Media Relations

. Media are both a constituency and a conduit through which investors, suppliers, retailers, and consumers receive information about and develop images of a company. The media’s role as a disseminator of information to a firm’s key constituencies has gained increasing importance over the years. Media is interested in satisfying the needs of readers and viewers; they had to meet the public’s growing interest in the private sector and its participants. Hence they no more relegated business news to few back pages.

Organizations irrespective of their size had to build better relationships with the media.
They must take time to cultivate relationships with the right people in the media. The assessment of accomplishment in the media relations business has for years been the amount of “ink” that a company gets, whether aided by in-house professionals or an outside consultant. Getting a lot of ink, means lots of articles written about a company, may not have any value if it doesn’t help the company achieve the communication objective it started out in the first place.
By conducting research, companies can avoid giving reporters’ information that they are not interested in and communications need only occur when a company’s media audience is most likely to be receptive.
Responding to media calls are very important, most of the calls get directed to automated machines which would not differentiate between important and unimportant calls. The best solution for this would be to employ a person just to attend to this. We should make sure when answering such calls to keep a friendly tone when checking the availability for an interview. Next step would be to prepare for media interviews. Depending on the type of interview, the media relation’s professional should prepare the company representative for it. They must make sure they know in depth about the subject they are going to be interviewed about.
Media monitoring and analysis is also an important tool for maintaining healthy relationship with media and helps us gauge our accomplishment with the media.
The most critical component, in media relations is maintaining ongoing relationships with the media which means developing and maintaining a network of contacts with the media.

To build a successful media relation program the basic thing would be to involve the media relations personnel into the strategy, by developing in-house capabilities, we could also use the help from outside counsel.

Media is no more just restricted to paper or television, internet is used on a large scale.
There are various ways to interact online. Blogs are becoming quite a roar as they are publicly accessible personal websites that serves as sources of commentary, opinion, and information on a variety of topics.







Handling Negative news badly: When a company encounters a crisis, the best way to handle it would be to come clean to the media and give their statement before things turn out bad and the company faces downfall.

http://tenant.net/Organize/media.html

http://www.personal.co.za/media-relations-cape-town.htm

The above article gives us an overview of managing media relations and also listed is a website of a media relations consultant’s firm which gives an idea of how things are being done.




Tylenol Crisis of 1982 shows how effective media relations can help diffuse a possible explosive situation and maintain the reputation of the company. Johnson & Johnson the makers of Tylenol capsules immediately recalled all the Tylenol bottles. J & J also advertised in national media not to use the Tylenol capsules. It also put up a $100,000 reward to find the perpetuator of the crime. It also immediately introduced capsules that were triple sealed that were tamper proof and that coupled with heavy price promotions in the media ensured Tylenol retained the #1 brand image.

Corporate Advertising vs Product Advertising

Corporate Advertising: It can be defined as paid use of medium that seeks to benefit the image of the corporation as a whole rather than its products or services alone. Because all of a company’s advertising contributes to its image, both product and corporate advertising should reflect a united strategy. Corporate image advertising should “brand” a company the way product advertising brands a product.

Product Advertising: It can be defined as paid use of media that seeks to benefit a certain product of the corporation, by increased sales etc.

Now to talk of a major difference between corporate and product advertising is who pays for each of the two types of advertising. A company’s marketing department typically is responsible for all product-related advertising and pays for such ads out of its own budget. Corporate Advertising, on the other hand, falls within the corporation communication area and either comes out of that budget or in some cases, is paid for by the CEO’s office.

There are mainly three types of corporate advertising. First type is the Advertising to reinforce identity or enhance reputation. Here companies use corporate advertising to strengthen their identities following structural changes. As companies merge and enter new businesses, they need to explain all their new developments like vision, strategy, etc
To constituents who may have known them well before but are not able to get along with their new status. Hence corporate advertising is used by larger organizations to simplify their image to unify a group of disparate activities. The second type is the Advertising to attract investment, this is one of the tool used by companies to enhance their images in the financial community is financial – relations corporate advertising. This type of advertising can stimulate interest in a company‘s stock among potential investors as well as buy-side and sell-side .analysts. Third type of advertising is the Advertising to influence opinions. This kind of advertising is called issue or advocacy advertising which is used by companies to respond to external threats from either government or special interest groups. This advertising mainly deals with controversial subjects.

