Showing posts with label travel PR. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel PR. Show all posts
05 June 2012
PR tip 4
Several of you, to my knowledge, are making a classic mistake. You're hiring a big-name agency because it's a big name, and perhaps you think both that prestige will rebound upon you and that you'll be getting top-end advice and assistance from a company with a global track record of success.
But you should begin by asking yourself for whom these agencies have been successful. And whether the clients for whom they've been successful are relevantly similar to yourselves.
The answer will usually be 'no', and the major dissimilarity between yourselves and the clients that so impress you, and amongst whose powerful and illustrious names you think it would be good to be listed, is that they have lots of money, and you don't. So long as they remain amongst the agency's clients, these big-spending corporate giants are going to claim most of its attention. You're a minnow in a pool of sharks, and it's the junior staff for you.
What you want to be is the largest goldfish in a far smaller pool. You don't want a global name with high overheads and high hourly rates. You're getting a great deal less for your money than if you hire a small operation for whom you are the largest client, and for whom you are providing a significant proportion of the its total revenue: preferably the majority of it. You'll pay less for its services. You'll have the full attention of the company's principals, and they will do everything they possibly can to keep you happy.
They'll keep me happy, too. I'll get prompt and helpful replies to email queries. I'll get to talk with people who have actually taken the time to get to know your destination and its tourism products well. They'll help me develop story ideas, and what they don't know, they'll research.
With the big boys I'm often lucky if I get a reply within a week. Sometimes I'm lucky if I get one at all. You might have thought that replying to journalists' queries, especially on such innocuous and non-controversial subjects as the communication of positive messages about a holiday destination, would have had absolute priority. If it does, I'd love to know what comes second.
There's one destination I've been to on several occasions, originally represented in my part of the world by a one-person company who could not conceivably have been more efficient and helpful. Once she'd thoroughly sounded out my bona fides, determined I wrote for outlets she wanted to reach on that destination's behalf, she researched every story idea I had and filled it out with worked examples, suggested several stories to me related to angles the destination wanted to push, but was responsive to what I thought I could run and what didn't interest me.
After a few years of successful cooperation, the country decided to take things in-house, and sent out a civil servant instead, who quite possibly had far too much on her plate in terms of dealing with the industry as a whole, but certainly had no time for the press, and was completely disorganised. Getting things arranged became something of a struggle.
But matters became worse still when after a while it was decided to hire a PR agency again, but a very big-name one.
The person I deal with there cannot systematically read an email and reply to the questions it contains. She seems to think that I have an hour to spend chatting on the phone on a 'get to know you' basis—she wants to know what television shows I like, and so on. I neither know nor care about such matters, and all I want to talk about is business, not make friends. I'm not short of friends: I am short of time.
She is profoundly ignorant about the destination, not even knowing in which parts of the country major cities lie. She cannot answer any question about the destination without having to go and ask someone else first. She has no story ideas to offer, and does not pay attention to what sorts of stories I say I'm looking for, nor to where I say I might want to go. On my last trip the itinerary came in so late there was little time to do anything about it, and it contained several profoundly irritating made-for-tourists day trips of precisely the kind I don't usually cover. Luckily there was much other good material because this is a fine destination full of colour and interest. But what I found of that was more in spite of the agency's assistance than because of it. I couldn't see that it added any value at all. Indeed it bordered on being a hindrance.
Unfortunately in recent years my experiences with three of the big name companies tell me it is very often like that with them. The value all goes the other way, with the agency feeling that having the travel PR/destination marketing accounts of sovereign nations looks good on the portfolio when they're chasing the accounts of the Motorolas, Microsofts, and McVitie's of this world who have spending power orders of magnitude greater than most government tourism bureaux.
Often, when I arrive, you'll sit down with me for a general chat and in passing ask if I got everything I wanted from your representative back home. I'd love to tell you the truth, but the fact is I cannot. Suppose I quote chapter and verse of lacklustre, embarrassingly ill-informed responses, and cocked-up and aborted arrangements, and suppose you then take this to a higher level and sit down for discussions with the agency on my version of its shortcomings.
Do you think it will take that well? Or do you think that perhaps instead I'll be blocked from all future trips and that word will be put around the industry that I'm difficult and unproductive (really nothing's further from the truth), so that instead of fending off invitations I'll have to go begging for them? Some PR companies that make a complete hash of things have no scruples about stabbing journalists to save their accounts.
