@dvocable

I was in at the Bangalore’s Forum Mall when I got the first call about the bomb blasts behind it in Madiwala. Having grown up during the time when Punjab insurgency was at its height and traveling through Delhi was a hurdle race through checkposts, the Bangaloreans (is there such an entity?) response to the Friday happenings was interesting. There was not even a controlled aggression visible on the faces of the security staff of the Mall. I actually walked back into the Mall a second time to put up a ticket I left in the PVR vending machine and voila this time I dint even pass through the metal detector because the Security Staff was checking with the public on where the next blast had been reported by ?? (TV or radio). The next blast was somewhere near Adugodi, a close by area.

By telling you all this my intention is not to eulogize how I proverbially escaped etc etc or lament the internal security situation in India (homeland security as the Americans call it), Im building up to a point which for all of us in Communications is a gold mine to debate – Does India have a Crisis Communications Policy? Isnt it time we did?

Worldwide and in India, the Industry has by far been quick to grasp that while management of a crisis is critical, the advance alerts or post crisis response has communication at its core making it one of the key factor of “to what extent” the crisis impacts the stakeholders. When we speak of National or state level crisis, these stakeholders are us – the common wo/man.

I spent years in newspapers and amongst other beats buried my nose into the power sector to understand why all the MW produced did not reach the consumers and YET s/he paid for the entire power production and WHY therefore the power company was answerable to the people for its process management. Part of this process was T& D losses and some of this was attributable to those next to the consumers house who hooked onto power lines to steal it without paying! This consumer when told so could be galvanised to protect and report power theft!

This experience has come really handy in understanding the skill of mass communications and I now believe that the credibility of the source of Communication is a subject worth a study – be it a corporate or a country. Even after hours of whatever was happening over the past weekend whether you were in Ahmedabad, Bangalore or Surat, the main source of information was the media / journalists and some tidbits here and there on Crisis Management by local authorities. What and where was the citizens credible / believable / actionable source of information? Till today some TV channels in Karnataka continue to insist that the blasts left 2 dead and most others put the number at 1.

A few months back, the Computer Society of India, was doing an issue on ICTs and asked me to author one of the articles. In writing that my attempt was to extrapolate learnings in the Industry and investigate if the corporate processes can be juxtaposed to how a country and its management communicates with its stakeholders, specifically during a crisis. In this article I alluded to a model that can be implemented by the top management of the Business House (India) and its Strategic Business Units (States). I just got to know that the magazine was published and therefore feel at liberty to discuss that idea in this forum as well.

At the heart of such a model are the same few questions that chief communication officers in companies ask their managements when penning crisis communication manuals.

Scenario build up – Kinds of Crisis experienced in the past and feared for the future (both for India & SBUs)
Designated Spokespersons and Chief spokesperson who are credible and their call to action is heeded to by stakeholders

Types of stakeholders in each crisis

Channels of communication to reach the stakeholders

Human Networks to use when ICTs (Information Communication technologies) fail as they almost always do in a natural disaster

Understand the holding statement concept

Who prepares and who contributes to the holding statement

Practice runs at frequent intervals of the crisis scenarios …

A potential draft of such a policy lies in the answers to the above questions and in the article I answered each head assuming that the Corporate in question is India, the Strategic Business Units were the States and the chief communication officer was myself. All answers were based on the assumption that Ive not been debriefed yet by the nation’s CEO or the SBU units but I’m building answers to the questions through intelligent hypothesis.

I can’t reproduce the article here but I hope I’m able to convey that such a model can be built for India – more efficiently if bigger brains than yours or mine go to work on it. In fact quite possible that this is being done somewhere but as a citizen if I look at what communication reached me over the weekend, its obviously not yet in place. Take for example the city of my current domicile, Bangalore, I as a citizen don’t know who to believe when reasons are enlisted on what happened to my mobiles on Friday at 3 PM – when the somebody tells me that mobile phone operators jammed the signals post the blasts so that people couldn’t spread rumors, I believe it. When others say the cell phone were jammed because Police wanted to stop miscreants from triggering live bombs using mobiles as possible detonators, I nod and almost believe it. The easy answer we all know as citizens is that the cell network was jammed because panicky citizens were trying to check on each others safety but then that’s “so obvious” an answer that you would say nahhhh! Quite possible its the Crisis Management Standard Operating Procedure given out to service providers but do I know this ? No. Maybe its top secret confidential modus operandi that a citizen needn’t know about but do I know that or have heard about it? No.