The main outcome of Corporate advertising are increase in sales, next to create a stronger reputation as the best corporate advertising creates goodwill and enhances reputation by letting constituents in on what the organization is all about, particularly if it does beneficial things people are not aware of. Lastly to Recruit and retain employees where corporate advertising is an indirect way of building morale among employees. This type of advertising attracts the best and brightest both at the entry level and for senior positions and creates enthusiasm and excitement among potential and current employees.

http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/research/ras/may2007/biehal.html

The above mentioned article gives an idea about Product vs. Corporate Branding: What’s the Right Mix?

Product brand managers are often at odds with their corporate brand counterparts over the allocation of limited advertising budgets - with brand managers pressing product messages over the corporate branding. But product managers should take note of new research from Gabriel Biehal, associate professor of marketing at Smith, and Daniel Sheinin, University of Rhode Island, that finds important efficiencies in corporate branding when multiple products are involved.

The corporate advertising I would like to refer to portrays the first type which is advertising to reinforce identity and enhance reputation. The advertising is about Reliance group which got divided among the brother’s. The second brother launched his share of the industry as Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. He used corporate advertising to reinforce its identity and create strong reputation.

Image,Identity and Reputation

Identity is the visual manifestation of the company’s reality as conveyed through the organization’s name, logo, motto, products, services, buildings, stationary, uniforms, and other tangible pieces of evidence created by the organization and communicated to a variety to a variety of constituencies. It is very important to tap the mind of the consumer for which we need to have a strong identity. Hence shaping the identity must be a key feature where the central to it is a vision that encompasses a company’s core values, philosophies, standards, and goals. The next important feature is Names and Logos to help illustrate the conscious actions organizations can take to shape their identity and differentiate themselves in marketplace.Consistency is a key; organization’s vision should manifest itself consistently.

I would like to mention the example of FedEx. They changed their name from federal express to FedEx and demonstrated that it was in touch with their customers wants from their company and made a promise to emphasize this throughout their organization.
To maintain the Identity, we need to conduct an identity audit, set identity objectives, develop design and names, develop prototypes, launch and communicate and lastly implement it.

Image is a function of how constituencies perceive the organization based on all the messages it sends out through names and logos and through self preservation, including expressions of its corporate vision. Constituencies have certain perceptions about an organization before they begin to interact with it. Perceptions are based on industry and what they have read about the organization and what others have told about their interactions with the company. After interacting with an organization, the constituencies may have a different image of it than before, they have to ensure their image is better than worse.



Reputation, any type of reputation, is just the outcome of one of the many applications that can be built from identity. Where your identity is



Reputation differs from image because it is built up over a time and is not simply a perception at a given point of time. It differs from identity because it is a product of both internal and external constituencies whereas reputation is based on all constituencies. Reputation is assessed based on the perceptions of all its constituencies. Good Reputation matters as it can attract and retain best talent, as well as loyal customers which contribute to growth and commercial success. It helps to weather crisis more effectively. Every organization needs to consider corporate and social responsibility when thinking about its own reputation.

http://www.clipperz.com/tags/dickhardt_0
http://www.landor.com/?do=cPortfolio.getCase&caseid=25

The above mentioned articles give us a clearer idea on the whole topic. The first article tells us about how reputation and identity are different and cannot be misunderstood for one. The second article talks about the FedEx case.

In my experience Rin Supreme bar, the most premium bar in its category being migrated as a Surf Excel bar is a wonderful example for this topic. Surf Excel is already a premium brand in powders, while Rin is positioned on the whiteness platform, the communication exercise for the `new' surf Excel bar is expected to focus on both whiteness and stain removal. In the commercial, a kid conveys the mixed news (bad news since Supreme bar is no longer going to be available and good news since Surf Excel bar is coming into the market). The company officials said that Rin Supreme bar is already a top-end bar and it helps when it is being migrated to an already premium brand such as Surf Excel.

