MxMIndia

Tag: earned media

  • Why 2015 Dassera marks a new beginning for PR industry professionals

    Siddhartha Mukherjee: Humility & Quality wins over ‘Dude’ Culture

    By Siddhartha Mukherjee

     

    “Why do you want to take up a job in PR Industry?’, a common question a lot of us ask while interviewing candidates. Pronto comes a common answer:  “ …because I like meeting people.” For those who find this response completely normal and healthy, I don’t want to comment any further. This particular column is not for them. However, for those who find this to be a wrong signal or symptom, my response will be – Let’s Talk!

     

    Till recent times, interviewing candidates used to be a harrowing experience. The various audio and visual symptoms/ signals candidates from PR Agencies, Corporate Communications etc would display have often made me wonder if our Industry’s so called talent pool will be spelling its doomsday.

     

    While ‘Jugaad/Fixing’, unfortunately though, still continues to be the core ideology behind certain clients hiring PR services, the good news, however, is that a large part of the client set have started gathering around he the need to build brands, nothing short of it. To meet such expectations, PR firms have started attracting “Quality, Well qualified and Humble” talent pool – specifically those who understand brands. Those who do not believe that meeting people or journalists is the mainstay of this business. Those who understand that Public Relations is all about Input, Output and a final Outcome. And that this business requires research and a very systematic measurement/ appraisal system.

     

    Our PR firms are trying their best to take a positive U-turn, as fast as possible. They are doing everything possible to attract and sustain them with rigorous training processes. They are making it clear to their teams that client servicing is no longer meeting, fixing or just a press release exercise. In short, life is not going to be the same!

     

    Dassera 2015 marks our Industry’s beginning of the victory march over the following ten evils or hurdles that was stopping our professionals transform from jugaadus/ fixers to brand-building partners:

     

    1. Agency Professionals have started Reaching Client Meetings on Time: There was a time when the Client Servicing teams of PR Firms were (ill) reputed to never reach on time. Despite pre-decided meeting schedule, clients (corporate communications and its internal customers) have been kept waiting for the (grand) agency team to reach the meeting venue at their own leisure and convenient time. Today, amazing examples of punctuality are being displayed by teams across Agencies.

    2. Agency team is well-prepared for the meeting: For most of the agencies and their team members, the answer to the core question of why the client is doing PR remained a grey area. More so, no one wanted to know the answer. Attendance in meetings was a customary formality. Preparations through research, Asking the right questions, Presenting a scientific plan, etc was a rarity. Today, however, client servicing teams are coming well-prepared. They are asking the right questions, working out a crisp brief, and clearly working out the blocks of Input, Output and Outcome. They know that they have to move the cheese and that they are accountable towards an objective!

    3. Agency team is geared up to meet CXOs: As a continuation from the above, PR firms are getting more reasons and opportunities to meet the CXOs. Earlier, owing to their typical traits of punctuality and (lack of) preparedness, the corporate communications team wasn’t so sure of introducing the agency to his/ her internal CXO customers. Today, that hesitation is slowly fading away.

    4. Agencies are opening up to working with External & Neutral PR Research & Measurement firms: There was a time, when external and neutral PR research and measurement firms were considered as Roman agents by many PR firms. Today, that thought process is drastically fading away. They are opening up to working with such firms not only towards various possibilities of research but also in terms of getting their client work measured and audited.

    5. Clients allocating higher budgets to PR Tool: That paid media (ads and sponsorships) have started delivering declining ROIs is becoming an increasingly known fact. No wonder then, CXOs are being forced to depend equally (if not more) on Earned Media/PR initiatives. Monies are being allocated accordingly. A down-the-line beneficiary of this should be the PR Agency talent pool.

    6. Corp Comm gaining importance over Marcom: Generally speaking, at one point of time, PR industry was known as the product launch machinery. Marcom used to rule the roost. In today’s Reputation Economy, CorpComm and corporate brand is taking centre stage. PR Firms and their talent pool are having to transition accordingly.

