@dvocable

This post is dedicated to the movers and shakers of pubic affairs, PR’s shy first cousin. Dilip Cherian, Nira Radia, Suhel Seth, Deepak Talwar are familiar names in this industry in Delhi. There are many more that you may not know but who are just as effective. Shantanu Guha Ray talks about them all in his article ‘Forked Tongues and Artful Nudges’ in the 21st June issue of Tehelka. Go ahead, you will enjoy it…

Some time back, we announced the ‘Directory of PR agencies and PR freelancers in India’ project here at India PR Blog, and now we are ready to provide the initial listings of the agencies from Mumbai and Delhi. We thank all those who have taken the time out to send in their information. This is a work in progress and we plan to add all Indian States and many more details of agencies and freelancers soon. So here we go:

Index of the India PR agencies and PR freelancers directory page.

Maharashtra PR agencies and freelancers page.

Delhi PR agencies and freelancers page.

In order to make this project successful, we hope that those who haven’t yet send in their details do so asap. Guidelines for submission are here.

About this directory:

The directory is an endeavor to showcase the diverse talent and local know how of the various PR professionals across the country. As the India PR blog is becoming a comprehensive resource for not only PR professionals and agencies but also for corporations and organisations seeking professional information on their PR and communications requirements, this directory will serve as a ready online guide available to them free and 24/7.

We all are aware of Google News Alerts, that nice service from Google News that keeps us sending email alerts on a particular tag/word we specified. Now take that into a new level with Alerts.com. This new service supports not just news alerts but more than dozen types of alerts including birthdays, gas price, corporate press release alerts, forecasts, horoscope, jobs, wake up calls, flight alerts, traffic alerts, hotel price alerts, RSS update alerts, and more. You can set up a to do alert as well.

Aother nice feature is that Alerts.com can send you the alerts through email, SMS, or voice on your mobile phone, home phone, or work phone, depending on how you want it. If you prefer, you can set up a ‘Do not disturb’ time period when you don’t want any alerts.

Currently the SMS and phone alerts seem to be working only in the US, but I am sure they will soon support more carriers globally. Despite this, the service is neat and I am really starting to like all my alerts configured under one service.

I think one of the reasons why OpenID is not catching up as fast as it should be (it should have been a rage) from the users’ community is because with all the dozens of OpenID providers and OpenID urls, most of us are taken to a new and unfamiliar territory. I can today register at one of the open ID service providers but when the time comes to use my open ID url, bang..I have forgotten it. What was it? Some pip dot palin dot whatever? Or palin dot what ID dot com….

Sure some of the techy among us can install a Firefox addon (Sxipper, Seatbelt)  that will autofill OpenID forms for us, but for the majority, it’s always …oh! what was my ID?

Another concern that I have is that these are not my urls. These are borrowed urls that I have opted out of compulsion in a bid to establish my identity. I didn’t like it. My identity is not Wordpress, nor Verisign, nor myOpenID, nor AOL, or whatever.

At least to address the first issue, we have hacks and plugins with which you can make your website/blog address as your OpenID. I love this concept. At least I don’t forget what my url is, even though after login, I am redirected to my OpenID service provider.

The latest on this is that for those of us who don’t have blogs or websites, we can make our email addresses as our OpenIDs. Email to ID is new neat service that enables this. You can register your email addresses with the service and associate your OpenIDs with the emails. Next time, you need to login at a OpenID-enabled site or comment on a blog, simply enter your email address as a your OpenID. You are not likely to forget your email address, are you?

We all have pitched journalists on the email and on the phone. We can also remember those times when we chatted up with journalists while on a media round and threw in a pitch. Now all these are the regular ways. I am wondering if any of us have pitched in a unique manner and have been successful at that.

Talking about this, I googled the topic a while back and found this article from Read Write Web – Five Wrong Ways to Pitch RWW and One Great Way, which seems to suggest a lot of ways of how not to pitch. The only way it thinks is okay is bundling up all your client’s information in an RSS feed and sending it to the journalist. Now while this might be working for RWW, for others, this seems as unpractical as coming up out of a geek to the normal person. I mean while a few techie PR professionals might send this to another techie journalist, the rest of the PR professionals and journalists in this country won’t be able to figure it out. Besides it doesn’t seem to serve many other purposes than keeping a journalist updated on developments.

There are no best ways to pitch a journalist. A lot of bloggers seems to love taking out their ‘how to pitch me’ sermons for PR professionals, each with his/her own individual preferences. However basic rules stand. Like spelling the journalists’/bloggers’ names right on your email salutations, researching well what he/she writes on, understanding that every journalist/ blogger is different, not giving a unsolicited phone call out of the blue, not flooding journalists’/bloggers’ inboxes with irrelevant stuff and press releases.

