Expert Speak

Twist in The PR Tale

Twist

For a change I want to address vendors. I thought I was being mysterious and an escapist when I made a career switch to the IT world, leaving behind my original constituency of mainstream reporting.

To a large extent my working style has changed. From racing to the spots of disaster for coverage or in case of political crisis, I have undoubtedly more decent things to report on now – the IT channel business shenanigans.

But there is another significant change in my lifestyle. Almost an hour of every working day of mine is dedicated to deleting the PR spam, that mark a daily tsunami in my mail box. Importantly, the PR firms are simply eating into my time and more importantly wasting the funds of their clients.

There’s again another twist in the PR tale. Most IT majors have outsourced their media management affairs. This standard yardstick might help in reducing the head count servicing this function. But in the ultimate analysis one has to measure how much does shoddily done PR job can tarnish the vendor’s name.

Last week, one PR firm messed up an interview when they tried to put their client in touch with us – without knowing what segment really this website services. Our impression about the vendor and its executive has made a nosedive subsequently.

There are several other areas of such lacunae. We spoke at length on these, ventilating our grievances, when one PR person from a key vendor walked into our office to put some quick fix to smoothen her company’s relationship with the editorial team at our end. The sum total of what we tried to tell that visibly embarrassed the PR person – despite her all honest intentions – is that hardly there is adequate homework at the company’s end on how to handle media.

Even the basics of any PR training on media management is found wanting. You ought to know that those who deal in apples might not like oranges. This is not the best of examples but a vendor’s representative should know a bit about channel functioning when he is talking to a journalist from an IT channel publication.

There are also maladies in the PR machinery when journos are fed with repeated lines like: the boss is travelling and let’s play it safe syndrome.

All these force me to ponder why IT players neglect their crucial function of corporate communications. But what I want to emphasize here is that my frank remark should not be mistaken as a tirade against the whole PR industry.

There are definitely PR firms and PR persons who actually work hard, do a lot of homework to understand well the nitty-gritty of clients’ product portfolio and the needs of the specific media organizations.

I sincerely believe IT is much more purposeful than making sense or no sense out of briefing an agency which can do little better than churning out badly written press releases.

My advice to IT companies is that it is essential to take training for employees who handle PR function seriously. It is equally important to pass on necessary directives to senior executives on how to interact with journalists from different media segments.

What is ultimately vital is that companies should communicate to the press what the media can ultimately give out to the readers.

Readers of channel publications and website would need information related to issues close to a partner’s heart. Transparency and effective two way information flow and objective feedback from the Fourth Estate are the twin guru mantras.

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