So instead, without naming names, let me ask you to re-assess your strategy. Never mind impressing the tourism minister with a glittery name, think instead of value for money. Talk to the journalists who arrive and ask them in complete confidence to tell you frankly of their experiences. To be sure not all the junior members of the big name companies are entirely lacking in gumption, and some of the journalists certainly are lacking in that commodity themselves (there's no point in asking bloggers anything) so the results may vary, although the big fish in a small pool argument still applies. Become the most important client at an agency that will care desperately about keeping you, and at which the people you deal with are the same people who deal with me.
I think we'll both benefit.
23 May 2012
Blogging for freebies
Since the last posting I've been in Japan, Hong Kong, China, and the USA twice each; and in Australia, Macau, the UK, Poland, France, and The Maldives. The lack of even a single word on any of these trips is an indication that I prefer to write for a living, and with travel, administration, not to mention family responsibilities there's little time to waste on financially unproductive activities.
Apparently, however, there's a whole world out there of people who blog in order to be noticed, and whose principal activity when not blogging is doing anything that will drive traffic to their blogs; notably tweeting. In many cases the purpose of the blog is to attract sufficient attention so as to bring free gifts and some advertising revenue. Many of them (I find from looking at the links given in various tweets) are absolutely appalling: unpublishable in any other form. But if enough traffic is generated, from the point of view of destinations, outfitters, and properties hoping for increased sales, it's a case of 'never mind the quality, feel the width.'
Now one website is offering a service which claims to provide a measure of influence, and with coverage in Wire and elsewhere its name is about to join Twitter, Google, Facebook, as part of everyday speech, or so it seems to think. If the boosters are to be believed our Klout score (www.klout.com) is already being taken into account by employers and by those looking to get persuasive coverage on-line for their products and services: get high enough Klout and couriers will be arriving at your front door laden with desirable kit for you to write about.
However, we're entering a world in which influence is only measured by interaction with others, and only on-line, essentially through Twitter, Facebook, and Linked In. It's about being mentioned in other's tweets, about being re-tweeted, and about getting responses to posts on other social media.
I joined Twitter early, and left it again almost straight away. It is probably already obvious from looking at this blog that 140 characters is not my preferred medium of expression, and I'm not interested in communicating the trivia of my day. I've discovered, though, that a significant number of my friends and colleagues do most of their communicating via Twitter. Some are now required by their employers to keep the profile of their organisations up by constantly tweeting together with links to the organisation's site.
But just as so much blogging is about discussing what others have written, so most tweeting is about drawing attention to such comment or its subject, and re-tweeting links posted by others. A small amount of original content mostly goes round in circles with very little added value. In the Klout world, however, the persuasiveness of the content has nothing to do with its inherent value. Well-informed and well-expressed criticism has less value than vapid gossip if it is re-tweeted fewer times.
I find this world picture one of fascinating horror: a little like being unable to look away from a car crash. The Klout score above which the couriers start ringing the doorbell is 50, we're told. The average Klout score is 20, but every successive increase in value becomes harder to obtain. Given that the average person in the world isn't even on-line, I was surprised to find I had an initial score of 12, well below the average. This was despite having published several articles across North America this year, as well as in the Asia edition of the Wall Street Journal, reaching audiences of millions and beyond the wildest dreams of more than a handful of bloggers. But off-line influence apparently doesn't matter, even when the articles also appear on-line. And there's apparently no account taken of the relative persuasiveness of items appearing under the auspices of organisations with large, long-standing reputations in the real world, compared to items under the banner of Joe Bloggs' Blog.
This may be the world wished for, and the world predicted to come to pass, but it isn't here yet, and it will be a worse world if it ever arrives. However, and playing the game by its own rules, I re-joined Twitter, and within two days my Klout score had rocketed to 42.
Life isn't really like this, but since I heard a story from a colleague that he'd been turned down for a press trip because he didn't blog, I've been asking various PR people I've come across (rather a lot, unsurprisingly) about the emphasis they place on bloggers versus those being published in print media, and I've yet to find anyone who puts any weight at all on blogs.
