Becoming a Communications Professional.

Becoming a Communications Professional.

Do you like communicating with people, giving them information about occurrences and happenings arround them ? About a new movie coming up or about a new shampoo launch? About essentials during a crisis ?  

Yes ? Then Public Relations  is meant for you.

To help you understand Public Relations broadly, let me first tell you about the eight simple steps of communication.

1. Observe the behaviour of your audiences, how they interact, how they think and feel & what are thier community values and interests

2. Listening takes off all the development guess works. One of the best ways to do this is  to add social media intelligence to your network to uncover the key conversations by your audiences about any given topic

3.  Identify key Influencers on the topic , people and communities who are influencial to thought process and look at associating with them

4. Internalize what you have gathered from observations and listening to develop  meaningful  content to work on

5. Share the knowledge with different departments of your organization to collate the blanks in the content you have gathered

6. Process the information from a 360 degree perspective. 

7. Participate , open communication is a good source to create a peer to peer approach

8.  Feedback, contributes to making information more relevant and concise for the desired audiences

To summarise, it's about communicating strategically at the right time, to the right people, a precise message through the appropriate communication tool.

Two of  obvious questions would be, what is the role of a PR person ? What is the scope of PR as a field ? 

PR comes with as much excitement as much of thought and smart work. Like Advertising, PR also follows an AIDA phase. Awareness before an occurrence, during  occurrence and after the occurrence, for a planned format activity.

As a PR person your role is diverse. Say you are doing PR for  the brand - Sunsilk. Your 1st task at hand will be to understand the brand, it's audiences and it's competition. Staying tuned to your brand and competitive updates is crucial. That will aid your PR moves for Sunsilk. 

Next you will need to identify, ideate and execute PR-able  opportunities for your brand. For example, considering female audiences for Sunsilk, you could plan online and / or offline engagements for occassions like women's day and mother's day. In summary seasonal and occasional tools for interacting  with audiences.

As a business opportunity, you will plan on Sunsilk associating with a Filmfare awards or any televised / non televised event. You could plan for  Sunsilk endorsing itself within a movie or a show just like Nescafe in Sanjivini - 2 on Hotstar.  This means your are creating media visibility for your brand, which is again very necessary.

Public Relations also calls for back end roles like media relations, planning & positioning, writing & content creation and reputation management. PR is like parenting a brand through all the odds & evens of  its life cycle.

Public Relations as an industry is an investment of time, money and effort in story telling that leads to relationship building. It is critical to any brand that needs media exposure,  requires to sway consumer opinion and maintain good will. 

Modern - age PR demands an integrated, well planned and a multi channel approach that aids in amplifying  the brand meesage to audiences. Hence PR one of the strongest  business support tools.

PR also eventually allows you to develop your comptencies in the genre of  both your skill & passion, meaning you can look at opportunities in Fashion & Lifestyle PR, Entertainment PR, Heathcare PR, Sports & Fitness PR and lots more.  But all this  once you have understood in PR in practice.

Though Public Relations is challenging but it is a extremely rewarding career with amazing growth opportunities,  being a functional necessity for every brand, human & non human.

Sounds lucrative?  Have any questions on how to get there ? 

Write to me at aditi.gosalia@gmail.com and I will be more than happy to guide you through your  professional journey.