To take this conversation a bit further, we have written about the five key things to keep in mind while pitch a journalist, which includes the quality of the story peg, relationship with the journalist, knowing what the journalist writes on, industry knowledge, and media list. We have also written that perhaps the first half of the day is the best time of the day to pitch a journalist, because that’s the time when a journalist is mostly free. Calling in the morning has the advantage of also helping the reporter plan the day. Nothing will cheer him or her up more than an exclusive landing in the lap in the early hours itself.

Now coming back to the topic, consider the pitch methods below. What do you think? Have you done any of them succesfully? Are there more?

1. Post interaction pitch: Remember those times when a journalist is through with an interview of your client and you are generally chatting up some niceties before saying bye. Or remember those times when you and the journalist are waiting for the spokesperson, or when you are on way to the meeting the journalist. I mean all those times when the journalist is keen to know what other clients you handle and what are the new things going on. I have pitched stories at such occassions successfuly for many clients, and these are priceless moments that I never get on the phone, when you can explain evrything in detail.

2. Gtalk pitch: I notice some of our young PR colleagues today have many journalists on their Gtalk. Not so much when I was doing the client servicing actively. They chat away with these journalists like they were good friends and say they have pitched many stories succesfully from GTalk. Wonder how they did it. It’s understandable when you know a journalist personally but what I am talking about is people using GTalk as a social networking platform or as a common internet chat forum where you get to invite new people, accept invites, and then start chatting about anything in the world including pitches.

3. Twitter and Linkedin pitch: Almost same as Gtalk pitch, but out here you direct message a journalist or the blogger on Twitter or on Linkedin. I think this method depends a lot on how well you know the journalist. Note that many have written that they consider direct messaging quite intrusive and would prefer a public message update instead. You can consider the Twitpitch.

4. Blog comment pitch: When a blogger writes on a particular topic, you can leave a nice and valid input on his/her post and maybe on your service, that he/she takes notice and perhaps checks out your service. That could be a good way to start a conversation.

5. Online pitch tools and platforms: We have platforms for journalists and PR professionals like PitchWire that help both parties to manage pitches. How successful are these, I have no idea. anybody any luck?

Don’t forget to check out our top media relations tips.

EUfeeds is an Alltop and Popurls like site from the European Journalism Centre that aggregates more than 500 European newspaper feeds. The feeds get updated every 20 seconds. There are flags of the various countries in Europe on the site header that you can pick to see the newspaper feeds of that particular country.

For someone who is not familiar to the region, this is one site to get some good information on the top newspapers, and follow the updates from one centralised location if you don’t want to visit their homepages individually or if you are not too familiar with feed readers.

This is a kind of service we can build one for each region – US, Asia, Africa, etc. And will do good too. Any takers?

Sometimes when we see a picture of a person on the net while browsing, we go, ‘Oh! Who is this person?’. If the name and details about the person is mentioned on that particular page, good for us. If not, what can we do except a wild guess? Think of situations such as a group picture, a random shot, etc. etc.

Now Polar Rose comes as a new face recognition service that aims to do the guesswork for us. The service, in beta now, comes as a neat Firefox plugin that will show a red flower icon whenever there is a picture of a person on a web page. When you click on that icon, there is a pop-up that displays the name of the person. See picture on the left.

If you are the nice types, you can help by adding the names of people, if Polar Rose fail to recognize the picture.

At the main Polar Rose site, you can search for a particular name and the site will take you to the webpages where the pictures of that particular person you are searching for were marked at. So for instance, if you search on my name, it will take you to my MyBloglog profile page and this blog.

What differentiates Polar rose from other image search engines? This is what its recent release had to say – A search for ‘Peter Jackson’ in today’s image search engines result in various images featuring multiple ‘Peter Jacksons’ plus a number of images not featuring people at all but instead just images close to the text ‘Peter Jackson’. Polar Rose will instead sort the entities to include faces only, and group the individual Peter Jacksons.

I think the service is innovative and definitely has a good chance to make it big, though I would like the flower icon to be smaller, as sometimes, it could be obstructive and on the face. Does it slow down my browser, as it keeps on looking for human faces on websites I open? Common sense tells me it might, but who knows. Till now, I haven’t seen any problem though.

We, PR pros, have an undying faith in the power of the press release. Every evening, somewhere between 3 and 4, PR execs run to the terrace and load the canons. It’s poetry in motion. With natural grace they slide a fresh press release into the barrel, swiftly point it at the target (in Delhi it’s ITO, CP, INS Building), light the fuse and take cover. BANG! The press release lands with a hiss at the desk of Mr. Business Editor, Leading Daily Times. Mission half accomplished! The infantry, heavily armed with release-loaded plastic folders, launch the assault exactly half an hour later. The team rests only after hitting each and every target.

