We have run eight press release campaigns for the winners of the PublicityShip Hidden Jewel Awards for small tourism operators.

The campaigns continue to run, with more publicity expected later this year, but the publicity achieved so far is worth both celebrating and examining to discover the reasons for the success.

Whenever you experience success, do remember to celebrate, but also ask yourself what you did to deserve it. This is just as important as working out why something fails. So here goes:

1. We worked hard to find a hook for each story. For example, the health benefits of walking brought attention to Auswalk’s tours from a different angle, while Faraway Bay focused on the corporate market to grow that part of their business.

The message here is that just talking about your product or service isn’t usually enough. The story needs to take a new perspective, offer something different or be carefully targeted.

2. We harnessed the passion of tourism. This worked wonders for Bookabee Tours’ Haydyn Bromley, whose genuine passion for his tours into the Flinders Ranges helped win him a feature in an international trade magazine.

Our recent interview with the magazine’s editor also draws attention to this quality of passion - something that even the most hardened journalist can’t resist!

3. We insisted on good quality, compelling images. This was definitely a factor in much of the coverage - including Faraway Bay’s stunning coastal camp, Live History’s costume drama, and Bookabee’s experiential tours.

Again, we have heard from more than one editor that images can make all the difference to a decision to publish. For many campaigns, especially in tourism, they’re just as important as the press release itself.

4. We applied writing experience to produce press releases that could be easily turned into news stories without further research or pressure on journalists to completely rewrite the story.

News publications, both print and online, will often run stories that are virtually ready to publish without making too many changes. We saw this happen for four of the Hidden Jewels.

5. We included enough links and contact details to make it easy for a journalist to extend the message into a full feature without too much hunting around. Quick responses to enquiries are all part of that process.

This worked particularly well for Bookabee Tours and Faraway Bay, with features on other Hidden Jewels in the pipeline.

6. We tapped into the zeitgeist - or spirit of the times - by understanding what tourists are looking for and linking our Hidden Jewels to those wants. For example, Ningaloo Blue and Undara Experience appeal to the increasing number of visitors wanting an engaging and moving encounter with the natural world; and Anangu Waai, Tribal Warrior and Bookabee Tours offer the cultural authenticity that is now in high demand.

The message here is, keep your finger on the pulse of your industry and tap into growing demands, needs and trends.

7. We didn’t give up easily! Some messages will hit the editor’s desk at a busy time or simply get overlooked. Far from being disheartened, when this happened to us, we sent out follow-up messages and/or extra images with friendly emails, and made a few calls to discuss stories with our contacts.

This made a big difference, getting us attention from contacts who had previously placed our message on a backburner.

To find out more about the campaigns, go to our Client Gallery.

When I talk with clients wanting to get their message into the media via a press release campaign, one of my first tasks is to get tough.

Finding a message that’s newsworthy - i.e. one that is attractive enough to persuade editors, producers, journalists to run editorial or devote airtime to you - is a tough job for most businesses. Yet the success of a press release campaign rides on it.

So as you develop your message and write your news release, be tough with yourself. Keep on asking yourself the same question – who cares? And make sure you can answer it –

“This group of people will care because my service answers a ‘want’ among this particular group that isn’t yet being met … / addresses an issue that hasn’t yet been tackled effectively … / taps into a hot new trend that can be used as the main focus … / rides on a surprising statistic that is likely to grab attention.”

Still struggling? Here are five ideas for turning a worthy message about your business into a newsworthy one:

1. Keep an eye out for new publications or articles revealing evidence-based research or statistics that support the need for your product or service.
2. Tailor your product or service to suit a particular segment of your market and launch it.
3. Establish a new partnership or affiliation with a complementary business.
4. Initiate an event such as a competition, or sponsor a charitable event.
5. Invite a local celebrity to use your product or service and agree to be photographed.

For a business, its good to have your own email address.

A lot of people prefer it to a hotmail or gmail account. As we help quite a number of businesses run their websites, we also run their email server for them. So mysite.com goes with info@mysite.com (rather than info-mysite@gmail.com or hotmail.com).

But if you’ve tried to set one up or run one, you know your own email server can be a headache. I now recommend a simple way of running email using Google’s Gmail service that is a lot easier than a setup using only your own email server.

