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Have you sent your entry to the Asia Pacific PR Awards 2007? The last date of submission is August 24, 2007 and the awards will be presented on November 14, 2007 in Hong Kong.

Now in the seventh year, the awards hold much significance for Indian PR agencies as the name is much well-known in the Indian market and secondly because of its geographical relevance. The awards are open to PR consultancies, solo practitioners and in-house departments from all countries in the Asia-Paciic region (including Australia, Japan and New Zealand).

Last year, the sole winner from India was Ogilvy Public Relations in the ‘Corporate & Public – Corporate Communications’ category for its campaign ‘Plural Power to Rural India: Bringing the World Home to Rural India’ for Amararaja Batteries.

Here is the snippet of the campaign from the PRAward2006 supplement:

The ‘Plural power to rural India: Bringing the world home to rural India’ campaign was supported by Amararaja Batteries (ARB) India and Amara Raja-Johnson Controls
USA, a leading player in the Indian automotive battery sector.

All activities in line with the launch were aimed towards strategic imperatives of
information availability and usage, communication, documentation of success stories and leveraging this success provided for Amararaja Batteries’ corporate reputation.

Let’s hope we get home trophies this year.

To get more information on the awards, visit the awards site here.

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and the actual survey results: - post by hobbithob

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This is a guest article by Deepak Aneja, a communications research professional at a leading global media analytics company and a reader of the India PR Blog. Deepak will write a series of posts here on PR measurement. The views here are his. Read on…

PR Measurement has been under tremendous pressure by marketing professionals to prove its contribution in business outcomes. Now there are techniques and tools that can show a direct link between PR and business outcomes, for example: correlation between volumes of coverage and sales. These advances in PR measurement techniques are helping prove spending on PR programs and justifying PR’s role in marketing mix.

Most PR measurement programs are traditionally focused around its media generation role. Typically most measurement programs seek to analyze media exposure – which is similar to the traditional advertising approach that marketing and brand managers are familiar, and comfortable, with.

First Level – Reach, This will cover number of media, number of readers, key message delivery, placement and the tone. Basically, the facts, what came out?

Second Level – Benchmarking, This measures the equivalent of the traditional advertising ‘share of voice’ approach tracks the corporate media coverage vis-à-vis its competitors. It provides the advantage of knowing how much media coverage and of what type it obtained relative to its competitors. In a very competitive business environment, it’s essential for organisations to be serious about their PR. Combined with the first level it provides good evaluation approach.

Third Level – Now measurement techniques at the second level can be correlated with sales patterns. And this has been named by ‘Share of Discussion’.

The theory about Share of Discussion is that if,
- PR can increase the amount of public (principally media driven) discussion about a topic, It can gain the majority share (or dominance) for its client or product, then It is likely that there will be a consequent increase in sales for that product/competitor after a period of time.

There are several case studies that directly – and scientifically – provide a link between peak periods of discussion to increased sales. However I would like to add that the time lapse between activity and action varies according to the type of product or service.

It must be recognized that these studies are related to unpaid media coverage i.e. that which is generated through PR. It supports other studies that report that consumers are much more influenced by editorial comment and coverage which they perceive as being independent and credible.

Accordingly, (for example), if mobile phones are very much an item of discussion in the media, the mobile phone brand which gains the greatest exposure stands to reap the greatest sales benefit. Please refer to the figures below:

Share of Discussion based on story counts…

Here the articles have been collected for the period of 2004-05 for Ist table and 2003-04 for IInd table from Factiva for India region, which covers all financial, mainlines newspapers and top business & telecom magazines. Articles are more or less exclusive on brands and are not being analyzed for tonality.

Correlation- During both the periods Sales to Share of Discussion (Volume of articles mentioning mobile handset brand names) were highly correlated. During 2004-05 correlation was r=0.97 and during 2003-04 it was r=.98.

