If you can’t analyse your audience, don’t talk to them

One of the most gullible species in the world is a species called Nairobians. They oscillate between ten degrees of praises and seventy degrees of trashing any other species with which they may have had an altercation.

Just the other day, the two Jubilee contestants  for the gubernatorial and senatorial seats Waititu and Sonko respectively, were seen as the worst mistake that The National Alliance (TNA) was about to make in the upcoming general elections.

But, wait!! The two candidates are currently flying high after performing extremely well against their elitist competitors on NTV and Citizen TV.

While many will fault the middle class for being gullible, let me be quick to point out that the two candidates have mastered an art of communication that many communication experts always ignore.

Sonko and Waititu have done their research well and thus they understand their target audience.

Understanding one's audience is one of the most important elements of effective communication. Audience analysis can help you gain valuable insight about your listeners, which helps you to choose and develop a relevant, meaningful topic. It also helps you to create a communication strategy that is tailored effectively to your audience.

Your communiqué should be filled with the right tone, remember the helmet joke that CORD’s Nairobi gubernatorial aspirant Evans Kidero hurled at Waititu? The tone used to deliver that joke resulted to an evening that CORD supporters could not fathom.  Kidero had the right content but his style of delivery was wanting. If this was a media one-on-one interview Kidero would have beaten Waititu hands down.

When Waititu faced Kidero and told him that one of his intentions when he becomes the governor was to protect slum dwellers from land grabbers, I nearly flipped channels ... but Waititu was literally ‘touching the hearts’ of over 70% of Nairobi County. While Kidero was clearly enumerating his agenda for Nairobi County citing developed cities around the world he was essentially just communicating with 30 % of the county’s population.

There are three main areas to consider when analyzing your audience: demographics, dispositions and knowledge of the topic. For each of these areas, there are a set of questions you need to ask yourself so as to stimulate you to think about your audience. The age and socio- economic status of your audience will always affect your listeners' attitudes, expectations and opinions about you and your political agenda.

A PR Perspective To Managing Party Nominations Crisis

We all woke up hopeful that the nominations would go down well, but barely a few hours into the exercise, disgruntled candidates who defected from their parties at the eleventh hour are now accusing their erstwhile parties for bias. Notably, ODM and TNA have been singled out as parties that have shown open preference for certain candidates.

While it is common knowledge that bad publicity is likely to come out of this nominations exercise considering the high stakes involved, the parties have an uphill task to either spin this bad publicity to their advantage or fight the bad publicity till it dies.

As a self proclaimed positive opinion shaper in the society, I beg to help the different political secretariats go through this turmoil with ease. 

It is evident that the parties had no crisis communications plan in place. But it is not too late to prepare one urgently while liaising with the key stakeholders of the parties, A first step would be to quickly chose a party spokesperson  that is capable of staying calm before the preying eyes of the many journalists criss-crossing the country. The spokesperson will be the only conveyer of news to the media. He should be able to handle all the pressure on behalf of the party. For example, ODM should quickly alert Prof Anyang Nyong’o and Ababu Namwamba that today is not their day, while TNA should quickly advise Sonko to keep quiet and let the respective spokespersons do their work.

Social media gave us the freedom to question and report anytime, so the spokesperson must also play into this space by ensuring that the public is informed at all times. While in 2007 we had to wait for our radio stations in the evening, right now I only need to prowl social media portals and I will have all the news countrywide. Speaking out gives you the ability to try and put out the fire surrounding your party.  Saying the wrong thing could seal your party’s fate though, so proceed with caution.  

Meanwhile, ask one of the many journalists that you poached from the media to quickly prepare a well thought-out press statement on hourly basis that will help in giving out your side of the story. You either do this or the reporters will file their stories without necessarily getting an explanation from key members of the party. I advise that you take the initiative to get them the information they are looking for before they cook up their own stories.

Finally use the pretty website, twitter & facebook page to post explanations of what is happening. This will allow you to get your side of the story across to the public directly thus providing a forum for them to vent and help calm down the situation.

YoungPRSpeak All said and done, while you endure the bad publicity, try and find some positive through the entire negative.  Perhaps there's a good news angle waiting to be uncovered.  

My PR Resolutions for 2013

So 2013 is here. Apart from celebrating our jubilee since independence, we will also be going to the polls in March in which many PR professionals will be involved at different levels.

That aside the normal PR hustles resumes this week with many clients sending in ‘urgent’ briefs expecting ‘award winning campaigns’ from their diligent agencies.

As we start the year, below are a few resolutions to keep you going;

Be a better writer- The news desks will be filled with enough political releases and statements; the business pages and slots will shrink to pave way for more political pages. The best favour you can do yourself or your client is to write succinctly so as to compete for the rare business pages.

Think Regional- Now that even the ever rigid political elite have recognized that the country can be governed at county level. As a PR professional you have to start thinking beyond Nairobi with your communiqué .Regional radio stations might be the key to unlocking the potential of that client that had been stuck with Capital FM ever since.

Embrace online media-If you thought facebook and twitter is for idlers then you may have to ask mobile service providers in Kenya. The online community has been driving conversations about brands; they have picked articles from main stream media and broken it down for the vast online community. It is high time you thought about those online personalities that command a bigger following than the readership of many publications in Kenya.

Be ROI sensitive- Forget about those strategies that you worked on for this year. You have to show the Return on Investment this year. Being an electioneering year, many clients will be mean on their budgets. So we have to show value for the little budget that will be squeezed out of their pockets. Do not call for a luncheon when you can host a press conference at the client’s office. For the clients do not insist for a mega launch for a promotion that can do with a few pictorial and a press release.

Stop being reactive- Just because your competitor has launched a new product should not be a good reason for you to launch that product. Unless you have a bigger budget to ensure that your campaign eclipses the one launched by competition, stick to your strategy and live up to it.

Goals are not resolutions -Last but not least, I resolve to call mine goals and not resolutions so that I can work towards achieving them instead of sticking to resolutions which are always slippery and that’s why 95% of our resolutions will be null and void by the time we vote in our new president.