Here is how it works:

• register your domain and setup your email addresses in the usual way. So your email is info@mysite.com
• setup a Gmail account - free, with around 2.8Gb of storage. Lets call this info.mysite@gmail.com
• forward your info@mysite.com email to your info.mysite@gmail.com
• while you are at it, simplify your life and forward me@myispemail.com to your Gmail account as well.

This way, all your email sails straight through into your single Google account. And you can still send email to people from any of your addresses.

A great reason for using Gmail is that the interface is better than PC email applications such as Outlook or Mac Mail. Mainly because Gmail shows you - on a single line for each email - who the email is from, the subject, and the first line of text. This means you don’t need to scan each mail, you can see at a glance. Just sending/receiving email is easier, and of course you can access your Gmail account from any browser. However, if you like Outlook or Mac Mail or whatever, you can still access Gmail from that (its just a POP email account).

But an even better reason for using Gmail is that the spam filters are flat out the best, better than any filters (such as Spam Assassin) that you can put on your own email server.

With around 2.8Gb of email storage and good search, Gmail has really done the job. There are only two drawbacks, and these may not apply to you. One is that I have a single address book on my Mac’s Address Book application. This synchronizes to our phones (separate lists for Julia’s and mine) and across my office Mac and laptop. With Gmail, I can’t sync my Address Book into Gmail (or I can, but its a one off, not much help), so while I can reply to an email, composing emails lacks addresses. So to get around this I send new emails from Mac mail, and a copy appears in Gmail. Secondly, I like the way my Mac’s Spotlight search can scan the content of all documents and emails - currently it doesn’t scan Gmail content. I’m hoping a plugin will appear for both of these features.

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of different email addresses. Because I am in business online, it just works that way. Using this setup, you can establish a new business presence and the email isn’t a headache.

For our customers with their own site and email, we still operate an email server for them, but forward their email to their gmail account rather than spam filtering/storing/managing the actual email content. Gmail is better at that.

Click on the icon above, or here to find out more.

We’ve been having a great time working with Ningaloo Blue, the overall winner of our PublicityShip Hidden Jewel Award.  Getting a publicity campaign up and running while launching a new blog-enabled website during one of the busiest whale shark seasons on record has certainly made it interesting! So, here is an update on what has been happening.

The new new website at ningalooblue.com was launched in May. Keyword research was used to identify the sorts of queries that are being used, to maximise the opportunity for Ningaloo Blue to be found. The site structure was redesigned to make it easier for travellers to find out about the different adventure travel options available at Ningaloo.   

The site was indexed rapidly by Google, and has already started drawing traffic on some of the new keywords.  It will take a while to get better rankings on some of the highly competitive travel keywords, however we are confident we will get there.  This is the sort of strategy that will pay long term dividends for Ningaloo Blue, as the cost of pay-per-click search traffic on the competitive keywords is already significant, and will only increase.  

Once strong rankings are achieved, they should be able to be retained on the strength of content rather than advertising spend. The blog is getting good visibility including through Technorati, where it has a blog authority ranking (Technorati), a good result for less than a month’s exposure. The new blog helps capture some of the excitement of swimming with the whale sharks - this year has been a fantastic season, just this week they had two days where they swam with 10 or more separate whale sharks.

Ningaloo Blue are already seeing enquiries coming in via the site, including a query from a New York journalist wanting more information on the whale shark tours, and queries from travellers seeking advice on getting to Ningaloo. This is great news for Ningaloo Blue, who are aiming to raise awareness of the tours in the US and Europe as well as getting a better profile with independent travellers.

Their publicity campaign planning started earlier this year, and has already been delivering results. As a result of the publicity campaign, the West Australian and Sunday Age have featured Ningaloo Blue in their travel news, and the high-ranking global news site, about.com, has expressed interest in Ningaloo and requested information on tours that include Ningaloo Blue’s whale shark tours. Whether this results in coverage or not we’ll have to wait and see, the awareness-raising is invaluable.Please let us know what you think about the new site through email or comments, all feedback very welcome.

Our four most recent clients have all achieved some excellent coverage, so I thought it might be helpful to pinpoint the reasons for their success.

First up is Melbourne Fashion Experience - a small operation that fills a gap in the top-end fashion market. Proprietors, April Duck and Deborah Boreckyi, have created personalised tours of Melbourne’s tucked-away designer outlets for busy women wanting a top quality shopping trip. The designers themselves are highly supportive of the tours, and will arrange to be on hand whenever a tour is coming through.

