Maverick Indonesia

An Intern: Encountering Maverick’s CSL session

One week into my stint as an ITB intern at Maverick I received an invitation to sit in at a lecture that is part of the PR firm’s Corporate Social leadership (CSL) program. The program aims to help non-profit organizations conduct their own PR programs by running them through a 10-month course on public relations and communications skills.

The lecture was to be about online PR and presentation skills so I had two expectations. Firstly, I hoped to learn how to use what’s happening on the Net and online to help me communicate more efficiently. Secondly, I could benefit from skills that would enhance my presentations.

I was not disappointed.

On of the useful things I learned from the online PR session was about street creds. (more…)

Tags: Arif Pranoa, Civil Society Organization, CSL, intern, Maverick, NGO, online PR, presentation skills

Credibility on Facebook Groups

Most people would equate Facebook as good for personal social networking and little more. That it certainly is. But it also has more uses than just this, and corporations would do well to consider whether this medium could help them add to their arsenal of communications vehicles.

The Facebook Group feature provides opportunities for corporations to gather users with shared interests and causes. Facebook members can create a Group for any topic and Group creators are able to email (list serve) all group members for notifications and communicating to the entire group. For instance, in 2007, DKT Indonesia, a social marketer of Fiesta and Sutra condom, conducted the “National Condom Week”.

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Tags: New Media

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.

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Closed: National Condom Week 2007

 

The National Condom Week 2007 that closed last week was interesting in that it brought strong views on condom use to the fore.

On one side were the supporters who take the stand that whether you promote condom use or not, people will still bonk. So it would be more efficient to educate bonkers on how to have safe sex through condoms rather than to try to stop people from bonking. It is also important to note that the supporters do not encourage indiscriminate sex and promiscuity. The central message of National Condom Week is that the best prevention for HIV/AIDS is still abstinence and being monogamous.

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Invasion of PR students

We at the Orange House, as we fondly refer to our office, aren’t used to many visitors at one time so it was a bit of a departure from business as usual when 36 Public Relations students from the Diploma Program, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Gajah Mada University (UGM) visited us last Tuesday.

It was not the first student visit to Maverick but we were no less enthusiastic because we welcome any opportunity to help people understand PR and sharing our experiences with younger minds. Who knows, we may influence them to make a career decision that could affect the rest of their lives.

The visit started off with Maverick partner Lita Soenardi highlighting Maverick internship opportunities for students. She spoke of the challenges interns would face working in a professional services firm and also the opportunities they would have in learning new things. She also explained to them the rigorous selection process of selecting interns. The students, all coming up to their third year of study that requires them to seek internships in companies, were all ears for this section.

Anyway, next to speak was Associate Hanny who talked about the similarities and differences between PR consultancies and In-house PR. Hanny also explained the advantages and disadvantages of being a practitioner in the two areas. Hanny’s presentation was concluded with what she does best: Marketing PR.

Another associate, Indri, then shared with them her experiences in Corporate Communications as well as Corporate Social Responsibility/Leadership. The session was rounded off by Riri, who’s in charge of our media monitoring department and online media monitoring and PR measurement service called Gauge, provided her insights on the importance of media tracking activities in a PR consultancy.

During the Q & A session, the UGM students seemingly could not get enough answers and kept peppering the Maverick speakers with an endless list of questions. They were most interested in Crisis Management that we had accidentally left out in our talks and peppered all the speakers with a stream of questions, forcing Hanny, Indri and Riri to recount our experiences with crisis-situations for clients, with their names left out when appropriate.

Eventually, the discussion ended up with Mavericks sharing tips on how to get about and around the profession. The students were most curious about day-to-day activities and wanted to know how the theories they had read about in their text books stacked up against reality.

Very interesting questions, especially when most PR text books are written by Westerners about Western situations that have very little to do with reality in Indonesia.

PR Practitioners in Indo: A Sad Case?

An article published yesterday in Bisnis Indonesia stated the urgency for PR practitioners in Indonesia to increase their competencies. As somebody who’s making a living from being a PR hack, this article without doubt caught my attention.

Ex-PR of Pertamina Ridwan Nyak Baik, as quoted in Bisnis, said that in Indonesia “there has got to be a strong effort to increase the competency and professionalism of PR practitioners to counter the attack of foreign workers”.

Fair enough, but please tell me something new. With the increasingly open job markets, practically everybody face similar obstacles.