The table above illustrates the correlations between the client’s (Nokia) own media coverage / count and its competitor’s with regards to the sales figures. Of course, it may be argued that marketers have always intuitively known this anyway. However, what makes this different is that this is showing the potency of unpaid media exposure – and that’s PR.

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Will be covered in part – II

More meaningful & in-depth measurement can be done based on media values and based on impressions.

Should we(as PR professionals, corporate communication managers, marketers, bloggers) call a journalist on the mobile phone? This is a question that strikes across for a second whenever PR professionals get ready to dial a journalist.

The question might seem silly at an age where most of us ignore the landline and talk on our mobile phones. If you need to call, just call. What is the need of going through the newspaper’s board number, wait for 5 minutes, go in circles until you finally get to the journalist. Call center people call us on our cellphones. We twit from our cellphones. We get dozens of SMS ad messages on our cell phones. What’s the big deal in calling journalists, or for that matter, our clients, and business partners on their cellphones, talk and just get on it with?

On the other hand, some people say calling on cellphones for work can be considered impolite and too intrusive. So we keep on trying their landlines, or maybe jut send them a couple of gentle reminder emails. There are journalists who freak out on PR professionals calling them on their cellphones. Some journalists vow never to share their cellphones.

The question is should we call journalists on the mobile phones or not?

Or does it depend on what are we calling them for? How should we call them in the following situations?

1. Following up on a press release

2. Inviting them for an event/ RSVP

3. Pitching a story

Or does it depend on journalist to journalist? Some do not mind it while some are very finicky about it. What are your opinions and experiences? Let’s hear it.

Public Relations Measurement for Travel and Tourism Annotated

The reality is that there are lots of very accurate ways to measure travel and tourism PR: Perhaps the most famous case is Southwest Airlines. By embedding a unique URL that takes visitors to a mirror landing page in each of their Search-Engine-Optimized press releases, they can tell exactly how many tickets they sell as a result of each press release they send out. See this Measurement Standard article for more.

Elisa Camahort, co-founder of Blogger, uses a similar system to measure the impact of blogging on ticket sales for her clients in the theater world. She gets actors to blog about upcoming performances and then tracks the number of tickets sold by tracking the number of unique visits from the blog to the ticket sales page of their web site.

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By looking at social media ranks for companies, and comparing it with mainstream media ranks for the same companies we can see which brands are taking advantage of this new medium and also draw conclusions about the effectiveness of social media.

The Top 100 brands in social media – immediate future

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Finesse PR has an opening for one PR executive for its Delhi office. See the job details at the PR jobs board.

A brief on Finesse PR

“Set up in December 2000, Finesse PR is a full service communications consultancy headquartered at Delhi.
Finesse PR has its South office at Hyderabad and representations at Mumbai and Kolkata.

Finesse PR is managed by experienced Public Relations and Finance professionals and ably supported by a host of experienced professionals from fields as diverse as Media, Travel and Tourism, Architecture, Interiors, Marketing, Processed Food, IT & Telecom and Finance.

Finesse PR has senior Bureaucrats and Specialists from the taxation and food-processing fields as consultant on board. Critical level of contacts in the bureaucracy, industry and media ensures that relevant information inflow never stops.

The Consultancy advises clients on Public Relations, Brand, Image and Reputation Management. The provision of expert and objective analysis and advice and access to a pool of resources is a part of our PR offering. ”

Comment from India PR Blog

While Finesse PR is relatively newer PR agency, it still commands a name when we talk of PR agencies in Delhi and can be competitive in the media relations service space.

View Finesse PR’s website

Click here to go to Finesse PR’s job posting

Post a job on the India PR job board.

(This is the fifth and final of the ‘first 5′ PR agencies to post on the PR job board. From now on, please subscribe to the India PR Blog RSS feed or the email subscription (see right-hand sidebar) to get notified of the latest job postings on the board. Thanks to all the 5 agencies for supporting this initiative by taking the lead in using the board.)