“Nonsense,” you say? “That was years ago. We have evolved, moved on.” But why are our brothers and sisters still shooting releases. “Necessary evil,” a colleague had said conspiratorially and winked before she reached out for her Gate Pass in the snow white ToI building. For a moment I felt I was part of a secret brotherhood, surreptitiously making eye-contact with the elusive journalist, trying to extract a pledge of 10 cc (or more) of premium space for my client.

I don’t have more to say about the immortal press release. I won’t even be surprised if “Press Release 2.0” has been released(!). I suspect something like that is already in the air, secretly infecting the PR industry. But there are a few incidents about Press Release 0.0 that will forever play in my mind. There was this one time when a senior editor made good use of the press release I gave him. He thanked me and instantly used it as a paper plate for his snack – two tiny, oily samosas. It was a cruel conspiracy – the greasy patches took shape on my client’s quote I’d spent half a day on.

And there was this other journalist who used to look up from her monitor and smile sweetly when you gave her a press release. She read the first two paras (I suspect she looked at it blankly) and if it bore her, discreetly put it in the bin. Though I would be heartbroken, I felt relieved there would be one paper less to scan the next morning…

Socialthing is still in private beta and those of us already a fan of FriendFeed might think Socialthing has no scope of big life. However, when I recently got into its private beta, I was surprised to find a nice feature of Socialthing that FriendFeed desperately requires.

I am talking about Sociathing’s update notification that comes on top of your profile page whenever there is some new update from your friends. We have heard of Friendfeed users refreshing the page periodically to check if there are updates. This update notification feature is one that many would love.

To top this up, Friendfeed can do the updates with AJAX just like in Gmail. That would be lovely.

Recently I picked up a book called “Why So Stupid?” by Edward De Bono and this post is inspired by it. In fact, I wanted to write about why we stopped thinking about PR in our business but ended up writing something else courtesy a copy of a magazine landing on my desk.

Well, to be very honest I haven’t finished reading the book yet, but it seems that it would be fascinating to read through it. In the first few pages only, I disovered many things. One quote fetched my attention beyond doubt and I would like to share it with you. It helped me to put headline for today’s post as well. It reads and I write, “You can analyze the past but you have to design the future.”

Now coming back to the recently published report about “The Future of Public Relations” in one of the marketing magazines, I have few observations which I want to express for you lovely friends. While it did mention about the future of PR but the irony was that I haven’t seen any of the future leaders of PR talking about the future. I saw the same old faces trying to analyze the past without realising the present situation in many of their businesses or agencies and pretended to be designers of the future. I am sure many of you guys must have had a good laugh reading through it and some of their views must have been swallowed by many of us with a pinch of salt, some pepper and cold water.

The thinking in the industry has been stale and stopped somewhere. I was discussing the same with my wife and she said that it is happening probabbly because in earlier days leaders were born and born leaders are great thinkers, but today leaders are made, and they expect some reference as they are made like that. I think she has a point here. Most of our leaders are coming from ‘recoginition’ background and they always need a reference point to begin. The recongnition here is the worldview they have been living with since 70s and trying to impose the same upon their people. Do you have a high attrition rate – stop blaming the new generation, please. I have had the luck of meeting many of the agency heads and since I have to be politically correct here on this blog and have to remain in the industry where I belong to, I have to say a big lie that almost all of them have inspired me. (sigh!!) But, I am sure almost everyone who is reading my blog today knows ‘who is who?’ in the business and I do not have to give you any recognition or refernece point to think outside the box to arrive at any conclusion. I am sure you are smarter than me.

By the way, who am I to pass on any judgment on the industry or some of our so called leaders. After all, some of them have created the industry we are all working in now. They are the ones who are driving growth of their agencies and dipping the fees. They are the ones how are corrupting the business eco system and doing things which are not required in the name of building and maintaining relationships. They are the ones who are not willing to let their people grwo and try harder to make them feel inferior. After all, they are the ones who are drving the industry, where the accelerator is on a left hand side and brake is faulty with a gear lever lost somewhere on the way.

Why am I behaving so stupid and writing such a post? May be because I am like that only. I care for each one of us. I love what I do and it really hurts when I see my love being treated the way it is being now by many of them. SOS! Please respond, before its too late.

Take care friends and wake up! Jaago re… Jaago re… Jaago re…

PS: I wrote this heartfelt post with complete honesty and with an intention to hurt few of them in the process. If you are one of them and felt hurt, please accept my apologies and look into the mirror. Do you see the horns emerging from sides… ??!!!???