    7. Clients are preparing detailed, scientific briefs for PR Agency Teams: Yes, the flipside of all this is that CorpComm teams are getting better and timely briefs from internal CXOs. This, relatively better, brief is bring passed on to their agencies for better ideation and implementation.

    8. Clients hiring and firing of Agencies becoming more stringent: Gone are the days when PR agencies would cakewalk into a new client business with just a credentials presentation. So is the case with clients firing agencies. Recruitment of an agency and firing it is no longer that easy. Stringent metrics are being worked out for entry and exit into a client’s life.

    9. Industry Events and Awards cropping up slowly to acknowledge talent: An average of two-three PR/Corporate Communication award functions are being held each year to highlight work done by Agencies and specific team members.

    10. Course Curriculum & Recruitment process being revamped across Institutes: That a fresher will have spent making news clippings dockets during the first six months (to a year) of his/ her career in a PR agency or CorpComm department is breaking down, though slowly. No wonder, course curriculums, quality of faculty and guest lectures are seeing a drastic change.

     

    The march towards victory has started. The army of PR professionals are proactively carrying the torch of doing PR for PR. Their audio and visual touchpoints of PR professionals are reflecting thought, sophistication, poise and above all, humility.

     

    The industry has realised there was a Ravana with sins. Now, they themselves are out there to destroy it.

     

    Siddhartha Mukherjee is a senior PR industry professional and currently Senior Vice President, Eikona – Earned Media Planning, Audit and Advisory. The views expressed here are his own.

  • Holistic science of Earned Media Planning, Audit, Advisory & Brand Reputation Management to be the focus areas

    Rebranded Eikona to offer solutions for Earned Media management

    By a correspondent

     

    After having set many proactive PR measurement and audit benchmarks for the industry, a vibrant and freshly rebranded Eikona is all set to aid the brand custodians (client organization and its agencies), with end to end solutions on brand management through Earned Media. The objective is to play an intrinsic role in helping clients and agencies at every step of their brand communications planning, execution and review process.

     

    Eikona shall offer holistic, neutral, one stop research and data solutions for Earned Media management. Eikona’s service span will include helping brand custodians listen to the mood of the market, set communications targets, monitor execution, audit & advisory and finally, establish Earned Media’s impact on brand reputation.

     

    LV Krishnan

    LV Krishnan, CEO, TAM Media Research, commenting on this initiative, said, “Our organization is very uniquely placed. While through TAM & RAM we help the industry understand the TV & Radio consumption patterns & dynamics of Indian consumers, what makes us come a full circle is our ability to not only monitor & correlate a brand’s Paid Media initiatives through ADEX and but also the Earned Media initiatives through Eikona. These data sets help industry scientifically understand and correlate brand’s Visibility as well as its Reputation.”

     

     

    Siddhartha Mukherjee

    Explaining Eikona’s focus on Earned Media management, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Sr. VP, Eikona, said, “We are living in a Reputation Economy. Here is where, Earned Media is fast moving towards the centre stage of any Brand Building or Sustenance exercise.  While the need to manage this space has become quintessential, it is the methodology of managing & leveraging Earned Media that is becoming a complicated combination of art & science. Eikona will focus its energies in helping Brand Custodians with step by step, end to end solutions starting with Communications Planning, Execution checks, Audits & Advisory, and finally, helping establish Earned Media’s impact on Brand Reputation scores.”

     

  • In many ways, in its current avatar IndiBlogger is a social network for Indian bloggers

    Blogging site IndiBlogger helps brands talk to customers

    By Preethi Chamikutty

     

    For most of us a blog is a destination to put up a view, an experience, a rant, videos and photos – some vivid, others vicarious – and then get back to a mundane life. But five hardcore bloggers from Chennai decided to be an exception when they founded IndiBlogger.in, a congregation of Indian bloggers who totalled some 27,000 at last count.

