Maverick Indonesia

An Email from Singapore About PR and Blogging

Today, we have just received an interesting email about our blog from a Singaporean student, Yun Ying Sim:

Hi!
Thank you for your prompt reply!
I’m actually a student from Singapore and I see that you guys are a cool group of people. It is indeed very cool to see a PR firms blogging! It’s like blogging and PR is such a sensitive topic after the whole walmart-edelman incident. PR firms in Singapore are still quite apprehensive towards using Blogging as a PR tool.
Is it like that in Indonesia? Are clients open to using blogging as a form of PR?
Cheers!

Thanks, for thinking we’re cool Ying Sim!

Yes, we are aware that some PR firms and companies are sensitive about blogging.

But, as our name suggests, we are mavericks and why we blog is because we’re that type of company that is open, eager to engage people, clients, journalists and anyone else interested in public relations, Indonesia and communications in general.

We also believe that technology will change the way businesses communicate, perhaps sooner than a lot of people would like to think. So we decided to move our cheese before some else does.

True, with virtually no rules in the blogosphere, people can write anything about you, your company, your products, or your services. However, it is also true that blogs and bloggers are swarming out there on the Net. They are already there, it’s the matter of whether you’d like to engage these bloggers and keep up with what’s happening in the blogosphere.

Changes are inevitable. New technologies has changed the way we communicate or interact with each other, through blogs, SMS, online social networks, etc.

As PR professionals, the challenge is how to keep up with these changes, see how it changes us, observe it and experiment with it, and come up with a strategy on how these new media can provide an additional channel for us to get our messages across.

As stated by Churchill: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

On your question about Indonesia and blogging: like elsewhere there are a handful of people who “get it” about what new media could potentially do. Others don’t get it or don’t care. Indonesia’s government is fairly open and even encouraging about blogging.

In October last year, for instance, Maverick together with the top bloggers in Indonesia organized Pesta Blogger, Indonesia’s first nationwide gathering of bloggers.

The Minister for Information and Communication not only attended and delivered a keynote address supportive of blogging, he proclaimed the day as the National Blogger’s Day.

Some companies are coming around to the potential of marketing themselves via new media though, as seen in Toyota Indonesia’s recent launch of its Corolla Altis.

We see opportunities in the blogosphere and we’re right out there experimenting and seeing what works.

The key, we think, is to blog for a purpose… And we’ll discuss this next week