India is home to the pioneer in “newsjacking”… Who??

On test tube babies!

If you are in the public relations business, by now you must be familiar with “newsjacking”, more recently well articulated by David Meerman Scott (are you following him on twitter – you must do – @dmscott )

For those who are late, here’s how David defines newsjacking : “the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business. It creates a level playing field—literally anyone can newsjack—but, that new level favors players who are observant, quick to react, and skilled at communicating. It’s a powerful tool that can be used to throw an opponent or simply draft off the news momentum to further your own ends”.

By that, newsjacking is the easiest tool available in the arsenal of any right thinking public relations pro. And despite many downfalls and issues of ethics in what events ought and ought not to be “newsjacked”

You can read a load of stuff, all over the net, and in PR fora’ on recent uses of newsjacking, where it worked well and where it backfired.

Looking around, it realized on us that the pioneers of “newsjacking” are right here in India. You might be pleasantly surprised, but, in my view its as earyly as 1966 that and India company (offcourse with the help of their great agency) India might as well the home to “newsjacking”

Here, is a part of the story of Amul topical (courtesy : amul.com) Twitter handle – @amul_coop

On the Enron controversy!

“For 30 odd years the Utterly Butterly girl has managed to keep her fan following intact. So much so that the ads are now ready to enter the Guinness Book of World Records for being the longest running campaign ever. The ultimate compliment to the butter came when a British company launched a butter and called it Utterly Butterly, last year.

It all began in 1966 when Sylvester daCunha, then the managing director of the advertising agency, ASP, clinched the account for Amul butter. The butter, which had been launched in 1945, had a staid, boring image, primarily because the earlier advertising agency which was in charge of the account preferred to stick to routine, corporate ads.

In India, food was something one couldn’t afford to fool around with. It had been taken too seriously, for too long. Sylvester daCunha decided it was time for a change of image.

The year Sylvester daCunha took over the account, the country saw the birth of a campaign whose charm has endured fickle public opinion, gimmickry and all else.

The Amul girl who lends herself so completely to Amul butter, created as a rival to the Polson butter girl. This one was sexy, village belle, clothed in a tantalising choli all but covering her upper regions. “Eustace Fernandez (the art director) and I decided that we needed a girl who would worm her way into a housewife’s heart. And who better than a little girl?” says Sylvester daCunha. And so it came about that the famous Amul Moppet was born”

In a sense, even unknowingly, the Amul moppet has been ever since 1966, been only using the  concept of newsjacking in the best possible way, on issues that confront the people of this country – issues which were breaking news…

Right time to newsjack?!

If you chose to look at the graph by David on when you should newjack, and compare it with what Amul has been doing almost on a daily basis since the birth of the Amul moppet, what else would you call the Amul topical but newsjacking in its truest sense.

And even better, Amul has been newsjacking using traditional media (call it brick and mortar), decades before all this internet thing happened!

So, who else but our own Amul as pioneers of newsjacking? Surely, David Meerman Scott would agree, hopefully.

What are the like examples of newsjacking you can think off?

And lastly, is “newsjacking” in your things to do in 2013??

 

Related articles

• BEST Amul advertisements in 2012 (rediff.com)
• Newsjacking: 6 Tips to Help Your Branded Content Use the News (contentmarketinginstitute.com)
• Newsjacking (slideshare.net)
• Newsjacking: You’re Doing It Wrong (iacquire.com)

Executive leadership, art of communicating, & “Reputation”!

English: President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with BP executives in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, June 16, 2010, to discuss the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Pictured, from left, are BP CEO Tony Hayward, BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP General Counsel Rupert Bondy, BP Managing Director Robert Dudley, Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, Attorney General Eric Holder, Biden, Obama, and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As a person on the communications learning curve ever, I am a great fan of Steve Farnsworth’s @Steveology blog, and a student alike.

I found this post “3 Things Executives Can Do To Be More Quoted In The News” a very informative one in the context of every top manager/leader being communicators for the organization!

By now, the world of communicators is too familiar with the reputation disaster the erstwhile BP CEO Tony Hayward was, in his now famous (rather infamous) “I’d like my life back” comment to the humongous disaster, the oil spill was.

The cardinal rule for any CEO/CXO who is in the line of sight of the media is to be always “battle ready”. This might indeed sound ominous, yet it’s the closest to reality and the best communications mantra!

Picture this – there could be a call from anywhere in the globe on something which has just been just happened a few minutes ago (hours and day response time are dead and gone forever – another rule to remember!). Any of these calls, if not responded to swiftly, can a long term ‘reputation impact’ on your company and its fortunes.

Add to the events per se that may impact your company, the buzz in the social media universe – someone cooks up a rumor, or goes by sheer hearsay, and tweets or posts a few words that could go viral in minutes, or hours – the ‘reputation’ consequences will impact you and your company too!

One quality that will keep your reputation index in good stead is this – your ability to respond in an appropriate manner to any query from any corner of the world!

The CEO may not have a magic wand to all queries, and it is important to admit and realize that – the best answer when confronted with an uncomfortable or ill-informed query is very simple – give me a while and we will come to you with the facts!

What happens in real-life is, on many such occasions, just the opposite – out of a quest to close the issue, and under pressure of the situation, the response is wee bit casual.

This is a perfect recipe for inviting negative media and negative soc-med, and  you are possibly and un-alterably messing up an already fluid situation.

If you think that an expert coaching intervention is needed to handle such events with the media, do ask your board or your organization, and tell them that it is a reputation imperative. Most organizations tend to have the belief that the CEO spokesperson must be suave and possess extra-ordinary skills in communication! This can be a huge advantage but not a pre-requisite at all.

