Exactly 2 decades back when ‘mile sure mera tumhara’ was created by Suresh Mullick, the brief from the then Prime Minister Shri Rajiv Gandhi was to infuse national integration through a strong film. And the film truly achieved it by bringing the different religion and colors across India by using well known celebrities from sports, films and music. All this was supplemented by composing the entire lyrics with rag bhairavi and driving home the message India is one.

Being in the communication business for more than 2 decades any piece of communication that you create should have sharp objectives and that objectives should be met by your strategy. Suresh Mullick’s film on this count achieved it 100 percent and that is one of the reasons that the film is still evergreen and fresh. One will never get bored of viewing it any number of times.

Honestly speaking I have still not figured the objective of the new Phir Mile Sur. To me it is like an unprofessional client telling an agency to create some film without a tight brief.

The sad part is so much has been written about the new Phir Mile Sur by the media to garner visibility but the equity of the Mile Sur Mere… is so strong and instilled in people’s mind for the last 20 odd years and it will be very difficult to erase this from every Indian’s memory.

There is a very interesting report on Indian youth trends at Ingene.  What stuck me the categorisation of the Indian youth:

1. The Bharatiyas: 67% of the Indian youth who lives in the rural areas with least influence of globalisation, least economically priviledged and high on traditional values and highly Bollywood influenced.

2. The Indians: 31.% of the youth who have moderate global influence but still rooted to Indian family values.

3. The In’glo’dians: Minimal in number but globally inclined, exposed and affluent. Always try to be different.

Read more from the original post here.

I couldn’t agree more with what Lakshimipathy Bhat wrote in the Financial Express that the Sunsilk Gang of Girls, often taken as the benchmark on digital campaigns in India owes a part of its success to the massive offline mass media support it got. Often for our clients we most of the time try to integrate digital support to PR and marketing activities. I think to pull off really big digital campaigns, it is now time for the other way round. Big bang digital idea, which has its heart on the web,  executed well online and supported by offline mass media. And of course, supported by mobile phone marketing as well.  For instance, a simple online contest can grow many fold when we add in an element of receiving the entries through SMS or voice calls.

But all of us need to understand to achieve the thought leader position one need to be patient and one need to demonstrate and show results. Name any good leader, be it in retail, technology, advertising or banking, the thought leader in their respective category have not got this overnight.

In the case of advertising Piiyush Pandey who began his career in Account Management and then crossed the fence to pen scripts and campaigns demonstrated his true creativity with many path breaking campaign. Starting from Chal mere Luna to….the dancing girl in the cricket field for Cadbury’s to the evergreen and refreshing approach on Fevicol made Piyush popular. But he started speaking to media when he knew that he has arrived to conquer India’s creative kingdom and consistently delivered world class work which made Ogilvy India proud in the global network. His great work helped him and the media started approaching him and today he is truly the thought leader in the advertising space.

One more example that I would like to illustrate is from the retail sector. Kishore Biyani rewrote the retail story by strongly believing that consumer is the king and came out with his innovative retail solutions. All of us will vouch with out any hesitation that he is the pioneer in India’s retail story and his capacity to demonstrate has earned him the thought leader status in the retail space.

We have Narayan Murthy in technology and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw in biotechnology who have really demonstrated before they reached the thought leader rank.

It is the ultimate goal or ambition for every entrepreneur or founder of a company to be a thought leader but great thought leaders are the one who truly demonstrate their skills and knowledge with a long term agenda and will run with the baton for a very long distance with strong focus on the future. There are no short cuts to emerge as a thought leader.

When you are in peak you get great laurels and corporates are willing to shell out huge dollars and rupees to tie up with brand ambassadors. But what happens when the barometer drops for various reasons. Few years back it was got to do with the performance of the Indian cricket team in the world cup in the Caribbean where we got knocked out in the preliminary rounds and brands like Pepsi were so livid that they terminated the contract of some of the players. They were not keen at all to use them as brand ambassadors as it may damage the equity of the brand. This is also common with bollywood celebrities for years.

Right now the Tiger Woods incidence is fresh and the media is just splashing all kind of negative reports on it. All of us know that Tiger Woods is associated with a world known consulting brand Accenture. This can happen to anybody and I keep wondering what would be going in the minds of the people at Accenture. Very difficult to guess and it will be a wait and watch situation before they take any decision. Huge sums must have been disbursed to Tiger but the brand is taking some amount of beating for the news.

