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What are soft skills?

Soft skills or social skills (also called non-technical skills) are those personal values and interpersonal skills that determine a person's ability to work well with others in a group. These skills differ from 'hard skills', which are easy to observe, quantify and measure, unlike 'soft skills'.  Soft skills include effective communication, leadership and teamwork skills; demonstrating problem solving abilities, initiative, and motivation skills; displaying honesty and strong work ethics.  Soft skills play a vital role in academic and professional success; they help us excel in the workplace and their importance cannot be denied in the emerging information or knowledge society. Soft skills are needed to work in a collaborative manner with one's colleagues.  Types of Soft Skills There are various components that comprise soft skills. Some are inborn such as confidence, friendliness and some has sociable nature, while others are skills that can be taught or im
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Marketing Communications: five finger story

Marketing Communications is about establishing an image for company and products. It is to communicate benefits from products, create awareness about new products, keep existing products in focus and generate market excitement.  The company's marketing communication tactics alerts customers to sale, justifies prices with benefits, answer consumer's questions, provide after sale reinforcement and keep organisation in focus.  All marketing communication tools should work in unity. It should be a seamless communication process sans hitches.  Advertising: It is a paid form of non-personal communication about an organisation, product, service or idea by an identified sponsor.  Paid: purchase of space or time for advertising messages.   Non-personal: uses mass media to transmit messages to large target groups with little opportunity for immediate feedback. (in case of traditional form on mass media: newspapers, magazines, TV, Radio)

Tips to develop soft skills

For running any kind of business, one need to hone his/her presentation skills. As the famous saying goes "You never get a second chance to create first good impression". Following are the points to be kept in mind: Consider yourself as brand. Every brand needs promotion Maintain an eye-contact while talking to someone. Develop positive attitude towards life Don't walk slow. Learn to walk briskly. People who walk briskly project that they are going with the purpose Don't put you hands in pockets while talking to someone. Don't stand with hands folded Sense of purpose should get projected when talking/meeting with people/client   Be professional in your dressing Project a promise of prosperity when making a presentation. Promise should be made visible to the client Language - impactful words should be used How you deliver and what you deliver are most important things  Select right words to communicate. For that you need to have a good vocabulary Alway

Corporate Image

Managing corporate image is a serious business. It is to make public percieve a company, as the managment want. Some business executives think that corporate image as imagery creation of some smart snoozy word-smiths, whose business is to concoct concepts for ultimate aim to generate advertising revenue.  Good corporate image is considered, by enlightened businessmen, as focussed communication to clear cobwebs in people's mind about the company. Company tries to clear the mis-information and mis-conceptions through clear and crisp communication.  Heads and hearts of people have to be cleared and made focused towards the company. The corporate communication department of any organisation need to work on a central thematic idea to project a good positive image of the company. This work is also carried out by PR department of any orgnanization. Tata was the first company in India to realise the importance of good image developemnt and thus opened an in-house PR department in 1945. 

Image Managment : What is image?

Public Relations Officer is a custodian of company's image. It is the duty of the PRO to enhance the image of the company. A business is like a public institution and is under constant public scrutiny. Every company, even the smaller ones, are being watched by intrested publics.  Company's reputation should be credible and strong. People watch how comapny conduct itself and its business. Over the last decades, public curiosity in business has grown many folds and this wil increase in coming times. Image starts with the smallest thing. Public talk and compare the companies.  Concerned about the public perception, many companies find it difficult to determine, as to what the name of the organization stands for. Brand image attracts the consumer more than what actuall the company is. Definitions:   1. Image is the sum of experience that someone has with the institution.                                                                                                   - Henr

Emergence of new media

The wider kinds of social and cultural change were being identified and described and had been, to varying degrees, from the 1960s onwards. The following are indicative of wider kinds of social, economic and cultural change with which new media are associated: (i)                  A shift from modernity to post modernity - a contested, but widely subscribed attempt to characterize deep and structural changes in societies from the 1960s onwards, with correlative cultural changes. In terms of their aesthetics and economies new media are usually seen as a key marker of such changes. (ii)                Intensifying process of globalization -   a dissolving of national states and                   boundaries in terms of trade, corporate organizations, cultures and customs,                   identities and beliefs.    (iii)              A replacement, in the West, of an industrial age of manufacturing by a ‘post-industrial’ information age – a shift in employment, skill, investment an

What is not Public Relations...

Sometimes Public Relations is taken wrongly by few organisations/companies. Many times we have seen that organisations use this tool for misguiding people. Public Relations is not:    A barrier between truth and publics Propaganda to impose a view point regardless of truth, ethics and public good. Free publicity to achieve sale – though PR helps in sales and marketing effort. Gimmicks for quick acceptance of idea, but fail to bring about desired change in understanding and credibility. Unpaid form of Advertising Mere press relations, though press work is important for most PR programs.    7. Moulding public opinion    8. Hiding the truth and betaing around the bush.