In fact, track some PR crises and how suave spokesperson handled them – you will see that the over-confidence that comes out of being suave and flamboyant brings in a tinge of arrogance – a perfect recipe for many a media disasters!

Facts and truth, yes, nothing but truth – put across in simple language with amazing clarity and miles ahead of a suave and ambiguous, arrogant and just too casual remark.

Many PR careers have been shunted by usage of inappropriate language, unintended it may be – someone somewhere leaks it out when things go out of the hand! The mantra ought to be state the facts and only facts, in a language that can be scrutinized anytime later.

While speed of response is a paramount criterion, it never can be at the cost of language that reflects an unprofessional and casual attitude! Make sure that facts are not colored by style and the tone and tenor of the spoken or written language!

Executive leaders must endeavor to be masters in the art of communicating to the media. And get to being masters one event or crisis at a time – sans making any costly ‘reputation’ screw-ups.

Related articles

• 13 things to know before a social media crisis (raventools.com)
• Protect Your Reputation with Reputation Monitor from Apartment Guide (apartmentguide.com)
• Executive Blunders, Reputation Recon: Real-World Crisis Communications (techaffect.com)
• Social Media Crisis Management For the Skeptical Corporates: 4 Essential Steps (melissaagnes.com)
• How Companies Manipulate Negative Reviews: 5 Secrets Consumers Should Know (mint.com)

Agility ‘myopia’ – will your social media plan ever help?

Social Media Cafe (Photo credit: Cristiano Betta)

Organizations’ round the world are slowly adopting to the brutal embrace of the social media.  The word brutal might sound crude, yet, that is only to signify the powerful impact the medium has on how contemporary business is done, and how customers across every business are gathering real-time information of your products, services and people!

As a matter of fact, it will not be an exaggeration to say that your customer knows better than you, or your product/service or people, more that you; not just that, the customer gets to know it faster that you.

Once the customer gets to know – by virtue of your brick and mortar touch points – they could be your product performance, your people response, or your service credential, he gets online and shares this knowledge to the world – by a blog, a podcast, a tweet or a face-book post…  any tool that comes in handy to him at the click of a mouse.

Speed or call it ‘agility’, is the mantra. And your organization being ready to embrace the power of social also means that you are willing to engage in conversations real-time, round the clock, and round the year!

Most organizations miss this point – they have a social media plan, yet, the system is steeped in old world bureaucracy – the social team, or the team that is meant to respond real-time is a victim to the rigor of seeking approvals from the higher ups – who are completely myopic to the power of agility in social media. When the need is to swiftly respond, they engage in internal debates on the how and when, and sometimes the tangible benefits/losses and the ‘budgetary’ impact of the actions to be taken.

Little do these agility-myopic people realize that there is a negative spiral out there swallowing the reputation of the organization, one bite a second (or is it faster?!). In this age and world of 24/7 social, your hard-built reputation is at stake, every minute you are embroiled in useless bureaucracy!

Social media is not for the agility myopic – if your organization has a well made social play-book, yet does not have the culture of agility or is not willing to swiftly embrace the ‘agility culture’, then there is one way out – throw the social play book in the dustbin, and get back to business as usual.

May sound rude, yet, that’s the harsh reality – the social space is NOT for those with agility myopia!

Related articles

• 7 Reasons Agile Marketers Are Better at Their Jobs Than You (hubspot.com)
• The Power of Agile Thinking (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
• 7 Reasons Agile Marketers Are Better at Their Jobs Than You (rpmgr.com)
• Customer Experience Update: 11/3/2012 (businesstechnologypartner.wordpress.com)

Who in PR is promising you the moon?

Does you PR advisor tell you this – come what may, we will make sure that we get
your company covered in the media – in a nutshell, call it a “column cm guarantee”?

Nothing can be far from a blatant lie, and honestly, PR never works that way in any
part of the globe.

As a matter fact, if you have a long term PR/communication strategy for your company in mind,
you must quietly stay away from such ‘column space coverage’ guarantors!

Look at the media (and the journalist fraternity) as end consumers of your content. They have their their own creativity constraints – and its in a sense a battle between classy content, the most crucial advertisers (who walk away with a chunk of the col cms), and the editor who wields the wand as to what the reader must see and know!

The same analogy can be drawn to all kinds of media – print, television, online and so on. Add to this, the clutter of competition in your own industry – which is only increasing by the day!

In all this, if someone walks up to you and gives you as assurance of guaranteed coverage, it can be only if you are gullible enough to think that any of us in the PR business wield that influence.

The fact is, none of us, yes, NONE of us have that, and to some extent, it would be an insult to the independent thinking of the media if we imagine such a thing!

While we could be your company’s image advisors, we are just facilitators to friends in the media – sometimes involuntarily pushing information we perceive as useful, and at times offering a helping hand when sought. We are only catering to the content needs of the journalist fraternity, and this is in their own terms.

In all this, we also see how well we could position our client PR needs, and offer some expertise in creating media oriented content, which will be relevant and consumed!

Look at PR advisors as partners in your long term communication strategy execution plan. Not as someone who could just wave a magic wand and get you instant headlines in the next mornings newspapers! And by the way, such a magic wand never exists with any PR advisor!

Related articles

• Is your spokesperson ‘battle’ ready? (theprequity.wordpress.com)
• The Importance of Tailoring PR Pitches (marchpr.com)
• Why PR Doesn’t Drive Sales (hubspot.com)
• 4 things PR pros should always say to reporters (prdaily.com)
• Crappy PR (online-pr.blogspot.com)
• The most terrifying PR clients (prdaily.com)