Take another example of credible spokesperson . Lets assume that the Chief Minister of Karnataka is the chief spokesperson whom the citizens of the SBU believe in as its head of management (please don’t drag us into the mindless debate that state chief secretary should be the chief spokesperson since bureaucracy are the real managers!) . What information was coming out from the CMs office at the time – the anchor sitting in Mumbai was asking the Bangalore correspondent about updates and all he had was this – a meeting at 5pm had been convened to take stock of the situation. That’s it. Any advisory for the citizens ? Hmmm..Oh yeah I did hear somebody say that the CM said, “Nothing to worry”. Of course the next day a live bomb was found outside a mall in a flower pot, left by a man in red T shit, which was defused by a bomb squad. Later the media wrote that a cobblers wife clipped the wires which hung by its sides the day before which could possibly have been the reason for it going dead.! I’d love to explain this in detail but its as funny as its sad..all this in India’s IT capital no less :-)

So to cut a long story short, we really need a Crisis Communication Policy in India as we are surely and quickly becoming the eye of the storm..and a crisis hits only once and effects directly or indirectly – after that there is pin drop silence or a deafening noise made by those alive to take stock of what could have been done instead. If the lines between crisis management and crisis communications seem to blur, then they should as the latter is the core of the former and its time we gave it some thought.

I have created more than a hundred PowerPoint presentations till date – for new business pitches, for my clients, and for internal office purposes. I love creating my PowerPoints with pictures on every side. Over time, I realize that I have used so many pictures, those I sourced from the Internet and other places and thought was creative and nice, that I wished I had a master folder on my PC containing all those pictures. Then every time I create a new ppt, I can quickly go to that folder, choose a good suitable picture, and use that, instead of going online and searching the photo stock sites. So there will be no more the ‘Ah! I can use that press conference picture on this slide but where did I used that picture before? I have to remember’. This will save so much time.

I needed a software that would search all the PowerPoint files on my computer, and extract the images out of them. After some searches, I found the answer. The solution is called the MS PowerPoint Extract Images From Presentations Software. It is a small file that you can download and easily install. You can load individual ppt files or an entire folder (like the D drive for example) on the tool and it will start opening each ppt file and extract the pictures to a location you specify. Very neat.

The software comes at USD 19.99 for the full functional version license. The unlicensed version just works well also though.

It’s all out there in open. The media is going gaga about it. Everyone is talking about it. It’s an open secret. Some obnoxious figures are floating out in open, and many of our so called ‘Netas’ in white clothes are busy collecting all the black money they can, in these next few days. Someone’s father is being laid on the tarmac so ‘Nawabs’ can fly off and on from his holy name.

I wouldn’t be surprised, if tomorrow Mr. Musharaff would be projected as our Prime Minister! Yahan par sab Maya hain, mere bhai! But actually, when I come to think of it, it is actually not a bad idea to have Mush as our Prime Minister. His initials are PM. Almost everyone of the pseudo-secularist brigade would be very happy and yes the most important part is that N-deal or No-deal they would be able to solve many critical issues of national interests – 1) they will help us get rid of the government which has just few months to serve (oops! Sorry rule) the country before we have our general elections. 2) We may not get much needed power due to some power hungry or powerful politicians. 3) We will lose faith in democracy and turn many youngsters away from voting. Are you listening Mr. Karat? Mr. Bardhan? Mr. Ajit Singh? You may win, but we all are going to lose and you are going to be responsible for it.

Well, what’s the connection between all these madness and PR?

The insiders know it very well, that how well-oiled PR machinery is working overtime to make or break the government. The media contacts are being used to the maximum. The buying & selling is taking place. The stories are being planned and planted. Dinners are being hosted and lunches are being thrown upon. It’s a time now when everyone worth their salt in political journalism is high on ecstasy and enjoying every moment of their lives. Many business houses are playing their cards and using all their power to stabilize or destabilize the government according to their comfort levels.

PR is playing its role and whether you like it or not it is affecting your life for better or worst. Everything is fair in business and politics. My grandpa always said that if you have to be happy in life you have to stay away from four Ps: Press, Police, Politicians and Prostitutes. Well, the old man died before I came into PR, otherwise he would have added it also to this list.

Grandpa, I have a confession to make. I dealt with everyone on the list. Hang on guys – before you jump the gun, the last community in the list was part of an NGO I serviced as a client. And yes, I have one more confession to make – I found some humans in each of these communities! In PR as well, we still have few humans left.

The call for the Media magazine’s Asia Pacific PR Awards, the PR Student of the Year award has been announced. The award is one of the most prestigious awards in Asia Pacific among the PR students community.

The PR student award category was first announced in 2006 in conjunction with Weber Shandwick. The winner of the award gets USD 6,000 in prize money, a paid for trip to Hong Kong on Nov 20, 2008 for the awards ceremony, and a paid internship at a Weber Shandwick office nearest to the student.

Any student enrolled as an undergraduate student at an institute or university in the Asia Pacific region, irrespective of whether he/she is majoring media or maths, communications or chemistry, can enter the contest. To participate, students needs to write a PR campaign for MasterCard and showcase his/her creative and real life PR skills in drafting the same. The entry kit can be downloaded from here. The detailed brief for developing the campaign is provided in the entry kit, but in a nutshell, it is like this.