Last year I visited Scottsdale for the third time, and about two weeks ago two resulting stories happened to appear in Canadian media at the same time. As the people at Scottsdale are always well-organised and helpful (and likeable), and as I'd been thinking that they'd gone a long time without seeing a return on their investment (not that any is ever guaranteed) I took the time to send a note with links to the two stories.
I received a delighted reply. I then received an equally delighted email from one property mentioned in one story. I received another from a property that got a passing mention in the second story, rather disproportionately small given the amount of effort it had put in, I felt (but that's just how it goes sometimes). Finally today I received a letter personally signed by Managing Director of one of the properties. I imagine this was written for him by the PR person, but nonetheless the effort had been made.
I'll perhaps discuss in another post why all this is unnecessary but the point is that these people are in no doubt where clout's important. And it's with four million newspaper readers across Canada. The on-line presence is just a bonus.
06 June 2009
'Don't like Jamaica...'
'...I love her.'
Partway through my Jamaican visit this 1970s 10cc tune came back to me, but my Jamaica Tourism Board minder had never heard of it, and even suggested (teasingly) that she thought I was making it up. But this is the 21st century, the small but comfortable hotel I was in (Sunset Resort, on Treasure Beach) had broadband, and by the next morning I'd downloaded a copy of the song, transferred it to my iPod, and gave it to her to listen to over breakfast.
She wasn't impressed, and indeed I hadn't remembered that the whole thing is slightly mocking.
I'm not particularly keen on these trips that introduce me to a country I've never visited before (and in this case a region previously unknown to me). It doesn't seem reasonable that after a week I'm going to come back with something intelligent to say. But of course this is wrongly conceived, since intelligence is about the last thing most (thankfully not all) editors and readers (ditto) want from their travel sections. But there are times when such trips become necessary either to assist the bank account or because editorial interest is turning in a particular direction and stories on a particular region is all that they want.
The whole thing was very poorly handled by Jamaica's New York-based agency, with long lacunae between email replies, a complete failure either to produce story ideas or promote Jamaica in any way despite being invited several times to do so, and final agreement on a trip only reached a week before it was taken, and long after one deadline had gone by.
I saw a draft itinerary only five days before departure, and was given merely 1.5 hours to comment (!) before the USA shut down for the long holiday weekend. It was only then that I discovered that my piece on driving round lesser-known corners of Jamaica was going to amount to no more than being driven around Jamaica with the permanent company of a minder. Had I been aware of this earlier I might well not have taken the trip.
But it's just as well I did, because no sooner had I arrived then things actually clicked into action. My guide, the amiable Claudia, was not of the 'minder' kind, was not in denial about Jamaica's reputation, and indeed would have been hard put to deny some of its problems since only a few minutes after leaving the airport when we stopped so I could use a bank machine, someone immediately offered me some dope. She was justifiably horrified, not that I was in the slightest bit bothered about it, and drove the man away. This was, however, the only time anything of this kind happened to me in a week.
It's always tricky when you have to have someone with an agenda at your elbow for a week, although some countries' tourism boards, and apparently Jamaica's is one, will only operate in this way. But Claudia's agenda was principally to make sure I got the stories I wanted, and it rapidly became clear that very little of my requests had been transmitted to Jamaica at all. As a result within two days we'd abandoned the existing skeletal itinerary and Claudia was spending large parts of the day on the phone to various people rearranging and reconfirming in general thoroughly sorting things out. If, en route from A to B, I spotted a turn-off to something that looked interesting, there would follow a rapid discussion about it, and an immediate change of plan if that's what I wanted. I very quickly forgot to be peeved that I wasn't driving myself and musing privately into my dictaphone. In terms of flexibility I might just as well have been driving, and while loneliness can sometimes be a problem on these trips, Claudia was very good company.
As I saw in the second half of the trip, the way most visitors treat Jamaica it might as well be the Costa del Sol, or parts of the Mexican coastline. They fly in, are collected from the airport and taken to an all-inclusive resort where they frolic on a palm-fringed beach, eat three largely foreign meals a day and drink all they want. The only Jamaicans they speak to are those working in the resort. Some take brief tours to what are inevitably the most self-consciously made-for-tourists sights on the island (although some of these are well-done). This is my idea of hell, and I simply cannot see the point (whether in Spain, Mexico, Jamaica, or anywhere else), but of course some people just want a one- or two-week break with reliable sun, sand, sea and sometimes something else beginning with 's'.
