24 April 2010
PR tip 3: Get a global strategy
The key one that exercises me is that I can live in place A and travel to place B for the purpose of writing for publication in place C. Yet all to often this simple fact seems to cause many of you monumental difficulties.
The only question you should be asking, wherever you're based, is whether publication place C is an important target market for your destination. If it is, and if you find that the medium through which I'll be reaching that market is a persuasive one, then you should presumably be doing your best to assist me within whatever limits your budget permits.
But instead all too often your response is that you're not interested because you (or your superiors) only measure success in term of the number of column centimetres published in place A, where you and I are based. So in concentrating solely on your home territory you often deprive your destination of a prime opportunity in a key market. This is a stupid accounting artefact, entirely unhelpful to the development of tourism to your destination, and thoroughly dunderheaded.
Unfortunately rates in place A are so pathetic that writing travel features for publication ought to be advertised on television along with all the other miracle diet plans. Nevertheless I have to try and place stories in media in place A just in order to be able to get on a plane and write for media in place C where they actually have money, and so I can put food on the table, even if only snacks. But sometimes that's not possible.
So, you overall strategists at Place B: if you want to develop more coverage, link your budgets to target markets, and not to points of departure. Give credit to your local representatives when they generate coverage for you in ANY of your target markets, not solely the one in which they are based.
A few of you are already doing this; a few others call colleagues in other countries of publication and agree to share costs. But really it's time to wake up and instead of simply fretting about the value of social media or other on-line comment, to realise that thanks largely to the Internet someone like me who has the ear of editors in Europe, Asia, and North America still lives on only one of those continents, and needs to leave from home wherever he's going and regardless of where he's being published.
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