Public Relations

What does an internal audit at #PRPOI look like?

As we got all enthused and ecstatic on the first anniversary for the curated #SaturdayLive sessions, we just got thinking that this has been one helluva journey for all the founders, as well. No one knows it all, yes, we say that proudly even after being in the industry for a combined 6 six decades (all three of us put together). Probably that hunger to keep learning is what turned out to be our biggest challenge and motivator.

So, this is when we looked inwards, in literal sense auditing, to check if we have enough brownie points on our scorecard for upskilling. And we were glad to come out in flying colours. Come on, don’t go boo-hoo on us just yet. Yeah, blowing your own trumpet is not looked at kindly, but then we aren’t doing that. We are simply telling you that we learnt a lot of new skills ourselves. And our constant noise on “learn new skills” is not an empty example, because we are talking and walking it ourselves first.

So, here’s our checklist.

  1. Use all the digital platforms at your disposal! Why should a Facebook live be restricted just to Facebook? Why should we not take our content to Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and our blog page? So that’s what we did. Apart from promoting updates from each live session, we kept exploring how to keep curating content specifically for other platforms. And that’s how we did YouTube simulcasting, Instalive, Twitter chat and launched our Podcast channel!

Yes, in this digital age, you might just roll your eyes on us. But remember, we are a platform designing sessions for the industry to upskill and doing that for ourselves was not the primary focus. Yet, we did that.

2. Do the backend basics first. Apart from designing all our creatives internally, editing our videos, starting our blog page, we also had to sharpen ourselves to be better hosts and presenters. This doesn’t come easy and needs a lot of planning and clear discussions with speakers, as well as internally within our teams. Immense kudos to everyone out there on the digital / television / theatrical screens – because all this so-called-glamour is a lot of hard work!

3. Innovative content curation needs unique speakers. We got blatant and reached out to speakers we knew as well as the ones we had never engaged with, basis the topic at hand. We wanted to convince everybody to contribute to our vision. It took some perseverance, but good word spreads faster and good storytelling much, much faster. We sharpened our skills to understand how to bring forth an individual speaker’s strength for that particular session. This helped us do a lot of #PRforPR and curate content through blogs, contributory articles and podcast segments!

4. PR for PR. The entire endeavour put our PR skills to test. Creating and engaging a massive community that was known to work in silos, was a huge undertaking. Creating camaraderie and a spirit of collaboration took some convincing. But one by one…like we do in an ongoing PR campaign we convinced people to look at the community from our point of view. A crystal-clear vision, smart storytelling and immense amplification, helped achieve a lot of #PRforPR 

5. Collaborate to create visibility.  Yeah, yeah, as PR professionals this is emphasized upon us all the time. But halfway through the year, we began experimenting with bringing on board media partners and industry partners. Because we thought what better way to promote the talent helping us and get a neutral platform to talk about content we are curating. And you won’t believe, for the last 7-8 months we have had a different media and industry partner, each month. We also got an international industry partner on board in this exercise. So, never stop looking for like-minded options, which could work as perfect pieces to the whole puzzle.

6. Tickle the Technology bone. The cherry on the cake was learning how to master technology. After all, a great product with bad packaging will face a steeper climb towards success. We upskilled on technology platforms for multicasting. We stumbled along the way, took in advice from panelists, feedback from viewers and after several hours of research and youtube videos we zeroed in on our list. We also learnt how to create, edit and host podcasts, video shares, uploads and downloads. Studying the numbers and the analytic charts too (wooo-hoooo!). 

What got all three of us cheering with joy, was the acknowledgment from the industry, as Adgully awarded us the “Content of the year, 2021” award! This is what made us happy and instilled fear to work harder, because we can’t ever mess up (no one knows how much chaos we create in the backend)!

Just remember, this forum – PRPOI – is actually run by many more names that you can read. Our strong pillars are the speakers – the fraternity at large, the media network, our commendable group of members and every individual who reaches out sharing questions or ideas at our live sessions!

And this is what our last lesson was, to be great leaders one needs to make the whole village walk with them – gone are the days of people following – excite them to believe in you and they shall walk the last mile with you.

Until next year, we hope to share new milestones in our journey of upskilling with #PRPOI

– Pooja Trehan Dhamecha

Co-Founder- PRPOI

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