     

    With a tagline ‘Indians by birth, bloggers by choice,’ the IndiBlogger team fields more than 70 requests daily from wannabe Indibloggers. Vineet Rajan, 27, one of the directors who set up the site said: “We started off trying to just create a directory that allowed bloggers to submit their blogs.”

     

    Over the years, more features have been added based on what the community demanded on its discussion forums. For instance, the site now has IndiVine, a chat application, and Indi-Rank, a ranking algorithm for bloggers in India.

     

    In many ways, in its current avatar IndiBlogger is a social network for Indian bloggers.

     

    “It’s like LinkedIn for bloggers with an exclusive dashboard, and activity feeds that let them track other bloggers’ posts, and more,” Mr Rajan pointed out.

     

    It’s a unique concept and community, but at the end of the day it needs to make money. IndiBlogger’s revenue stream is, what Rajan calls, “earned media”, which he says is what brands are clamouring for. “With its blogs IndiBlogger can help brands build more trust and credibility than any other online media can,” he claimed.

     

    Mr Rajan cites Neilsen Global Trust in Advertising survey, 2011 that shows less than a third of netizens trust ads; in comparison 92 per cent who have faith in peer and word-of-mouth recommendations.

     

    IndiBlogger’s first brand engagement was with Microsoft through a blogger meet in 2007. Since then IndiBlogger has organized 50 such congregations; these have been coupled with over 50 contests with brands across sectors like consumer goods, travel & aviation and retailing among others. Samsung, Pepsi, Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), Castrol, Cleartrip and Tata Docomo are some brands that have engaged with consumers through IndiBlogger.

     

    Last November, HUL’s Surf Excel used IndiBlogger to engage with women bloggers on the site via a blogger contest called ‘Surf Excel Matic #GetSmart.’

     

    Targeted at urban women in the 25+ age group, Surf managed to reach a little over 25 lakh netizens using IndiBlogger and its tools like IndiRank and IndiVine, says an HUL spokesperson. Maximum readers were from the cities of Bengaluru, Mumbai, New Delhi and Pune.

     

    “Bloggers are publishers and the popular ones have a good readership .They know the art of expressing their views and thoughts on a certain topic in an interesting way which also wins them dedicated following over time. The popular bloggers also have good networking skills which they use to publicise the content on their blogs on various social platforms,” said the HUL spokesperson.

     

    When popular bloggers write about a brand and its core message, it reaches their followers and readers of the blog. This also results in a lot of user-generated content for the brand, essentially making these bloggers the brand’s ambassadors, added the HUL spokesperson.

     

    In the Surf Excel Matic contest, although only 41per cent of the participants were women, they garnered more than 55per cent of the entire readership of the campaign, thereby, helping the campaign achieve its objective.

     

    For Castrol, which wanted to engage with passionate bikers, IndiBlogger was an extension of the lubricant brand’s presence in digital and social media. In the ‘Castrol Power1 Biker code of India’ contest, bloggers were encouraged to share what biking meant to them. The contest got 170 entries and the blogs attracted an audience of roughly 1 million viewers within the first 30 days of the campaign.

     

    “Besides creating a powerful platform to engage with bikers, the contest enabled us to gather rich insights about our target group, which is the passionate biker,” said Saugata Basuray, deputy head of marketing at Castrol India.

     

    Besides being an aggregator, IndiBlogger also provides assistance to people who approach the site with technical queries about how to make a blog, how to get a domain name and so on.

     

    A 14-member team spread across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Delhi are responsible for maintaining the site, providing assistance and monitoring for offensive content. The blogger meets are mostly outsourced to event management companies who liaison with core members of the IndiBlogger team.

     

    Started with an investment of Rs10,000, the site turned profitable in June

    2010 and, according to Mr Rajan, their blogger database grew 37 per cent in 2011-12 over the previous fiscal year. He is wary talking about the company financials but says the website is on track to achieve $2 million revenues by 2015.

