Chronicling digital marketing trends & experiences, online tools & tips
Publicis Groupe of France is reportedly going to acquire India’s Hanmer & Partners and following this, the latter will merge with Manning Selvage & Lee and become Hanmer MS&L.
Hanmer’s clients include ACC, Network 18 (CNBC), Bharti Axa, Emirates, Enam, General Motors, ICICI Bank, ICICI Prudential, ING Vysya, LG, Religare, Tata Sky, BPL Mobile, Henkel and Discovery Networks, among others.
(Via CNN Money)
If you are looking for a quick guide to social media marketing, head over to DoshDosh. There is a nice post summarizing what the new practice is all about and how you can take advantage of it for your business.
This is a quick read for PR and marketing professionals who are new to the web 2.0 scene. The article can also be taken as a reference for some tips if you are going to meet your clients on why they should embrace social media marketing.
“Social media marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels and it is a powerful strategy that will get you links, attention and massive amounts of traffic. There is no other low-cost promotional method out there that will easily give you large numbers of visitors, some of whom may come back to your website again and again…”
Read on – Importance of Social Media Marketing …
Welcome to PRPO – which stands for PR Process Outsourcing.
And this is how PR outsourcing is starting out – Text 100 has started a Global Resource Optimization Centre at Mumbai to cater to activities that can be conducted at any part of the world. These activities include online campaign management, analysis, report generation, information management, content drafting for case studies, opinion articles, spokesperson bios, general editing, proofing and formatting, secondary research, reviews, pitches, messaging workshops, etc. Right now, the work outsourced is among Text 100 offices.
This is something that is likely to go viral. So two predictions:
1.We will see many global agencies doing the same in their India branches. We have Corporate Voice Weber Shandwick, Genesis BM, Edelman, etc.
2.Big Indian PR companies like Adfactors, Vaishnavi, Perfect Relations, Hanmer & Partners, etc. will open specialised cells to cater to outsourced work from their global affiliates.
3.There might be a third category of specialised PRPO firms coming up to cater to global PR firms.
Then we will need a NASSCOM.
Imagine you are pitching a story to a blogger and the latter is not convinced about your story idea. Still you persist. The blogger gets really pissed off and writes a nasty piece about you, your client, and writes in detail about what you have been doing. That is blogger relations for you – not like dealing with the usual mainstream media journalist who might bang down the phone but at least won’t write his/her personal jaunt with you.
Ok I exaggerated a bit. This can happen very rarely. Bloggers, especially the top ones, can be very professional and do take decisions objectively. But the point is this is an area that calls more a more sensitive handling than you would have been doing normally.
To help get things stated, this is a good post at Problogger that details 21 tips from the full-time blogger himself on tips that one can keep in mind while pitching to bloggers. Problogger is considered to be the top resource site on blogging so you might just want to check what the expert has to say.
Well, the tips are not any secret mantra and are what any good common sense would say. You need to understand the writer, what he writes about and appreciate it, and try to bring value to him/her while pitching for your client. The end objective should be a mutual benefit for both parties.
To put it from another perspective, we all hate telemarketing phone calls. Don’t we? We hate them all the more when a telemarketing executive calls us to offer a free credit card when we already have three. That’s what happens to ill-researched telemarketing calls made to random numbers from a random consumer phone number list. But if the same executive finds out a bit about us and calls us to offer a service that will help us pay off all credit cards at one go automatically every month, we might stop and listen.
Is the Hindustan Times (HT) group set to launch a TV news channel? If so, this could be its next step towards competing with the Times Group since the latter has recently launch the Times Now TV channel.
Remember HT Group launched Mint this year to fill its gap of a financial daily. The Times group has The Economic Times, though the comparison might be bit unfair.
By the way, LiveMint.com recently reported that India will see 100 new TV channels launching by the end of this year.
If you are a new business development executive and are looking for new ways to leverage your online social networking in your work, here is one Facebook application that might help.