Fine, and in terms of travel writing there's nothing easier than spending three nights in each of, say, three resorts, do little more than lying around on the same all-inclusive package for a story that practically writes itself. But it's not for me.
Instead I used the excellent Sunset Resort on the south coast's Treasure Beach as a base from which to visit assorted better- and lesser-known sites in the surrounding hills, whose originally Idaho now gone-native owner volunteered to take me off in various directions, and when I came back one day feeling slack, bullied me into taking a half-hour boat ride out to a small bar on stilts. I was very glad he did, as both the trip out on a high-speed fishing boat, and the early evening spent looking down to rays and up to the sunset was a highlight.
Other high points included various roadside food stops, for jerk chicken, jerk fish, and goat curry; a day spent watching a local limited-overs cricket match (with a lively crowd of about forty), and Greenwood Great House, which I'm hoping may trigger a return to Jamaica for further work. Having seen two of the surviving great houses I'd certainly like to do something on them.
Due to someone's inability to notice that May has 31 days, it was discovered (including by me) partway through the trip, that there was a day with nothing scheduled. I was at the Hilton-run Rose Hall Resort and Spa and so ended up with a day of doing precisely what most other visitors to Jamaica do: absolutely nothing.
I rediscovered that I am now absolutely incapable of this. I put my trunks on, went and got towel, headed down to a less popular end of the beach, went for a three-minute swim, sat under a palm, and in under 15-minutes all-in was back in my room, sorting out some of my notes, doing admin email, etc. The hotel room was large, well-furnished, solid and pleasant, and lacked the self-consciously tropical motifs of others I saw (Jakes, Negril Escape). The tropics were easily visible from the balcony: white sand, turquoise water, and all
It seems to me that you can't lose with Jamaica. If it's beach time you want, there are plenty of beaches to choose from. If you want culture and history there's plenty of that, too. Possibly the ideal combination is a beach resort used as a base from which to reach the rum factories (e.g. Appleton), river trips, waterfalls, great houses, local seafood restaurants (esp. Little Ochie), small non-touristy towns with no pestering vendors, and local nightlife.
One of the most likable aspects of the country was being able, despite having a dramatically contrasting skin tone, simply to blend into the crowd, something that despite the relative lack of contrast in China, is practically impossible to achieve there. A more easygoing people more interested in simply exchanging views and making you feel comfortable you couldn't hope to meet.
Ah well. Enough rambling. I've a deadline, as usual.
To return to the title of this entry, although I did like Jamaica it really wouldn't matter if I didn't. That's not the point of this kind of travel, which is to come home with the material needed for the stories in question. Fortunately, I did that, too.
22 May 2009
What is 'real travel'?
> I'm glad your press trip went well, but I'm still not persuaded to venture on one myself, I'm afraid. I just can't see how they come close to anything like real travel.
This rather begs the question, 'What is "real travel"?' It also assumes that whatever 'real travel' may be, that's the kind of travel I'm trying to have, which might turn out to be precisely the kind of confusion between work and play this blog (such as it is) is partly dedicated to dispelling.
The phrase 'real travel' is mostly heard in the dormitories of backpackerdom, meant to differentiate between travellers ('real') and tourists (in some sense 'fake'). The idea is never thought through, but is intended to indicate that uncritically following the routes and recommendations of your Lonely Planet guide is somehow superior to being spoon-fed your information on an organised tour. In fact there's little to differentiate the two.
Here a press trip (or 'fam trip' as it's often called) is being contrasted with other travel (whether independent or fully escorted isn't clear, but it's a fairly safe bet that independent travel is going to be regarded here as the only 'real' travel).
But all travel is 'real' (or none of it is), and no one who prefers to be carted from A to B need feel obliged to work out how to do it by themselves and by public bus. No one who simply wants to be on a beach need feel obliged to steep themselves in local culture and no one who thinks that following guide book recommendations for a few days amounts to meaningful cultural immersion is to be taken seriously anyway. Indeed, it's almost impossible for something to appear in any popular guide book and still be authentic. That's one of those principles of tourism that might have been constructed by Heisenberg: the more widely something is known about the less likely it is to be original and authentic. This is Neville-Hadley's Quantum Theory of Travel.
