactive? Or should your blogging plans be put on hold as yet?

March 2007:

Is media coverage the measure of PR?: How many of us believe that media coverage is all the measure of the success of any PR campaign? As we are in the business of public relations, shouldn’t the ‘publics’ be what we should have our focus on? The media is just the tool to reach out to the ‘publics’.

April 2007:

Corporate blogging case studies: Often we are at a need of corporate blogging case studies for research purposes or sharing with our clients.So this is a compilation of such corporate blogging success stories available online.

May 2007:

Top 5 steps for bloggers to get written about in newspapers and magazines: For bloggers who are engaged in blogging as a profession or are aiming to build on a high profile through blogging, getting covered in the traditional media can be the next big achievement after making a presence in the blogosphere and among the bloggers community.With an understanding of how the media works, bloggers can do their own PR and chart out a plan for their own media-image building exercises. Here are the top 5 steps that bloggers need to take.

June 2007:

Expensive PR events - are they worth it?: We organise events for our clients’ product launches, VIP visits, office openings, anniversaries, etc. inviting celebrity movie or sport stars, or with fashion shows, stage skits, belly dance performance, musical performance, etc. in a bid to attract more audience and media. Are they worth it?

July 2007:

PR measurement in India: A compilation of the PR measurement service providers in India.

August 2007:

Working in big vs small agencies: Is it better to work in a big agency or in a small/ medium size agency for say a PR professional with 1-3 years of experience?

September 2007:

Open RFPs - is it fair on the agencies?: RFPs seem the ideal way of getting the right agency. However, there are those who abuse the system. There are companies whose corporate communications departments regularly sends out RFPs to PR agencies only to get a round of fresh ideas without any intention of hiring any agency.

October 2007:

PR agencies losing out social media to speciality firms and ad agencies: The PR industry is today seemingly losing the social media to the advertising industry. Most PR agency folks do not care less about the social media or are too busy selling stories to the newspaper and TV folks. Ad agencies are taking advantage of this and some who are already looking at ad accounts of various MNCs are contemplating introducing social media marketing practices as part of their online advertising campaigns.

November 2007:

How to use mobile phone SMS in your PR & Marketing campaigns: 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.

December 2007:

A Flat World of Paradoxes: As citizens of these virtual networks we are all aware of the “hot buttons” and motivations basis which each of us thrive in this space. We need to use THIS knowledge as insiders/citizens and not be overwhelmed by the offline marketer/brand representative in us.

A Happy New Year from the India PR blog team. We will be back after the holidays.

Tech Tags: pr public+relations india

Lazy Sunday evening. I was fiddling around with Google Analytics and here’s what I found - the top ten most-read posts at IndiaPRblog.

10. Getting a story done - what clients need to know - Are we always at loggerheads with our clients over which media to target? They always seem to prefer The Economic Times, no matter who they are, what they have to say, or what type of company they are in. A reality check.

9. Shortage of professionals in PR - A simple post linking to a good story by a HR professional in the PR industry talking about the issues in the industry and steps that can be taken. Somewhere along the line, some people started misusing this post by forwarding it to other people and prompting them to leave hate comments on particular individuals in the industry. One such mail landed up on my inbox. I had to delete many comments and disabled the comments section. I consulted a few peers in the blogosphere and they recommended ‘no more un-moderated comments on this blog’. That’s when the disclaimer was put up.

8. What journalists hate in PR people - Journalists; one of the primary stakeholders in the PR business - won’t you want to know what they feel about what you are doing? By the way I invented a sentence around this time. ‘Journalists and PR professionals are like cats and dogs - besides all the love-hate, at the end of the day, we have to stay together inside the house.’ I guess nobody liked it.

7. Best media relations practices by PR professionals - A survey that we have done on this blog on various media relations tactics and processes and how best it can be done. What works and what doesn’t. The industry loved what their colleagues had to say.

6. Online PR communities that you can join - We know there are many communities on various subjects on the web. Joining one of them could be fun - you get to meet people like you, discuss ideas, seek help on a project, post a vacancy, tell people you are looking for a change, or just read what others are saying. This is a list of the popular online communities on public relations.

5. Free Press Release distribution services - We all love free resources, don’t we? If there are services that will distribute our releases for free, why not? Now I have got this idea that this list can be updated adding many more to the list. Watch out this blog.

4. 15 media relations tips by PR professionals and journalists - A list of select media relations tips from PR professionals and journalists who participated in an online survey on media relations best practices conducted on this blog.

3. Pepsi and Coke head for another PR disaster - I wonder what was about this three paragraph post that made it the third most-read post on this blog. Buy hey, accept it, Pepsi and Coke are not just consumer soft-drinks brands. They symbolise India’s modernity, and to some, western cultural imperialism.

2. Top 5 PR agencies in India - This is a PR industry survey inspired by the 1st Unofficial Public Relations Survey below. PR professionals vote on their favourite PR agencies categorised into HR, learning, senior management, payscale, and work culture.

1. Results of the 1st Unofficial Public Relations Survey - This is the all time top post in the IndiaPRblog! For the first time in the history of the PR industry in India, the PR agencies were taken to task, not by any research agencies or any PR associations, but together by those in the industry themselves on a simple blog. The results were not foolproof, but served at least as a base for some further research by those who seek information in the industry. People used to submit their feedback on the survey form months after the survey was closed that I had to put it in writing not to submit their inputs anymore on the survey questionnaire. If you want to know what the readers of this blog think which are the best and worst agencies in India, or if you want to know what are the salary structure like in the industry, take a look.

Some other pages most visited:

If we look at overall top landing pages in this blog, there are two pages that featured in the top 5. These are not posts, but labels of the various listings here in this blog.

1. India PR agencies - List of PR agencies in India. Human-edited. (You decipher the meaning of that for yourself)

2. Media lists - Listing of media in India. Human-edited.

A big thanks to everybody who takes out the time to read this blog. Write to me in case you have any complaints or suggestions.

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