In the lead up to the holiday season (December – February), when consumer spending is at its highest, MasterCard is keen to launch a financial management awareness campaign that specifically targets women in Asia Pacific. Based on the strategies outlined in the existing website, MasterCard wants to launch a holistic program that helps women manage their finances.

The entry should be on these lines:

Your proposal should be no more than four typed pages, 10pt font, and should include the following six components:
1. Objectives – Outline clear, measurable objectives to ensure success of your campaign
2. Audience – Specifically identify the people or groups you want to target
3. Strategy – Describe the overall strategy to achieve your objectives
4. Research and planning – Explain how and what type of research would be relevant
to shaping the planning process
5. Execution and tactics – Explain your program in detail. Break it down into major
components
6. Evaluation/Measurement of success – How will you evaluate the success of your
campaign?

Standard campaign elements that you must produce (in addition to the proposal) include: one written press release; a sample pitch letter to a particular media outlet; and a list of targeted media contacts. No budgets have been allocated as yet, but budgets will be commensurate with the program put forth. You must demonstrate strategic thinking, creativity and flawless execution in your proposal.

The entry deadline is September 12, 2008.

We started the Linkedin Group: Network of PR Professionals in March 2008 and in the last four months or so, the group has grown to more than 1,000 members. I did a quick search and these are some findings:

Number of members from specific countries: US: 500plus; India: 335; UK: 33; and a few members from other countries too.

Number of CEOs: 34; VPs: 75; Director: 174; Managers: 196; Executives: 131; Heads (Group Heads, Practice Heads, Corporate Communications Heads): 38, and so on.

Thanks to all the members. Hoping that we all can connect and benefit from this common platform.

Click here to join the network now.

With all the rush and chaos for booking fancy .me domain names since yesterday, I decided to do a quick search on finding some cool words ending with ‘me’. I found two cool tools that will do the work for us.

The first one is More Words. Simply enter ‘*me’ in its search box and it gives you a list of 407 words ending with ‘me’. Examples: time, summertime, slime, overcome, and so on.

The next tool is WordNavigator. On a similar search on the site for words ending with ‘me’, it came out with a list of 647 words.

Now with more domain name extensions coming up, I am sure webmasters and domain name buyers will want to play around with these tools, if they aren’t already.

Out of curiosity, I did a search of words ending with ‘in’ (.in is the India domain extension) on WordNaigator and it threw up a list of 1,148 words. Bin, aborigin, begin, coin, dioxin, wherein, wolfskin, ……anybody interested?

By the way, in case you want to play around more and come up with names like del.icio.us and blo.gs, check this nice domain finder tool.

After investing many years in the field of communication and dealing with brand owners and managers for ages I have seen the gradual change happening in the field of marketing communications. Be it a PR or advertising or any other medium of communication, every domain has seen the shift happening from product driven communication to consumer driven communication.

Let’s see, what we have seen in the past and what we are witnessing now. If we have look at ads in the past, they were full of product attributes and tangible benefits (some of them are even today following the same beaten path) – about size, shape, price, and shouted sabse sasta, yeh to jhaag wala hain and so on…

Come to 21st century and we are bombarded with extremely talented mothers, super kids, rich dads and a grand pa who go for jogging every day! All of them trying to sell some or the other service or product to you with emotions. Kyonki kabhi pyaar ke beech duriya na aaye…

Welcome to the ‘emotional economy’. This is nothing new and many of the management experts have spoken about it so many times. Many books have been written on the subject. The benefit of developing and demonstrating a personality of a brand has become a key element of strategy in every marketer’s workbook. Many of the successful brands have created a personality with which consumers are connecting themselves emotionally.

Now the billion dollar question is not whether Singh will remain king with support from another Singh who claims to be King as of now, but whether we as PR professionals have been able to embrace the same shift in our strategy or not.

Does PR as we know it and practice is today allow us to establish the emotional connect with the consumers the way advertising does. Do we have the same creative liberty to express ourselves? The answer is both, No & Yes!

No, because in traditional media relations model of PR where you are dependent upon the journalist (well some people would disagree to this statement, but it’s a politically correct perception) to share your story, he or she may speak the way he or she wants. There is no message control. There may be several other ‘NO’ as well, which I want my readers to suggest as part of their comments.

Yes, because the PR offers many more avenues than traditional media relations model. You have the opportunity to directly reach out to your consumers (prosumers, participants, partners, co-creators – many such jargons for people like you and me who spend hard earned money to buy many unwanted things throughout our lives). Social Technologies are really social in nature, which allows us to reach out to the real people in the virtual world and connect with them emotionally. I am sure there would be many more ‘YES’ to this which would come from you.

