Ever since Hum Network started organising mega events like Hum Awards, we covered them all and brought extensive coverage for our fans LIVE from the event place. Be it the 1st and 2nd Hum TV Awards in Karachi, where we also LIVE BLOGGED the whole show or 3rd hum awards, which were held in Dubai and we reached there on our own expense to bring the latest updates for our fans. We have been providing live updates and covering all star studded events since long but it seems we might NOT be able to cover first ever Hum Style Awards this time, as the network has outsourced its public relations to an outdated PR firm (Take II), which fails to acknowledge Online Media Publishers.
So when the whole media world had received their invites and posted on their social media accounts, we were left wondering what exactly went wrong and why didn’t we get a single invite to cover Hum Style Awards?
Upon reaching to Ms. Hina of TakeII PR, we were told that our name is NOT in the list and therefore NO INVITE would be extended to Pakium this time. Now this was quite shocking for us as we have been working along and covering Hum Network’s events since long and didn’t expect to see this coming. It is interesting to note here that Hum TV has an in-house PR department which has been dealing things for more than 7 years, but now some geniuses at the helm of Hum Network have decided to outsource events PR to other firms, which has resulted into a mess we are currently dealing with.
Anyways, believing it to be some sort of miscommunication we tried to reach the head of Take II PR, Ms. Tehmina Khaled. When we asked why can’t we have an invite to cover Hum Style Awards? She started cross questioning us that if we own OR are associated with some “Print Media” as they are only dealing and inviting Print Media.
“Do you have any print newspaper? Print Mag? Where you write or contribute” questioned Khaled. To that our reply was, “No, we don’t have. But we saw many bloggers invited by your agency who neither have any influence on print nor on digital media.”
While trying to explain that we are a digital media publication which has strong following of 1.3 million fans on facebook only and half a million unique visitors/month on web, we were diverted to another agency called MindMap Communications.
“Please talk to MindMap people as they are managing digital media for the event” said Take Two PR.
Now there could be a chance that all this time we were knocking at the wrong door. So we talked to Moiz Kazmi of MindMap Communications to have his views on the issue and he was clear in his stance, “we are only inviting twitter influencers who will help us trending the hashtags on Twitter. You are a media publication so therefore you should be invited by the PR Firm. We had only a limited number of invites which have been dispatched already to everyone”
Now back to ground Zero, we are unsure why the PR agency is restraining us to cover Hum Style Awards. Now either the old PR personnel/firms were wrong who not just invited us but also reminded by call and facilitated us at the venue. Or the problem lies with this new PR firm who is just not ready to acknowledge online media publishers. Isn’t it their job to facilitate all sort of media publications? Don’t they get paid for it? Why do we need to introduce ourselves again and again when we have worked with the network since it started operations.
With several things going wrong at PR and Interactive departments of Hum Network, We are hoping that the management will also take notice of this issue and double check the credentials of “Print Media journalists” and digital influence of “bloggers” invited by Take II PR.
