How do you organise an event that everybody will talk about, what's the most difficult part of working on the image of the company's CEO, how a seemingly innocent post on the company social media page can ruin the company's reputation, why is it that national media journalist send some press releases directly to the garbage can, what is the future of digital communications in the production sector and last but not least how do you get results in PR: these are just some of the issues that were discussed during the two-day conference on the development of the aluminium industry through modern PR and digital tools organised in Moscow by the Aluminium Association.
The forum brought together representatives of about 20 member companies of the Association. These included Alfa-metal, Arconic Russia, NP APRAL, ALTEK, Akron Holding, Moskabelmet, Nordfox, Kamkabel, Segal, AMR, Metall Profil, TATPROF, Iplana and others.
Presenters included top managers of leading Russian companies, experts in corporate communications from UC RUSAL, Rosnano, Bank Otkritie Financial Corporation. Relevant experience and practical advice were shared by the heads of the MediaLine communications group, the AERO e-commerce agency, Web Generation Group, the Matmatch portal (Germany) and the SidorinLab agency. SCAN Interfax made a presentation to help those present understand how aluminium industry companies are represented in the media space today. Meanwhile, speeches by representatives of leading national media (TASS) and bloggers allowed the PR experts to get an outside assessment of the work they are doing.
A roundtable on the development of communications inside the aluminium industry was organised with the expressed purpose of allowing aluminium industry PR professionals to voice their opinion and get feedback from colleagues. The roundtable also sought to come up with proposals for how to promote the industry in 2020.
It should be noted that the forum was very much a historic event not only in terms of who turned up and spoke at it. It was also the first event in the now almost four-year history of the Aluminium Association to have been almost exclusively devoted to public relations and marketing. In the end, all the participants agreed that this is a good format that there is a lot of demand for and that it needs to be developed and evolved. After all, as was said during one of the presentations at the conference: Communication is our strength!