Political PR: Emerging arm in PR industry

Indian politics and politicians getting more organized and scientific: PR strategists to play pivotal role in Elections-2014

Public Relations has always been taken as a tool to promote or propagate companies (corporate), but as diversification is the rule to grow, PR industry is also into diversifying phase. The new area to  for PR industry is non other than politics, politicians and political parties. 

Yes...until now the strategies of the political parties for the propaganda and publicity was decided based on the experiences and success stories of the past and that too just before the announcing of agenda. Some outdoor mediums of publicity and tons of advertisement budgets were used to promote the  party and its working. But now the picture has changed to a great extent. Even the political parties and the politicians have realized the importance of a well designed PR strategy and using it continuously to achieve the  desired results. 

As a PR professional, we generally say that " PR is a continuous process through which the person/ company can achieve the desired results in terms of visibility, reputation management and opinion engineering." All the above terms  are absolutely important  for any political party, due  to which PR can play a pivotal role in creating overall awareness about the party working, top leaders (like we do for top officials and promoters of the company) etc:.   

The best case study of political PR is the PM candidate announcement by a leading political party in India.  The candidate of the political party had done some wonderful work in his area (state) as the state head, but the most important task was to promote the entire work, which was beautifully and tactfully done by some PR firms. The entire gambit was to put the state head to a level, which can create and  change the opinion of citizens across the state to a certain extent. For this various  events , shows, surveys and relationship meetings were also coordinated by the consultants. 

The mind boggling success in enhancing the image and engineering the opinion of the above politician has created a big market for political PR in India, as other politicians and political parties will surely follow the trend.

Satyagrah: A case study of digital PR, crises mitigation and online reputation management

Satyagrah featuring THE Big B, Ajay Devgun, Arjun Rampal and Kareena Kapoor is currently running successfully across all theatres. The Prakash Jha movie typically showcases the agression and anxiety of a common man againt the corrupt system spread in all government departments across India.

As a PR professional, the movie (Satyagrah) is actually a case study about the success of digital PR , crises management and creating online reputation management. On the century celebrations of Indian Cinema, a movie like Satyagrah is surely to become a point of discussion across the communication industry.

Lets talk about the first major crises, showcased in the movie, where Devgun goes to the police station to get bail for Dadduji (Big B) , but inspite of central connects he fails . Finally like a professional PR consultant, he creates a strategy using all major mediums of advertising and communication like outdoors, creating FB page, tweets and circulating the message and MMS to target audience resulting to build a pressure on government and freedom for Dadduji.

Here devgun managed the crises situation by creating a NGO kind of setup , taking help of local leader (Arjun Rampal) and using Social media machinery to attract the attention of variuos media personnel to a remote area like Ambikapur.

Now the film runs fast and during the entire movie, you will mostly find the FB page, tweets, comments on Fb, LIKE to FB comments to establish the viscocity of agitation. Till now directors use the medium of breaking news and machines printing thousand of copies of the incident or agitation to showcase the viscocity. But this movie is the first movie which showcased the social media to established the seriousness of the agitation.

It is the social media or digital PR and online reputation management which actually incarnated DADDUJI from a retired Principal of a village school.

Client Servicing or Client Serving: The argument continues...

As a PR professional all of us use the word client servicing for about hundred times in our day to day work. But many of us feel that rather than doing servicing (which means to rectify the errors and create a smooth functioning) we just serve our client (give the client what he wants).

Majority of the times when a servicing team goes for a meeting the client comes up with a list of demands or deliverables; he is looking from the PR consulting firms. Out of them, if they are categorized some of them do not have any kind of editorial attraction. But still the PR professional tries to manage and create some story in one way or other and pitches to the media.

At this juncture, majority of the times media clearly denies or sometimes due to relationship they take a negligible note of the same in the media, which cannot be even counted as a mention. At the same time when the client is paying x amount of fees, clearly denying about the possibility of coverage for a event or press release, which is not editorially strong is a major issue.

Some points which can be kept in mind:-

• Aware and educate the client from day 1 about the difference between news worthy and non news worthy information

• Create a clear picture of what media wants in the mind of clients

• Try to educate the client to share all major developments and updates with client servicing team, as it will help to create various media opportunities and get better coverage.

• Be a consultant to your client and not just a execution model for your client requirements.