Post Your RFP is a Facebook application that you can use to browse a list of RFPs that other users have posted. There are more than 800 RFPs listed so far and you can see them listed in various industry categories.
If you are in an organisation, you can use this service to post RFPs and let your friends and contacts know about it. Post Your RFP can also draft and review proposals for you.
PR 2.0, social media marketing, or whatever name you call it is supposed to be primarily the domain of PR agencies. If you are a CEO of an organisation and wants to add the social media mix into your overall PR and marketing plan, you are likely to approach your corporate communications or your PR agency. Right? I don’t think so. And I’m not the only one talking about it. Here is Jeremy Pepper writing about how PR can lose the social media to the advertising folks because the latter have the ability to make things look more sexier.
He also wrote that when websites came into the scene years back, the PR folks ignored it and what is primarily a communications tool went to the marketing hands and today they use it mainly to sell products.
Out here in India it is mostly of this second reason that 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. These may include building applications, creating micro sites, blogs, and monitoring the blogosphere. Take the case of Quasar, a digital media solutions provider that is starting an online reputation program encompassing online ad campaigns, website and application development, and social media marketing. Read the news at Alootechie.
Another development is that certain PR professionals who are adept in the new media are opening their own specialised agencies, creating a whole new industry altogether. Take the case of Blogworks, a social marketing consultancy headed by a PR veteran, that has been instrumental in developing some good online properties.
Which are the PR agencies standing up now? We have heard about the supposedly famous 360 degree campaign of Corporate Voice Weber Shandwick some time back that was carried in a national daily and on national TV. But is that all? The supposedly big technology PR firms of India like Text 100 and 20:20 Media are quiet, instead of taking the lead in familiarising the industry of this development that has taken place in their specialised domain.
So while we all are busy selling stories to the newspapers and TV and boast of a fast growing Rs. 165 crore industry, other folks will come and quietly take over what could ever be the biggest growth opportunity of the industry.
If you have a product or service that you would like to showcase to the PR, marketing, and media professionals in India, then the India PR Blog could be an useful medium that you can add to your media plan.
India PR Blog is the leading public relations site in India and ranks among the top 25 PR blogs in the world. It is written by a team of PR professionals from a cross section of organisations and provides PR resources, tips, discussions, tools, and analysis of the PR practice, industry developments, trends, issues, and media developments. The initiative is an attempt to gather some of the best experienced and young minds from the Indian PR industry, share them freely with one and all, have a discussion and help take the industry forward.
The blog is read by more than 1000 PR professionals across levels and organisations, marketing professionals, journalists, mass communication students, and marketing bloggers in India, US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.
The blog enjoys good placements on online search engines and is among the top 5 results on Google, Yahoo, and MSN searches on PR and India related keywords.
Some site statistics, as on the date of this post:
Google Page Rank – 5
Page Views in November 2007 – 7,060 (Google Analytics)
Average Time on Site – 3.17 minutes (Google Analytics)
Subscribers – 1000 and growing (Feedburner and Zookoda)
Some ads that can yield high returns could be marketing and public relations related products and services, office productivity products, guides/books on marketing, PR event management, mass communication institutes, courses, new social media tools, organisations providing services to PR agencies such as marketing depts of media houses, media monitoring agencies, newswire services, jobs, career consultants, market research and related.
To advertise on this site, send a mail to the editor and we will help create a good campaign for you.
How India PR Blog is ranked across the blogosphere:
Mutual PR seems set to open offices at UK and Germany, reports IndianTelevision.com. The agency already has offices at Dubai and Singapore. Talk about employee exchange programs and here is a good opportunities for Mutual people to ask their bosses to start a program.
It will be interesting to see how these office will come up to be in these markets where PR is seemingly more mature than here.
So are these going to be one-man staff offices or are they going to be the next big story about Indian company going global. Wait and watch.
Palin Ningthoujam, Digital Strategist @ Genesis Burson Marsteller, wrote for an erstwhile PR blog & Mashable. Mail me, or let's connect on the sites below.
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