Just Like That !!

The last time I posted something on my blog was about the basic question What is PR? It was real fun making that video. That was in the beginning of the summer, it was a nice experience. Thinking about it makes me feel so nostalgic. The Stirling days was awesome.

Some of you, must be wondering what happened to my blog posts? Why I stopped? Well, there could be many excuses, but I just thought 'let me take a little break and come back to the blog just after getting a job'. It seems a weird excuse but I had nothing to talk about!

In the coming days, I might discuss the real PR world and how studies really helped me to get on to it. And also Why it is so difficult to make people understand about the PR profession you are into? Now, this is very common question we come across but here in India, it's little difficult!! I will share some of my experiences after my University was over, and my home coming? I would also like to share some personal experiences about my days in Glasgow and the days I spent in London.

See, I have so many things to talk about.. So stay tuned !!

What is Public Relations?

The question is so simple but there are numerous answers to this. Well people often relate public relations with other professions. It is far beyond than any of the profession; it is the result of many economic reforms and political circumstances. So it has evolved into a very different entity in itself.

In the simplest way, talking about yourself is also Public relations. Enhancing, developing relationships, and finding ways to say is all about public relations.

Ordinary people tend to confuse Public Relations as advertising. Many associate it human resources while some think in terms of a receptionist on a company desk. The general perception is to link it with marketing.

I have tried to get a general opinion about Public Relations in this Video. Check it out!

Mobile Communications in Public Relations

Have you ever thought the spinning role of mobile phones in public relations? It is now known as the 7th mass media in the world of communications. Because of its multi –dimensional qualities it is tremendously making wonders for the society at large. If Internet is more interactive then mobile communication is direct. It is an excellent tool to make a successful PR campaign.

Photo sourced from smh.com

As of now, mobile communications has as a long way to go, when implemented it can give amazing results. Though, I think following things could be considered while making a PR Campaign:

-Make a .mobi site and upload all the press releases and clients details, so that when you are out of office, just SMS the journalist and your work is done.

-Create mobile blogs and update all the upcoming events and happenings

-You can even put the mobile blog on the .Mobi site

-Communicate through SMS; you can make media invites (for the Press conference) and some important facts and figures for finance journalists.

-You can do surveys through mobile texts, mobile blogs and websites also

- Content feeds do amazing stuff, which gets linked with personalised emails (on this one needs to talk to the .mobi sites company)

- Now social networking sites like twitter have mobile updates, you can connect through twitter to the rest of the world.

-In those 45 characters, you can send links of your blogs, websites and information about your company and clients

- Mobile conference calls are also very useful way to make campaigns, discuss the strategies and ideas with your client.

The world is moving faster, hence the PR practitioners especially in a communication world need to enhance their ability to work in such environment. The technologies are only made for making our life more simple and mobile communication is our future.

Why online PR training or study is important for PR guys?

We all know and cannot ignore the fact that social media or PR 2.0 is becoming ‘the X factor’ in the Industry. The fast growing Internet usage has an immediate effect on the way we are communicating today! There are speculations about the slump in the mainstream media, as more and more people are getting used to the new media.

It is a breakthrough in the way traditional PR is working today, the various online tactics used for a PR campaign is doing wonders for many companies and also for many people. It is quite relevant to understand how the key publics are using these medium?

The key words like blogs, social networks, search engines, social video sites, all are very powerful medium of communication. It’s making a record in itself. So, the future starts from here and it does not look back!

As a PR practitioner, online PR is the next big thing so both training and study becomes all the more important to understand the diversified industry. The different parameters have to be applied while practising PR.

Work @ Office or Home!

I was reading a post by Stephen, managing director of 3W PR (a UK based online PR consultancy). He has a polling box in his blog which asks PR guys preference of working at home, office or a combination of both. It was quite interesting to know from his polling box that most of the PR guys were quite okay with working at office but an occasional chance of working at home was also welcomed.

It’s always good to work at office, as the routine deadlines and the professional environment give you that jolt to work. While sometimes you may find it boring and work from home. It’s all because of the Internet system, social networks and sites like Skype is another place where u can have your video calls, and one can do live conferencing with journalists, which I think is another wonderful way to get connected with people who are really important for you.

At the same time there are also disadvantages to this, as a PR practitioner, your boss would want reports and mails to be done online and you end up putting more hours than your office hours! Though technologies have both the effects to it, but one needs to create its own space to tackle things at Office or at Home!

Dominos Crisis!

On Tuesday, 15th April, from Conover Branch of Dominos in North Carolina, the pizza giant, Dominos got a reputational shock, when two individuals created most appalling videos online!

According to the news articles, the footage contains, an employee putting cheese up his nose and passing wind on a sandwich. As he appeared to tamper with the food, a woman said, “In about five minutes, it‘ll be sent out on delivery where somebody will be eating them, and little did they know that cheese was in his nose and that there was some lethal gas that ended up on their salami”

It was a huge shock for people who love this brand so much. What on earth these people were thinking of? Thank God! A blogger alerted the company people about the Youtube video, which was already viewed by a million people online. The company started healing its own wound, through pro-active and direct online response. The video was immediately removed from the site. Through twitter.com they answered millions of queries, that really helped them to clarify things in a more interactive and simple way. They also published an official response on their website, and apart from that , they uploaded a video on Youtube! In that video the President, Dominos, US, has clarified the whole situation, which is the best thing to do when you are handling a crisis situation!! Just watch the video below:

Video Sourced from Youtube

Utterly Butterly Delicious!!

'Utterly butterly delicious', this is one of my favourite punchlines from Amul (a dairy co-operative movement in India). Well folks! I am not talking about Amul, this is all about delicious, the social book marking site, a web service for storing, sharing and discovering web book marks with friends and people with similar interests.

Photo sourced from fearless-future.com

I wonder how stupid I was; when I used to send interesting URLs through mails to my cousin who is preparing her civil service exams, and she needs hundreds of articles to keep herself updated with the current affairs. No more worries...now.I am now going to add her in my network and she can go to all those useful links which I will store it now in my account!

Among the 20 Largest Social Bookmarking Sites ranked by a combination of Inbound Links, Alexa Rank, and U.S. traffic data from Compete and Quantcast, Delicious stands in the 6th most visited social book marking sites.

As per an article in wiki, there are innumerable advantages of a social bookmarking site, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as searchengine spiders.

All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Also, people can find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders.

Additionally, a social bookmarking system can rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked by users, which may be a more useful metric for end users than systems that rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

For users, social bookmarking can be useful as a way to access a consolidated set of bookmarks from various computers, organize large numbers of bookmarks, and share bookmarks with contacts. Libraries have found social bookmarking to be useful as an easy way to provide lists of informative links to patrons.

As a PR practitioner one can use this tool very smartly and tag all the journalists’ friends and while storing links for the press releases, you can store related links so that they can easily refer to them and for the journalist it will be quite time saving tool. And it’s also quite effective tool if you share this in-house and use them for your own research work.

Well, society is becoming more informative and such tools are here to make our life so easy!Thanks to social bookmarking!