     

    Blogs are today gaining currency as a medium for engagement and Kanika Mathur, president, Digitas India, a digital marketing agency, says the influence that blogs can have on a brand is hard to dismiss. “People who go online today are looking for a point of view, so either they get this point of view from the brand or from a third person. Bloggers are a set of experienced people whose opinion has great credibility as they are not from the brand side,” she said.

     

    Source: The Economic Times

    Copyright © 2012, Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. All Rights Reserved

     

  • Sharon Aneja has been appointed as Director, Earned Innovation & Business Head West and Gautham Pingali as Director, Digital Improvisation

    Sharon Aneja & Gautham Pingali join SMG Digi

    By A Correspondent

     

    In two major appointments, SMG Digital – Starcom MediaVest Group’s digital arm – appointed Sharon Aneja as Director, Earned Innovation & Business Head West and Gautham Pingali as Director, Digital Improvisation. While Sharon Aneja will be based out of Mumbai, Gautham Pingali will be working from the Bangalore office. Both will be reporting to Arnab Mitra, National Director, SMG Digital.

     

    Confirming the appointments, Arnab Mitra, National Director, SMG Digital said: “We are thrilled to have Sharon and Gautham on board. While Sharon has huge global exposure and a very solid creative experience in her kitty, Gautham has a sharp inclination towards business development and strategy. I am sure both will immensely contribute to the success of SMG Digital.”

     

    SMG Digital is the digital offering of the Starcom MediaVest Group. It was formed in recognition of how Search, Social, Mobile and Display play a role in the rapidly changing landscape of Marketing, Communications & Media.

     

    With the social media reach scaling up and earned media gaining a strong ground with big advertisers, Sharon Aneja’s appointment is in sync with SMG Digital’s focus in investing on people, processes and technology to boost client visibility and engaging consumers on an interactive platform.

     

    Sharon Aneja recently shifted to India after working in London for the last 12 years. Prior to joining SMG Digital she was working with UKTV (the commercial arm of the BBC) as the Head of Digital Entertainment, where she was primarily responsible for developing a creative and commercially focused multiplatform vision for the company’s core entertainment brands. She has a longstanding experience advising the business on key online and social media trends.

     

    She began her career in 1991 with Conde Nast and has since then held important positions with organizations like Virgin Media, National Geographic, and Sky. She completed her education from the Queen Mary University of London.

     

    Commenting on her move, Sharon Aneja said, “While moving to India I was keen on moving to an organisation that had Digital as one of its core functions and was future focused. I am thrilled to be a part of SMG Digital as it is an extremely future focused and strategic pillar of SMG.”

     

    SMG also continued to strengthen its South operations where it has a substantial client base. With the appointment of Gautham Ram Pingali, SMG added to its talent pool in the South after several recent appointments. This move denotes the high interest levels in Digital in the southern markets as well.

     

    Gautham Ram Pingali has over 6 years of experience in multiple verticals across industries. He joins SMG Digital after a 3 year stint with Havas Media. He initially started off with the group’s centre of excellence to drive operational efficiency and organizational growth and quickly moved into managing projects for global and regional clients. He was last working as Associate Director Strategy & Business Development with Havas Digital India where he also managed the businesses in North. Gautham started his career in 2004 with AIESEC Hyderabad and has since then led teams at Myrmidon Consulting and ABN AMRO Central Enterprise Services. He is a B Tech graduate from the Jawaharlal Nehru Technology University in Hyderabad.

     

    Gautham Pingali, confirming his move, said, “I am thoroughly excited to work with SMG Digital as they have some unique methods a great team and a very strong vision, with this ability  they are in the forefront of creating a new dimension to the marketing & communication space by leveraging the Digital platform.”

     

    Starcom MediaVest Group is one of the youngest, largest and most diversified media networks in the country. It has over 250 human experience strategists and activators across its four full service offices. It prides itself on its ‘people first’ approach at workplace and is known in the industry and in campuses as one of the best places to work in. In addition to communication strategy development through its two networks Starcom Worldwide and MediaVest Worldwide, the group offers solutions in the area of ‘any screen content’ LiquidThread.