On a concluding note I would like to add that a close assignment between the identity and image generates a strong reputation

Strategic communication

Communication is the means for exchange of ideas between people. Communication on the whole is simple and plain but when one wants to adapt communication as one of the key factors in their organization, it has to have some sort of strategy. Whether an organization is trying to enhance its reputation through corporate advertising, to communicate to employees about rising cost of healthcare, to convince shareholders that the company is still worth investing in or simply get customers to buy more products, using a communication strategy is very important. The three components for communication strategy comprises of organization, constituency and messages.
Communication strategy can be achieved by successful completion of its three components. In the first component, Determining objectives as their can be many reasons to communicate, Deciding what resources are available to determine how to communicate about something like employee benefits plan or introducing a new product into a market depends heavily on what resources are available within organization, including money, human resource, time; Diagnosing the organization’s reputation .
In second component, analyzing constituencies, analysis determines who are your organization’s constituencies? What is the constituency’s attitude toward the organization? What does the constituency know about the topic?
In third component, delivering messages involves a two step process, the communication channel and structure messages carefully. To assess the success of the strategy we need to check the results of the communication and determine if it gave to desired result. Feedback helps us to assess our result.

http://www.chass.ncsu.edu/ccstm/scmh/model.html
http://www.benton.org/publibrary/toolkits/stratcommtool.html
The above mentioned links gives an insight on the above discussed matter.

http://www.melcrum.com/articles/clutter_at_microsoft.shtml
The above mentioned article gives us an example of managing communication and reducing overload in a matrix organization. Here Mike love who is the senior director of corporate communications at Microsoft shares his experience of some tried and tested methods for generating more focused and relevant communication, and reflects on the role of new media in the mix.

From my personal experience, I believe that strategic communication is surely a leading path to success. I would like to share my views of when I worked at Emc Data Storage System, Everyone followed a very systematic way to communicate, and the best preferred way was to send an e-mail to state your query and the receiver would respond to it within a short span, answering the query with all the details, incase of any delay, a simple reminder would revert back with an immediate response. This was followed not just by the staff working in the same building in Bangalore but when the communication took place with the team in US too. Everybody is very prompt and very organized which helps for a clearer understanding of the issue which helps to solve the issue more efficiently.

Changing Environment in business

The business environment is constantly changing. The only way one can effectively deal with its constant changes is to have a good communication framework in the company.
The business is no more performed in a traditional way, now it is more dynamic and globalization is more strongly encouraged. The Decline of barriers among nations, liberalization of trade and the technological changes that have taken place make it much easier for globalization to emerge. Now companies specialize in their core competencies and outsource what remains or they merge to integrate their suppliers into their own organization. It is very tough in today’s world not to keep up with the changes taking place in business. To compete in such an environment, one has to first recognize the changes taking place in the environment and short term observations is not going to be of any help if the bigger picture is not taken into consideration. The growth of technological changes has increased uncertainty for business. Hence one needs to keep themselves updated. Second, companies must not compromise their values and beliefs in order to fit into the new environment. Third, one should always think of all the pros and cons when entering into a new segment. Lastly, Communication must be closely linked to the company’s vision and strategy through their structure.

http://upetd.up.ac.za/thesis/available/etd-10232001-152437/unrestricted/03chapter3.pdf
In the above mentioned link the author mentions what is meant by a change, the different types of changes as observed by several people. He talks about the phases one can adopt in handling change. How one can resist change. He also discusses the changing business environment
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1076/is_1_41/ai_53889737
This above article gives an overview of the environment and the importance and necessity of learning to adapt oneself to it and to learn to deal with it in an effective manner which would turn out profitable.

Now many companies irrespective of large or small adapt themselves efficiently with the changing environment. When I was working with Emc Data Storage Systems, I noticed that the people working in the company always were keener to work on new features or programs and always welcomed new changes heartily and made sure they were in par with the latest emerging technologies. There was no place for any sort of procrastination among the teams. From my experience, I learnt that Changes is not something which is readily accepted by anyone, the person who conquered this fear would certainly emerge out a winner.