The Ministry of Tourism should be complimented for tying up with Google+ to promote the Incredible India campaign. The campaign that was launched on September 4 is the first great example of digital PR by an Indian ministry.
The campaign is already delivering results. Hundreds of pictures are being posted by Indians and international tourists every day; the best are published on a landing page curated by Google+.
This should give Indian PR managers a reason to start experimenting with digital PR. Instead of trotting out lame excuses they should look at the following four reasons to switch to digital PR:
Reason One
The latest ComScore study shows that India has the world’s third largest Internet population; only China and the US are ahead of it. More important, this population is growing. In the last one year, India’s internet population jumped by 31%. The PR professionals must take note of this jump; they can’t continue to hide behind the lame excuse that India still does not have the numbers for digital PR.
Reason Two
Digital PR provides the PR professionals an interactive way of building audiences, and loyalty. A great example of this was seen during the Uttarakhand disaster. Once again, it was the technology giant Google that showed the way by putting up an interactive map where people could pin information about missing relatives; where addresses of relief camps could be found; where information about blocked routes could be published. The same could have been done by Indian Maharatna companies such as Indian Oil or HP that have hundreds of petrol pumps in the state. They could have published similar interactive maps, and combined this with support from their physical outlets on the ground.
Reason Three
It is time to trash the argument that digital PR has no meaning in India because a large section of the Indian population is illiterate. The PR professionals must realise that the same is true of newspapers. They too can’t be read by a large number of Indians. There are hundreds of Indian villages where there is no electricity. The result is that people living in these villages can’t watch TV. If this is the ground reality, then why are PR professionals insisting on following the traditional media only? It’s time they started looking at digital PR too.
Reason four
The TV channels or the newspapers are very selective of what they broadcast or publish. They do not allow blatant promotion of organisations. The PR professionals are therefore not in a position to influence the way traditional media reports events. In contrast, if they switch to digital PR they will be able to control information that they want to promote. This will give them much higher dividends.
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