Tiger Woods is a world class golfer and has been strongly bonded with Accenture. Ask anybody and people will connect Tiger and Accenutre with ease. Golf has become the brand signal for Accenture. Under the circumstances the only thing Accenture can do is reduce the exposure of the advertisement. Wait for the course correction. Conduct a research once the dust settles and find out the brand connect with Tiger woods and weigh the pros and cons before arriving at anything.

A very precarious situation. But worth the wait before bringing the curtains down.

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The idea is tempting and you might just even get sold on it, if you are a newbie on social media marketing. You control the message. The bloggers are yours. Yet to the outside world, the effort is going to be seen as passionate fans of your brands/ organisation writing positive about your brand or organisation.

Clandestinely hiring people like this is also often perceived as one of the many shortcuts that companies can implement when they are faced with negative reviews, complaints, etc. on an online forum, where the hired bloggers can challenge the complaints and write positive comments to counter the negatives.

The option to neutralise negative criticism for an organisation without getting involved directly sounds good. There is no risk of flaring up criticism after a direct involvement.

The bloggers might already have established profiles and therefore the chances of their initiated discussions taking as normal customer reactions are high.

However, having said all this, we should not forget that one day people will find out what your organisation has been doing. For instance, one of the bloggers/ writers is not happy working with you anymore due to payments, working style, etc., and he decided to tip off some other blogger or newspaper.

Paying bloggers/ writers to write positive about you might not be an ethical way of dealing with your customers and other stakeholders, and in a way is cheating. One also needs to see the impact that it will have on the brand/ organisation when people actually finds out what has been happening. The damage such short cut methods can cause is too much to ignore.

Hiring bloggers, if at all, should be done transparently and people should be told what their roles are. However again, this could have its pros and cons, which we will discuss next time.

What do you say? Leave your comments.

Some time back, Twitter launched Twitter lists for its users. Now Twitter users can assemble other Twitter users that he/ she likes into groups and follow them. This I thought was a fantastic way for me to sort and follow people, if you are following a large number of people and you don’t want to use any third party apps.  For instance, I follow more than 11,000 people and used to have Tweetdeck to sort out users. Now I can do it directly on Twitter and also share the lists for other people.  I created a list of digital marketers in India to keep up with their tweets.

The possibilities are endless. There are many interesting lists already. One lists I found that could be very useful for PR professionals is this list of Indian journalists. Check it out.

Let us know if you found any other useful lists for PR professionals. By the way, you can follow India PR Blog on Twitter and here is also my Twitter profile.

Further reading on Twitter lists on Mashable here.

1. Monitoring mechanism: Have a listening capability and understanding what the various stakeholders are talking about our brands and organizations is critical. Without this, we would be just another me too and shooting in the dark. How do we build an effective monitoring mechanism in place. We can use blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search to monitor the blogosphere, subscription on email and RSS on influential blogs around your industry/ subject, setting news alerts, and monitoring social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Digg, and social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, etc. There are host of tools to monitor micro blogging platforms, read Twitter. For blog comments and monitoring the social media space in real time, we have free tools like Social Mention. What about the citizen journalism sites and consumer review sites. Lastly but not the least, not forgetting to monitor the search engines.

2. Being a part of the community and the dialogue: We have spokespersons of our organisations who would speak to the media whenever required. Is the same spokesperson going to be responsible for answering online queries, or is it going to be another person? The CEO of a large organisation might not always have the time. So is it the corporate communications person? Who is the online spokesperson, or the community manager from the organisation? Deciding this quickly and reaching out to influential bloggers and active social media participants and addressing their concerns is key.

3. Building your communities: By renting and/or creating social media properties -  renting as when we build our communities on relevant social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin, and Orkut, micro blogging platforms like Twitter, media sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr; and creating blogs, forums, social networking platforms, applications and communities of users, and other properties.

4. Boosting visibility: Search engines are the encyclopedia of today. I remember a good example given by someone once that years ago, if we have to noticed something good, we would share it on our dining table or friends. Today, we would look it up online. Having your online gateway – your website, a easy to use and useful one, and maintaining good standards and optimization techniques to score well on search engines is must. Online advertising – Pay Per Click, Pay Per Action, Custom Payments – on social networks and blogs would give the boost.

What do you think? Leave your comments. Let’s discuss.