More to the media than the message

How much publicity should a corporation subject itself to? In these days of hyper-media interaction, corporate communication departments and their public relations consultants are often caught between the Scylla of anonymity and the Charybdis of over-exposure.

This is a late 1990s/early 2000 dilemma for corporations operating in India, reflecting the coming of age of the Indian economy. Before that, when the stock-markets were quasi-exclusive trading clubs, and licensed monopolies precluded the need to communicate with stakeholders, most corporations preferred anonymity.

Indeed, one of the first points a senior reporter told my batch of trainees, was that most companies regarded journalists with the same dread as the taxman. Our skill, therefore, would be judged by our ability to get information from executives.

Interviews, thus, became an elliptical exercise, prefaced by long conversations on health, family, the weather and so on to put the executive at ease (or so we hoped).

Corporate reticence with journalists was considered so basic a truth that CEOs who agreed to meet promptly and obligingly answer questions were - unfairly perhaps - regarded with suspicion.

Today, given the urgent need to communicate with multiple stakeholders and the rising costs of advertising, the relationship between companies and journalists has changed significantly. No longer do reporters have to beg senior executives for meetings.

It's the public relations people who are chasing the journalists. Could CEO X be featured in the after hours/weekly interview sections? Could company Y's revolutionary new technology/strategy/product/performance be featured in the paper?

For the fledgling business of public relations, the pressure to get their clients published is understandable. Barring the bigger and more reputed public relations firms, performance is still measured by "advertising equivalence" or the amount of column centimetres of coverage their clients get. To be fair, this is often not a performance yardstick of choice - it is what companies demand of their agencies, despite advice to the contrary.

In fact, the surprising fact about many New-Age CEOs is their urgent desire to communicate with the media with tiresome regularity. Many of them display pride in being on first-name terms with beat reporters. The consequences of such media familiarity, however, can often be troublesome and, eventually, detract from credibility.

The head of a large and reputed BPO outfit, for instance, insisted that he wanted to be much more visible with the media. The reason, he explained to his bemused PR consultants, was to establish himself as a "thought leader" in the outsourcing space. Wouldn't it be more effective to write, say, a column to unburden his leading thoughts? No, there was no time to write - or brief a writer.

Since the size and antecedents of the company made it a natural newsmaker, the CEO certainly received saturation coverage. Until one day, a report appeared talking of continental expansion plans, quoting the media-eager CEO.

Not only was this embarrassingly premature, it was vital, competitive information. A tough letter of denial was dispatched. The CEO had never said any such thing, a clarification should be published immediately.

A polite reply from the newspaper said the reporter's notes of the interview recorded this fact and, therefore, the news item could not be construed as incorrect. When pressed, the CEO admitted that he may have mentioned the matter in passing; it was by no means a major element of the conversation.

He expected a piece on how Indian outsourcing companies were establishing themselves globally. But since he'd said this many times before to various journalists, the reporter, looking for a fresh angle on this much-covered company, chose to lead with this one new fact.

The key message from this incident is that corporations have far less control over the information arbitrage that has become a staple of media interaction than they would like to believe.

Many are indignant when journalists they consider "friendly" do not publish the Authorised Versions of events or trends. Increasingly hedged in by publicists, media advisors and image managers, senior managements often forget that news reporters have a job to do as much as anyone, and few would choose to be irreverently labelled "Planter's Choice".

The balancing act, perhaps, lies in accessing the media only when there is something significant to say, rather than opting for scattershot saturation coverage.

Unfortunately, most companies in India still view public relations through the single lens of media coverage. Many are only just beginning to realise that publicity for its own sake can eventually be self-defeating.