MY COMMENT ON MALAY MAIL..

One of our clients Red Bull Rookies had an interview with Malay Mail, I then innocently commented on the interview online, next thing i knew my comment was published under Letters :-).I was so surprised didn't even know those comments could be considered for publishing. My supervisor was of course happy about it..positive feedback for the rookies.

THE NEED FOR NEWS WORTHY ANGLE IN PR…

In this industry for an organisation to get good coverage or even coverage at all, PR Consultants work day and night to come up with news worthy angles to persuade the media to attend.
One of the oldest tricks in the book, which still does the trick, is inviting a celebrity or a prominent figure to officiate your event.

For the Nowruz Festival Press Conference we took the same approach, we invited the Minister of Tourism and even asked them to endorse the Press Conference and the whole celebration of the Persian New Year in Malaysia. This endorsement on its own gave the Press Conference more value. We were guaranteed a good turn up for the press conference and gave us confidence of coverage from the mainstream media and most print news newspapers.

PR consultants need to come up with fresh new ideas to keep the media on its toes, plus editors are NOT looking for cliché stories to cover. They are always looking for something new, so we always have to think outside the box for that "wow" factor.

Now here is something that confuses me. PR Consultants are sometimes accused to be exploiting gender discourses; say if a consultancy gets a client with a profession in a male dominated field.
My approach would be is to play with words. The world has been waiting for females to do stuff men do and feminists are still calling out for more women in male dominated sports and professions.

But then again is it ethical for PR consultants to exploit gender discourses; does it have an element of spin or its just basic public relations?

RULE NO.1 IN PR ---->> Know and Understand your Publics

One thing I have learned in my internship is that as a PR consultant you have to know your audience, and with every client comes a new challenge and different publics.

One may ask why is knowing publics such a big deal in PR?

This is because public opinion is what we as PR consultants try or work on controlling or manipulating; we mould people’s thoughts and alter them to be in favor of our clients; that is the basic work of PR Consultants. In short PR consultants manage public opinion.

“Public opinion represents a consensus, which emerges over time, from all the expressed views that cluster around an issue in debate, and that this consensus excises power” (Cutlip, S M 2000)

Publics are normally divided in to primary and secondary groups to better serve and deal with each group. The primary group consists of the media because they are the main means of communication for us to get information out there we need the media. The second group is the actual people who use or buy our services.

Just last week we had a press conference to announce the “Nowruz festival” which will be held in KL this year

Nowruz or Persian New Year as some call it is a festival celebrated by Iranians; now in the past two months about six Iranians were charged with drug trafficking in Malaysia. Therefore in writing our media invites, press releases and post releases we had to be smart about what we tell the media. We ended up calling it the “Persian New Year” although the client would have preferred it as the Iranian New Year. After we gave them our PR view and advise they approved to the use of Persian New Year.

Now this where the understanding comes in, we had to use words that denote to the Iranian New Year but not saying Iranian New Year, this was to avoid the media causing a fiasco about it. Like I said before we if control information we give the media we have a chance to control public opinion over issues affecting our clients.

You see the believe is that public opinion= what is in the media, although this is not entirely true it does have some sense to it, people mostly believe or cause a fiasco about the media has to say about certain issues.

For instance if the media had questioned celebrating the Persian New Year in Malaysia regardless of the number of Iranians living in Malaysia, the public would have reacted some out the same considering that a number of Iranians have been charged with drug trafficking. It would not have been a good job on our side or rather it would have given us a lot of work.

All in all it boils down to building good relationships with both the media and the actual people who buy or use or client’s services for successful PR.