 Group head of corporate communications reliance industry limited. I had requested him to talk about using social impact as a PR tool and Mr. Bansal will be giving his point of view as a representative both of RIL and as His very robust career are the kind of anecdotes that he can share over to you Suparna Is somebody going to come and moderate the question answers or what's the plan? if I look Overawed or disheveled It is true that I am I Have never had the opportunity to Speak to so many PR professionals at the top of their game and then Simultaneously claim to deliver an address or something like what Suparna and Anurad Bhattra talked me into so I Also know that some of you here in this room are far more experienced in PR than I have been I have had a very short career in PR It's less than three three and a half years that reliance industries limited Which is known to be a company of great courage and entrepreneurship ability One of the minor examples of that is that I'm standing here in my first PR job With just three and a half years behind me so I Just want to put this in context and should you want to apportion the the blame on someone I have named those two people so you after my talk can always get after them I Think one of the critical advantages of Coming from a cross-functional background Some of it from the print media Within the print media from the financial media where I work for the financial express under the jury chair who Mercifully isn't here. Otherwise, I would be even more tongue-tied because I have reported to him as his resident editor in television and in Hindi television at that in Radio where you have to speak a lot faster than you might in television and as well and in in the in the big bad world of Consultancy which I attempted after some serious illusions after my amp I Found that I was lousy in billing Whatever bills I raise nobody paid So that also helped me understand what I can't do Which is to raise bills? I Was pretty good in showing up on boards Giving gratis advice so I became like the pro bono champion of my life Which of course changed after I on boarded this courageous and entrepreneurial Company rolled into one and I now stand as an intrapreneur So let me tell you a story Ten ten quarters back We were a very shy company. We thought if you got You got the numbers You processed more crude than anyone else on the planet You got GRM's gross refining margins 40 50 60 percent higher than the Singapore average you were good but All of a sudden with the onslaught of a lot of political temperature In a kind of outputting towards RIL We thought that that's not good enough and about 10 or 11 quarters back We started speaking and what did we do may be of some relevance at the back of the hall whichever You know company or consulting or client you represent Because we went cross-functional Here's how when we went for the acquisition of a media Set of set of media channels one of the questions which everybody asked me was whether we will be Showing up on that channel or those clutch of channels regularly and in a way becoming you know a plug point for RIL and I wasn't prepared for that question, but I knew it would be tweeted and spoken about So I just said I promise you ladies the four pretty ladies Read diet ladies Scholastic ladies who run some of the best financial news programs. I dare say on on television That I will never put my top guys on your channel. I will just send you what I send everybody else I couldn't have just said it and then tomorrow morning Yeah, I'm right release a madam. So I go chop the jay. Yeah, I'm so broadcast So some of us, you know got together and we said as a curtain we will the quarterly report of our CFO who is considered the top dog in the finance world in this part of The world at least if not the entire world We'll put him on air Now the option was to put him into different studios and then there is always a fight who is going to be the first one to receive him and then the second one isn't even interested and those sorts of things and Bombay traffic isn't as I discovered having been new to Bombay isn't going to work out at all The other option was to ask everybody to come in and have a lot of outdoor broadcast obi vans Parked outside maker for draw those huge wires and have all of us tripping over it while You know this CFO speaking a slightly Off-period want to can I have a sip of water from there? They removed everything. It's like Gurgaon. I'm in Gurgaon. I Told you I'm nervous So then you know coming back to my CFO story and how that represents to my mind some Cross-functionality some disruption. Hopefully is that we just had him speak after a quarterly earnings X temporary for about 15 minutes now that commentary Obviously, we use traditional PR tools like sending alerts in advance the YouTube link in advance Where one could tap have a certain countdown happening all the regular stuff which you guys do But fundamentally There was a big novelty here Alliance Bolega You know reliance is going to speak CFO is going to speak and of course We have a lot of screens in the communications department Where it was a pleasure. I can just share with you on a personal note. It was terrific to see It now suddenly breaking live into our YouTube feed Followed by Bloomberg Followed by NDTV profit followed by Z business Yes, CNBC Avaz and CNBC as well So, you know, if you have compelling content You don't need to go to different channels. We felt if you are able to create the necessary ecosystem You have something very pity to say all the analysts who were sitting and analyzing reliance would carefully hear what the CFO said in that YouTube cast We weren't preferential to anybody. So we didn't lose any popularity votes and I was happy that some of the journalists from the Channels who had initially ambushed me said yeh kya baat hui? Hamare ha gyo nahi pehle diya and That also is something that we have ensured that we