But of course, my travel is anyway business travel, undertaken for the purpose of obtaining stories agreeable to editors, and has nothing whatsoever to do with my own travel preferences. A successful trip is one in which I come back with the material I need: observations, notes on experiences, interview recordings. I may not have seen globally famous 'must-sees' despite being within five minutes of them (and I speak as one who has twice been to Alice Springs without visiting Australia's most iconic Rock--it wasn't part of the story in either case). My itinerary is agreed in advance, and even when it involves driving myself, rarely has any flexibility. But it's shaped to the needs of the stories. It's not a holiday.
In general I restrict myself to travel that can be undertaken by anyone else, and write in order to describe the experience and explain how it can be done by those who follow. This sometimes means doing more rather then less than other visitors would do, in order to be able to make a selection of experiences to recommend. One benefit of press trips with groups of journalists, although I mostly avoid these, is that there's often access provided that the average traveller wouldn't get, but which when recounted is helpful to the reader. On the excellent trip to Scottsdale that spurred the original comment, for instance, I had the opportunity to talk directly to some of the architects and their followers in a way not available to the average visitor. The point was, of course, to get information, anecdotes, and quotable material that would enliven the story and explain the experience in the words of those best qualified to comment. If this was 'unreality' then more of it is needed.
There is almost no genuinely critical travel writing for newspapers or magazines or television. This is not what the editorial and production powers feel the readers/viewers want, and the material created for these publications and broadcasts is almost universally artificial in one way or another. But the general public idea of travel is of something so imbued with glamour, whether it's the 'heroism' of hard-seat train travel in China, or the wannabe-James Bond-ness of luxury Caribbean resorts, that even someone as weary of travel as I am (and so far I've managed to avoid a trip further than Fife in Scotland this year) would have a hard time breaking the spell even if permitted by editors to do so. Indeed, it's often noticeable on website travel discussions that the unsatisfactory nature of an experience is the very last thing that either those who haven't yet travelled want to hear about, or that those who may already have travelled want to admit to. They slave and save, look forward all year to what may be the 'trip of a lifetime', and nothing is going to make them admit afterwards, that in swallowing all the clichés about a destination they were involved in duping themselves.
The best thing I can do is to avoid contributing to the overall propaganda, and if there's any distinction to be made between 'real' and 'unreal' in this context then it's to do with writing about, for instance, the insect markets in Beijing, rather than the usual goo about 'ooh-ahh Forbidden City 5000 years of culture Confucius he say'. This, however, requires a considerable amount of study and effort when venturing out of English-language territory, and is best based at least on repeated visits to the same destination. It's a lot easier just to rattle off a brainless piece on first impressions of the top sites, and it's a lot easier to publish such a piece, too.
I'm off to Jamaica next week on a trip that so far has been very poorly handled, insofar as it's taken about two months to set up with final agreement achieved, after long lacunae and one missed deadline, less than a week before departure, and with an absolutely skeletal draft itinerary which appears to have me chauffered everywhere rather than driving myself. However, the trip does seem designed to help me get the three stories I finally proposed (the intermediate PR people in New York having contributed absolutely nothing--sometimes you really do wonder what these people do to earn their money) and I'm promised that everything will stop and start at my pleasure.
The excuse (from the New York PR people) that I can't drive myself because I might get lost seems particularly absurd, not least since the tourism authorities themselves are promoting self-drive to less-visited places, which is one of the topics I'm supposed to be covering. Seeing whether this is in fact practical, and actually getting lost, is potentially part of the story.
But some tourism authorities insist on having someone at your elbow for the whole visit (and there are certainly journalists who can't survive without this, too), but it can be claustrophobic, especially to someone who prefers to use a dictaphone for notes. With the right chauffeur/guide it can be very helpful (as I remember with one in Melbourne and the Yarra Valley, one in Tokyo, and another in Asti), and in others the opposite (one in Fiji, one in Vilnius). If the timing of all this, leaving me with little option but to go to Jamaica, had been different there would have been further discussion on all this.
Regardless, the purpose of the itinerary is to get the stories. Is this artificial, in the sense that no casual traveller would adopt the same itinerary? Yes. Is it 'real'? Certainly. Getting the stories is the only thing that counts. This is work, not play.
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