What I found quite disturbing in the article was when Ridwan quoted a report from the National Profession Certification Body (Badan Nasional Sertifikasi Profesi) which basically was saying that currently there were 1,000 PR practitioners in Indonesia, in which four of them were categorized as experts, 39 possessed mid-level skills, and 957 had no skills at all.

Questions were popping out of the confused tiny little brain of mine:

1. I know that some Indon PR practitioners hold international certifications, but as far as I know (and please correct me if I’m wrong), there is no certification system available for PR practitioners in Indonesia. Where did the numbers in the report come from?

2. How did the report define experts, mid-level practitioners, and zero skills practitioners (why even bother calling someone a practitioner if he/she possesses no skills whatsoever)?

3. When did the national body issue the report? It amazed me how Bisnis Indonesia could bluntly quoted Ridwan without even bother to include the year and title of the report. So much for being a “trusted business reference”…

I have a strong interest in the development of PR practice in Indonesia. And shall the report is accurate, it is definitely a sad case for all PR practitioners in this country. Anybody out there know the answer to my questions? I’d also be interested to hear from you on how PR practitioners could advance themselves.

Nokia Got It Right!

This is how Nokia translates the term of customer satisfaction and shifting it into customer loyalty:

About a week ago, I had this problem with my Nokia N73. The message ‘memory low, delete some data‘ kept blinking on the screen, though I had deleted all data I stored in my phone memory. Based on my past experiences, answers to almost all questions can be found in the net. So I went googling instead, and found out that there were lots of Nokia users in all part of the world are actually having the same problem. Unfortunately, there were no solutions to this problem yet.

Since I needed my phone badly, in despair, I contacted Mr. Hasan Aula, General Manager of Nokia Indonesia, and told him about the problem I was having. I also gave him links to several posts and discussions on the net mentioning this memory-low issue.

The response was immediate.

Pak Agus from Nokia called me up not long after. He apologized for what had happened to my N73 and said that Nokia would pick up my phone the next morning and had it fixed. Pak Agus also told me how thankful he was for having being informed about this problem. He said the links I inserted in my email was very useful.

To add up to that, he was kind enough to ask me whether I have another cell phone to use while mine was being fixed! So, the problem solved, they fixed my phone, and I think I have become a more loyal user of Nokia!

I was impressed with this response. It is important for a company to give immediate response to their customer’s complaints, and handle it professionally. Nokia have shown they’re level as one of the leading cell phone manufacturer in the world by providing this excellent service. And it will be a whole lot better if Nokia could sign up to these Nokia users’ communities in the Net and respond to complaints and questions posted there.

Most of the times, when you get access to ‘higher-level’ officials in a company, it is more certain that you’ll get a faster response. I think it happens in most companies.

The problem now is to make sure that when your customer have complaints, they knew where or to whom they could complain to, and the person who receives their complaints could make immediate decisions and take necessary actions.

Came to think about it, I think companies will perform much better if their ‘higher-level’ officials become the ones who receive complaints—probably by launching a blog? Therefore customers will be able to interact directly with the board of directors, even CEOs!

Since the power is shifting now …

http://www.about-nokia.com/blog/media/1/20060425-nokia-n73.jpg

Will CSR (in Indonesia) loose its spirit?

Investor daily today, published an article on the government plan to issue the regulation on CSR practices.

The source in the article said that only 2% companies in Indonesia apply CSR. This reflected the low awareness of CSR practice among business players and the fact that CSR is not the matter they even consider about.

From my side, CSR is no longer responsibility when the government is involved in regulating it. Agree with Faisal Basri who was quoted in the article, he said, “With the government’s regulation, CSR would then loose its spirit”

Looking at the above small percentage, I believe the more important thing that government should do is a thorough examination on how to boost the number of CSR practitioners (companies) in Indonesia, without creating the sense of ordering people to do so.

The key word is ‘the awareness’, how to raise awareness is not as simply as issuing stiff regulation. Continuous and keen commitment from government to encourage companies could be translated into series of communications program or campaign.

The essence of CSR is the commitment from the companies to create better living in the society by putting your continues effort in it. CSR is no longer taken as the company’s cost but it is the investment for the future of the company itself.

Thus, I personally believe CSR is not the task that people can order you to do.

I can imagine many companies would only practicing CSR just for the sake of fulfilling their obligation to the government, that’s it! No sincere commitment from the companies to bring the betterment for the community they operate in.

If that happens, better use other terms then. How about Corporate Good ‘Responsibilities’?

(image was taken from corbis, with keyword: social responsibility)