Until we meet next Thursday, take care and God Bless!

Image Courtesy: AMA Japan (http://www.amajapan.co.jp/e/)

Now that Hancock is out in all big theaters across India , PR folks must be getting a sweet surprise to see that even a super hero sometimes needs good PR. We have Jason Bateman, a PR guy who after being saved by Hancock deciding to use his PR skills to change the poor image that the drunk super hero has. So what happens next? Hancock surrenders himself to the police and lands up in jail, shaves, dons a clean super hero suit, say nice things to cops, and learns to save people without causing collateral damage.

I quite liked the Hancock’s PR campaign, if you’d call it that. There was no excessive media scouting. The focus was on Hancock and what he needs to do to change his image. There was no ‘this is what I do’ and we have to spin it to make it to look good in front of the public. (are our clients listening? ) No TV and newspaper interviews. You focus on doing something good and the media ultimately follows you. Of course with some good creativity like the PR shock factor in the movie when Hancock surrenders himself to the law, standing apart as a classic PR stunt.

Ultimately, the movie has done some good PR for PR. Cheers to that.

Photo credit: IMDb

It is a mess and it is all over the place and it is not going away in a hurry. The stock market is toast, the oil price is freaking out in the USD 150s, real estate and financial services are tanking like the titanic! Everyone knows that we are in the middle of a meltdown and the effects of inflation have just about started to ruin the financial results of companies.

The politics of the nation are in the gutter and the uncertainty that clouds all decision making both in the public and private enterprise will continue well into the next year, if and when another government comes into being. A government that is cross subsidising the oil bill and some other future government will reap the whirlwind and some whirlwind it will be for sure, and I quote Rahul Bhasin of Barings in the DNA, where he said, “We are frittering away our gains made in the last 15 years”.

Against the background of this carnage in corporate India, the bean counters are finally seeing resurgence, like desert plants, they have waiting out the decade of exuberance. Today they are rising like the proverbial phoenix from the ashes, and promise to be the bane of many brands, marketing campaigns and other assorted still born initiatives. Austerity is back like the rude shock of a cold water bath in the freezing winter!

When the accountant’s chop does come down on big-ticket advertising, out-of-home and television commercials, these being the pet peeves of the accountant  PR promises to stay untouched. Having said that budgets for travel, off sites, media training, and all those nice fuzzy things are bound to dry up real quick, if not disappear all together. In all this skirmishing, fortunately for PR, most corporates have come to understand that it is not an on-and-off thing and if anything, some might even find it the last refuge of the marketing to reach their target publics in times of budgetary paucity.

The job market for PR professional and Communicators promises to retain traction and the moaning for talent will stay the wail it is, so here is one area that I again see no effect of the slow down, if anything it could lead to many more corporates hiring for the reasons above.

Challenges bring opportunities and usually constitute the need, the same need that spurs innovation and fosters new paradigms and discoveries. These are the times to service your customer better and to vow to be closer to the business and not lose accounts on reasons of tardiness, inefficiency or downright stupidity! I see many avenues that were shoveled into the “not important or urgent” quadrants due the presence of other ‘lazy cheque’ populars suddenly becoming fashionable. The medium I am talking about and maybe one who’s time has finally come in India, is the online medium.

This is the time to knock again and dust off those online plans, whether it is a programme to engage key bloggers in your space, or kick off that e-mail campaign or spend your remaining rupees in the pursuit of a web-only viral marketing or buzz marketing campaign!

I wish you well in these nasty times, so get dug in and wait it out, this too shall pass, maybe not soon enough but you can always take the time to do something you always wanted to attempt, something forbidden, constructive, intellectual, delicious and inspiring! I look forward to comments here!

I was chatting up with a colleague, who is a part of our four member media team in our office, on blogging and the new PR.

The media team, as we know, plays a big role in large PR agencies where events and crisis happen on multiple clients almost every day. While the client servicing teams need to concentrate on a whole lot of things in servicing an account, the media team can just focus on building relationships with key journalists across the country. So in times of crisis and big events, they can leverage on their networks to value add to the client servicing team.

Now the part that we were discussing was that the media team should now look at PR 2.0 seriously and gear up to equip themselves with knowledge of the blogosphere and start building relationships with key bloggers across the country across verticals and subjects. And why not. Media teams have been building relationships with journalists in the print media, tv, online media, and now social media should be a natural extension. Talk about digitally enhanced media teams.

So are you a media relations expert? If yes, my next questions could be ‘how many bloggers do you know well?’ Knowing and engagibng with bloggers is no longer the perogative of the client servicing person alone.

My question is can the media teams of today adapt themselves to the new challenge (or opportunity), or will  there be a new class of blogger relations teams in agencies? For now, there is just the socal media team that do everything.