never do that if we send something We send it to everybody at the same time, but what is happening? Therefore The tweets go on the same hashtag There's a summary that is available beforehand and there's a 25 to 30 page press release to back it It's really nearly impossible for journalists to understand 25 and 30 pages of Of a press release in a few seconds and they just pick up some stuff which is their area Now is is there a lesson in some of this? Is there a lesson central to disruption? That is happening in the lives of key stakeholders. Is there a deconstruction we can do of who is our consumer as PR professionals I Think You might want to educate me offline when we meet later, but lessons for us were that You don't need to get into a tutu meh meh match and you can still make a point Amy tutu meh meh is you you I I I don't know the English of tutu meh meh where people kind of Spare You don't need to get into that because this was Simply stated a point of view on the various businesses retail Petcams grm's what sort of crude and you know the larger situation in the world all of it And there were people who are able to see exactly what they wanted out of it in a discoverable mode through YouTube Next quarter We coupled the API because the API has had become smarter with the same camera angle You could also have Facebook and the next quarter with Periscope Integrating to Twitter ultimately so We were assured that at least at a sum of our Friends and people who are really fond of us said this is the first time a large company of any consequences been able to integrate three social media feeds and make its point Unadulterated and that went not just to the six Channels that I named it's gone to 700 news Channels that exist in this country How many of us in PR even have the names and the telephone numbers and the email IDs of some of these channels? But they felt respected They felt there is an equal and level playing field that helped a lot that helped a lot How that panden in a cross-functional? Perhaps even disruptive at least by our standards way was that when the chairman mr. Mukesh Ambani Announced the launch of the geo service and the disruptive free voice free roaming and Finally just pay for data Thing in September of 2016. He agreed to do this parallel plug-in to to what he was about to say at a Auditorium called Birla Matushri in Bombay. I Think if I remember correctly with a moment's exaggeration, you'll permit me 52 outdoor broadcast vans lined up in the narrow street leading up to Birla Matushri But I think the ability of Social media and the platform of the internet was extremely useful and Allowed people who are my key customers, which is essentially the media whether we say public relations a large part of it I confess is still media relations mainstream media relations earned media it helped to create that echo echo chamber Because all these numbers were measurable and of course the channel numbers are Through sampling so you again try and see where you stand and therefore you have a base and then you can see what it can do later now with the kind of Facebook presence we have not much by I Think by way of our ambition, but we have about 2.4 million follows We have a few Other pages like foundation, etc. Reliance Foundation and the sports the Mumbai Indians is of course bigger than all of us put together All of it to my mind leads us to Sharing the social story which superna is keen to talk about the social story Isn't possible until you have developed independent Platforms which are custom custom oriented It helps to get data from some of our media Friends who say that most of us what we intuitively know anyway Ladies and gentlemen is that most of us are getting information we need not from our desktops, but from this this device right so our information has to be therefore Even if it is a corporate announcement if it is some some boast or if it is some video of a simple farmer who's getting a better yield from a Reliance Foundation initiative which you might want to know is the largest single largest philanthropic thing for in the country about I think 700 crore were spent last year and There's a commitment to keep this up way beyond the social Impact or the CSR limits that have been prescribed for this 2% rule. So within that the ability to harmonize and to Share video to bring out people on the the actually cutting edge of the social Conversation By way of case studies by way of what they see and then know it is worth it worthwhile enough to put on the flame of truth You know Twitter handle or on the foundations website or on the hospitals you know Facebook page is is able to talk to each other only when the platforms are are actually growing and Operable and I dare say even customer centric and Why I bring the customer here is that my sense is that the media person today Is quite different than the ones which pros like Deepak here and there's so many of you who's you know Who have been on the discussion table with me in a variety of ways Including Deepak's two press releases on Coca-Cola and so and so forth Yeah, so I would say that the journalist has Significantly adapted to the new rules of the game and we in the PR community If we think of The citizen and the activist we should first start with the people who we know very well and Their needs have changed a lot. Look, let me just illustrate many of us I Wouldn't embarrass by a show of hands because that includes some of reliance's press releases We still use PDF We just send it on PDF. We think that every Journalist has the ability to convert it into a word file, you know The truth is that even if they do Should they should they even bother? You can always send a word version is also attached for your enhanced convenience or whatever you want to say, right? But do we Do we send pictures in files that are Acceptable by the servers of some of these news organizations Even the alerts for the CFO story I