Well ppl it was a very exciting tuesday afternoon that started with picking up Kiruba Shankar at his guest house and showing him garuda Mall about four times from different streets before reaching the Venue at The Enegry and resource Institue (TERI) in Domulur.
I was impressed with the way Shane Jacob from The PRactice went about organizing this. the hall was simply super and everyone who attended really deserved to be there. What followed was a highly interactive session with me getting a lot of questions. I just loved every minute of it!
I tend to be very straight with everyone I meet and this meet was no different and I expected some very tough questions.
When addressing the PR professionals in the crowd, I made a statement saying ” Do not approach a blogger without a blog”
My reasoning for this was that you have to have sufficient credentials to network with people on their preferred platform. For example, you do need a facebook ID in order to interact with a person on facebook and the same for twitter, linkedin or any other platform. It takes a blogger to realize and appreciate the effort put by other bloggers. Hell! on an average it takes bloggers a minimum of two hours to write one creative post! not to mention the mental fatigue afterwards LOL! I would never expect a company to approach me without a blog, I know that they would never understand the effort , commitment and creativity required for a blog to be successful. I am not saying that every PR professional should have a blog, all I say is that, if you want to interact with the blogging community and reap its benefits YOU or YOUR COMPANY should be a blogger!
Myself and Kiruba Shankar at PRCAI Bangalore
I also mentioned that “Never pay a blogger to write favorable posts on his blog”
This also prompted a huge discussion as to why it was unethical to pay bloggers to write favourable posts for their company/product/service. You must be kidding me!! LOL! The idea is that every blogger is a brand and it takes a lot of effort to get visibility on blogs. Once a reputation is built , it can be destroyed faster and it will be done by none other than your competitors. If your competitor gets a wind of you paying a blogger cash to write a favorable or neutral post, you will soon recieve an anonymous comment(mostly put by your competitor) that this post is paid and no one should regard this. How many companies or bloggers are willing to take up that risk? Is this business model scalable? I dont think so!
Along the same discussion I was asked ” Is it fine to pay an all expenses paid trip for a blogger to visit some premises and write about it”
Lets assume that the company is not trying to change the judgement of the blogger. I say hell yeah! awesome and enjoy yourself blogger!!!! The company can make it known to everyone on their blog and explain that they would like to know how the blogging community feels about their product and they feel it is best to understand it in their environment. But lets not send a blogger on a free trip when your product is in his locality LOL! that will send your competitors on your heels again. if you feel a blogger will learn more about your solutions from London, then send him there or its as good as paying him!
And of course the age old question that will soon rewrite the Ramayana five times over! Why should we blog?
Damn I love fellow IndiBlogger Karthik’s answer to that .. Why Not? he asked ..
There were several other questions but my whole point is that we have reached a stage where we need to understand what is scalable and what should work on a long term strategy and what should never hurt bloggers. IndiBlogger.in’s responsibility and current leader as the largest blogger network means that we will have to do our best for everything that the Blogging community in India stands for.
I loved everyone at the conference and I hope I can provide more straight answers for everyone. I mean, why would anyone make the same mistakes when there are things that have already been learnt and I will continue to provide information that can be used as a foundation to catapult you and your company to newer heights in this age of New Media!
You can see the presentation slideshare.net
Thank you once again.
. Thats the best thing about humor, isn’t it? people might laugh, stare and maybe even insult your jokes but when you wrote that article , there would have been a little child in your head laughing its head off 
I was always a wannabe sportsman. I did athletics till college, was part of the volleyball team etc but never really got anywhere. Motivation, lack of awareness, complete ignorance etc resulted in me being very short sighted. The main thing that interested me in sports was just the competition .. I always found it exhilarating when competing with fellow athletes etc. The cool thing about golf is that if you feel that you have missed your career in sports, Golf is a good outlet, I mean you do not have to be as physically strong as in other sports. You can even start playing the game when you are forty or fifty and compete on your zonals etc and clubs like Eagleton and Government turfs like KGA etc do have a number of tournaments. What Golf does best is to bridge the age gap between players and level the sport.
Penguin books.
