Maverick Indonesia

PR Week 2008: It should’ve been… engaging

Last week (27-29 May 2008) the PR community celebrated its PR Week 2008. Or rather, small portions of the industry celebrated the event. Although APPRI was said to have about 200 companies as their members, some couple of hundreds more unregistered under the association, only very few attended PR week.

PR Week 2008 was initiated and organized by EGA Briefings and MM Communications Trisakti University. It was a good effort to bring together and provide developments to practitioners in the industry. The intention was there but the attendance was disappointing. The few who attended were confined to the enthusiastic organizers, a handful of corporate PR people, a number of academicians and the heads of other PR organizations such as Perhumas and APRI.

There are three possible interpretations for the low attendance: Firstly, professional practitioners may hold the belief that they are already so good on what they do that attending such activities would bring no benefit; Secondly, they may feel that there is no benefit to letting others know their kitchen secrets; and thirdly, that past events have proved to be boring and rehashing the same old tired discourse on PR.

Maverick was one of the few PR consultancies to attend and to have a representative as a speaker. We do so without fear that others may learn our secrets but in the believe that the more knowledge is shared, the better the industry becomes. It is also because we view our competitive advantage as in thought leadership, our unique point of view and the synergy of our team members that cannot be duplicated by others.

Our speaker was Ong Hock Chuan, our technical advisor (disclosure: he’s my boss so I have to write nice things about him, hehe…) Ong shared recent developments in technology and the New Media and how it would eventually affect the way businesses communicate to their customers and other stakeholders.

Related to the PR Week theme of “Turning Cost into Investment through Strategic Corporate Citizenship and Responsible Corporation” Ong also shared our insight son Corporate Social Leadership (CSL), as opposed to Corporate Social Responsibility or CSR.

So, why CSL? Compared to ‘responsibility’ which tends to be a mere corporate duty in doing the right thing; ‘leadership’ would mean making things right for both the society as well as to the company. CSL should be engaging and in line to the corporate core business in order to make it more sustainable. (Activities such as Citi Peka’s ‘Financial Education for the Poor’ and ‘Citi Micro-Entrepreneurship Awards’ or Coca-Cola Foundation Indonesia’s ‘Cinta Air’, for example.)

Another speaker, Edelman head Chad McLinsky also gave an interesting presentation of Edelman’s regional survey, including Indonesia, of people’s reliance on the mainstream and new media as a source of information and news. The findings were not really surprising, however, as they confirmed what most of us suspected all along – that while the mainstream media remained the primary source of information the influence of new media such as blogs was rising. As the way with such surveys we suspect that many many clients would be treated to its results for quite some time to come. Such results are usually chopped up and cannibalized in other presentations. True enough, portions of the survey results appeared in an interminable presentation by Edelman’s Digital Indonesia Manager Misty Maitimoe the next day. Interesting to see Edelman, an international firm that purports to champion digital media worldwide, talking about digital media and yet the firm does not have a corporate blog of its own in Indonesia.

On the second day, Adrianus Meliala, a law expert from the University of Indonesia, shared an interesting perspective into CSR when he contended that a company already is performing its CSR the moment a company carries out their business in accordance to the law and business ethics - as simple as that. He then gave an explanation of the CSR regulation (Law No. 40 year 2007, Article 74).