started with go to shifts in charge two days in advance every eight hours with an apology that's sorry for the multiple email blasts, but Maybe you wouldn't have noticed in the previous shift and they were there it is the advantage of This at the micro level is that Individual stories of how for instance the Geo my five has helped people You know share their story of what it means to see Bahubali while on the way to Tadoba Tiger Reserve 20 kilometers away away from Chandrapur in nowhere That sort of story will come only when people see that there is a lot of traction that is happening and as for journalists You know the number of Influencers they have is far more than their boss in the media and the PR person They are listening to each other all the time Therefore it may be useful to Understand that if they see a Company's handle following them they feel respected and the amount of Inordinate in fact amount of time and energy we give to who follows us who we follow Who has treated us who has liked our thing is far exceeding the actual outcome of any of this tweeting business But I think that Let's go inside the mind of some of our key stakeholders and in this case the journalist so They are using mobile phone more often than not distracted They are constantly trying to juggle with many other stories than our own and even during the day the reliance Results are there for us. It's like a great big Mahakum of ideas and we think there's no other story But the sad and the factual and the truthful part is that the day is full of stories and that day in particular Is often full of stories So therefore it is always useful to to send the stuff in ways they can use and Create conversations that are far beyond the over-served customers or clients. There is a whole volume of folks who are underserved so Management 101 PR 101 all the things we've learned all these years in different sectors. We've been I think there is a Truth and a slightly bitter one in what was said about war is too important to be left to the generals I Would suspect you can fill in the blanks and change What is too important to be left to people of which profession? Thank you Thank you Thank you, Mr. Bansal will Request you to please stay back is We'll throw the open the floor open for some questions in case there are requested to please raise your hand and we'll Well, he's right here So you mentioned Can you name yourself and Please imagine there is I'm blinded Yeah Yeah, I can hear you sir Thank you very much Listening to a conglomerate is Very edifying it's much easier to work for a company however large it is if it's got a co-competent or A or a very specific industry that it's working in I work long years in Nestle My name is Bohidar and I set up the communication department in Nestle But then I've been following reliance For many years that I was in the times before the Nestle What I like best about the whole idea of how to actually address these large number of segments of people Once you're a conglomerate as large as you are But I'll bring the question down to a small very specific one Would you give us a little bit about your observer research initiative that you have on Rouse Avenue? I think it's funded by reliance and Second why would you not change your picture to color? Because I mean you sound like a reasonably good communication man with a lot of color. Why such a stern black and white picture. Thank you So the second question is the serious one Yeah, you could take that offline if you want No, it's okay We are big boys. You can take it but suffice to say that That's the first picture Which came to my mind and my ear was kind enough to send it and it was too late after that But I assure you I will get myself Refotographed and I also assure you it wasn't taken ten years back as is the case with most people So as regards the first question Well to my mind, it's always very challenging to be in very many Different businesses, but suffice to say and the chairman has gone on record to explain it. There is a There's a materials business, which is essentially Pet cams and hydrocarbons and all the rest of it and then coal bed methane Etc. And then there's a customer-facing business consumer facing and there comes of course a lot of Question marks until last year whether reliance is up to it to actually face Consumers by the millions and today we have I think more than hundred and fifty million Customers with about with with about three and a half thousand Retail stores and so and so forth and the data being consumed by on geo alone is about 70 percent of what is consumed in the entire landmass of India and larger than the entire cumulative Data in in the in the in the United States So there is an inversion that's happened Millions of Indians have reposed their trust in data and 2300 megahertz and voice over Long-term evolution So in a word, I think it's several companies coexisting But what I tried and attempted is the the thread that can weave some of this together and ultimately lead us to the social Social part of the communication. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Mr. Bansal And of course you made the point that media relations is primarily what it is So I guess our RIL is on the right move invested in a lot of media I Yes, so obviously it's super naji. You were not listening when I said that we send our statements to our media friends Without any maybe a net neutral in that sense. I did I did Thank you so much a TEDx speaker Of course a very long journey through the media itself and now the group comes head for Reliance industry limited may I request miss Archana Pandit to please come up on stage and offer it Archana Jan, what am I saying? Archana Jan to please come up on stage and offer a token of appreciation on behalf of The exchange for media group. Yes with a low ground of the past, please and go ahead tweet using hashtag IPR CCA And immediately We're moving into our next session