Public Relations and Communicators Blog

The world's best marketers clearly understand the value that Public Relations can add to their brand. More importantly they understand the limitations of PR and therefore are able to use it more effectively. See Richard Branson talk about PR Unfortunately, there are not that many well-grounded marketers who understand the subtler aspects and nuances of public relations. Usually most marketing professionals are off the mark by miles and they often overlap PR with the external manifestations of advertising. But then, PR is not even of the same DNA as Advertising, let alone being look-alikes. Unlike advertising, PR has far more layers and factors impacting the outcomes. Speaking about the two in the same breath is as aberrant as is comparing mud with mud-pie. Public relations requires subtle skills, advertising relishes blatant outbursts; PR purrs while advertising rumbles; PR builds trust and credibility, while advertising moves the audiences to action. To make the most ...

The value of good PR is easy to see: Positive news stories help companies retain clients and attract new ones. Delivering that value, though, and at the right price, is hard--and getting harder. The media industry downturn has left fewer scribes to go around, which means there are millions of press releases chasing fewer megaphones. To be heard above the chatter, many companies will hire public relations agencies. This article--the first in a new series, called "A Different Lens" on smart PR strategy--will guide you through the process. While a professional PR firm can deliver huge bang for your marketing buck, this business isn't rocket science. Truth be told, you could do a lot of it yourself--if you had the time and the connections, which you probably don't. That's not self-serving (I'm a PR pro), it's just plain fact. So for companies that aren't scraping to rub their very last two pennies together, hiring PR help, in some fashion, makes a lot of s...

Over the last decade I've seen the role of the junior most trainees and executives in PR change substantially. The first rung in the ladder in the years of yore of the PR profession would start with the mundane task of cutting, pasting & filing news clippings for clients and their competition. The agency would typically reason that since this was the most essential grounding that any PR professional needed, the longer they spent time in this task, the better the professional's media knowledge and understanding would be honed. This was also the time when the executive was to 'observe' all other activities and get a feel for media relations, client servicing and reporting. The other task the junior executives were assigned was to do with reporting. An onerous task at one point, where each of the clipping details had to be painstakingly entered into an excel file with the headline including title, page, journalist and size. Often the poor executive would spend 3...

Crisis communications has always been of utmost importance in any organization. Its impact and, by corollary, its importance & relevance has become higher due to the interconnected world we live in. Speed of response and a well thought through strategy is essential in solving crisis. Crisis response time and risk of crisis are inversely proportional on a logarithmic scale. Meaning, a delay the response by a few hours (or days) and the potential risk of the crisis grows many times over. We at Blue Lotus have a three stage crisis containment & communications plan. These stages are referred to as Anticipate, Participate and Mitigate. In the Anticipatory stage, we do scenario building, develop war-room situations, and conduct spokesperson training to be prepared for such situations. In the Participatory stage, we have our media relations cells in 9 offices keep a close watch on the story movement and evolution. Also, this is the stage where we are sensitizing the relevant media tow...

Communication across audiences is becoming more and more important today. There are multiple reasons for the same. There is a slowdown, and so everybody is looking at value. That's a reason for us to force-multiply and take experiences and various other aspects of the brand from inside the room, to the outside world. It is an important aspect of the marketing communications business to showcase value. The other is to show that we actually enhance value for people interested in the particular topic on show - be it a brand or a service or a launch or anything else. In order to reach out to everybody, you need to force multiply. The third is to actually build a very important part called 'trust' -the one thing that is being eroded in the current context. When trust gets lost, the things easiest to eliminate get eliminated. And therefore. as communicators - and trust is essentially a communication platform - it's important that we look at trust extremely carefully. Ther...

[At the very outset, I must strongly state that what ails the PR industry can be mostly attributed to the agencies themselves. As each agency strives to achieve better results for its clients, educates those who are not aware and trains the professionals continuously, we will see the industry become better. This, of course, is a well known and well accepted fact. In this piece I have focused on those things that can be bettered outside the agency set-up.] It may not be a stretch to say that the maturity of any industry is reflected in the maturity of its stakeholders. This barometer would be a direct reflection on the most important four stakeholders of the PR industry. In our case, the four main drivers for this ‘barometer’ are, the type of people that PR is attracting, PR industry’s focus, the academic rigour of the educational institutes conducting the courses and, finally, the scope of work that the clients are demanding. Let us consider our four metrics of the PR industry baromete...

Morbidity and Mortality analysis helps in systemic correction leading to growth Popular theory has it that the IQ of a person (or corporate) falls to 10% when faced with acute adversity. Is there a way that we can add to the intelligence by learning from adversity? Is there a way that we can end up adding IQ points when faced with a situation of adversity? When any company loses clients, markets, mindshare or reputation, it is unfortunate that very few do a serious introspection to understand what really happened. A parallel analysis, termed as termed Morbidity and Mortality in the hospital environment, is a common feature when an adverse event happens in a hospital. Not only has it helped improve efficiencies, but in the hospital context, the M&M analysis has actually helped saved lives. I categorize experiential learning in two categories, subtle and gross. Gross learning happens by pure observation of something new. On the other hand, subtle learning happens due to experimentati...