Coverage in Shop Til You Drop with a full feature in Melbourne Weekly Magazine were achieved thanks to the unusual and appealing character of the tours. Not only do they offer unique experience, but the visual appeal is strong, making for a more compelling feature-style story.

AllGayCruises proved more of a challenge, with plenty of interest in gay and lesbian publications, but a tentative response from mainstream media, which was the central target for this campaign. Despite having all the elements of a great story - the first gay cruise in Australia, lots of colourful events on board, and plenty of visual appeal - we had our work cut out following the initial press release distribution.

But after umpteen phone calls and hours spent on working up angles, we finally cracked the Sunday Age, and the story was also picked up by travel industry media. In this case, success was largely due to newsworthiness and persistence.

Third, something completely different - business coach Greg Chapman recently launched the Australian Business Coaching Club, an online tool for small and remote businesses to gain access to top-quality business coaching at low cost. As another Australian first, Greg’s story was news, but needed something more than a straight announcement.

So PublicityShip worked with Greg to come up with a ‘business school of the air’ angle. This was picked up by the Daily Telegraph in Sydney and Herald Sun in Melbourne, who ran features in their small business sections.

And finally, the Supertalent Network asked us to publicise this year’s Australian Dance Idol competition for 5-19-year-olds, running this week in Sydney.

Thanks again to newsworthiness and fabulous visual appeal - who can beat children dancing? - the competition was showcased on Channel Nine’s Mornings with Kerri-Anne on Easter Monday, and has raised interest among local media for coverage of the finals.

To sum up - our clients’ success comes from:
1. being newsworthy,
2. having visual impact,
3. finding an appealing angle, and
4. sheer persistence.

You don’t necessarily need all four elements, but the more you have, the more likely you are to get publicity.

Niche blogging will eventually change the way people measure the value of blogs. Most of the media attention for bloggers is based on high volume blogs, as measured by traditional website metrics (unique visitors, pageviews) and blog traffic metrics such as Technorati.

But for a small business owner who runs a niche blog with no advertising and yet gains a lot from each new customer, a very small amount of traffic can lead to enough conversions to make a huge difference to his or her business.

Niche bloggers don’t all care about massive amounts of traffic. A highly successful niche blog won’t show up in the top anything at Technorati, and may never get a high page rank. But they have an audience, in many cases a highly profitable one in their niche.

So, if you are a niche blogger, don’t be disheartened by the metrics of the big sites. Track your new clients, track your acquisition costs. Measure and test. And enjoy the benefits of niche blogging!

Since we launched, I’ve been constantly refining the online marketing approach we use for our publicity offerings. The biggest change occurred over the Christmas break in the form of an improved ‘long copy’ description of our services. At the same time, we introduced an autoresponder based education series covering the material from our publictity workshops. This has led to a definite increase in the traffic to our website and our conversion rate, and a range of interesting new clients.

The online marketing approach we use is finding its way into our service line. I am finding that in talking to clients about the kind of on-line marketing we are doing they want to add this into their site as well. Some are keen to launch a new site altogether. When I am talking about on-line marketing I am talking about key word research, adwords campaigns, dedicated landing pages, education via email auto responders and effective offer pages … etc. Its a long list, and helping people understand these marketing tools and how to use them takes more than one conversation.

Putting these elements together into fixed price services that our clients can tap is what I am currently working on.

I’ve been involved in sales and marketing of services for fifteen years. What is currently happening is a change of the rules of marketing for services. The on-line environment offers real opportunities for small players. This is one of those periods of time when everything about sales and marketing is changing. This is not always clear for people who are in the middle of it. Personally I find it very exciting. I’d be interested to hear whether you are getting a sense of these changes too.

I’m delighted to announce the winners of the PublicityShip Hidden Jewel Awards - one of the most enjoyable tasks I’ve had so far as Managing Editor of PublicityShip!

The winners are tourism operators who remain relatively unknown and poised for growth. They all have an edge that sets them apart, offering some exciting editorial and broadcast opportunities, which means they are likely to benefit from their prize - publicity! And they have something extra - passion.

The national winner is Ningaloo Blue Charters, situated on Western Australia’s Coral Coast.

The Ningaloo Reef is a hidden jewel in itself. Much of it within wadable or swimmable distance of shore, it harbours a huge variety of marine life. Most importantly, it is the only place in Australia where visitors can swim with a whale shark – the biggest fish in the sea – and Ningaloo Blue Charters records the most reliable sightings in the world.

But it was also Ningaloo Blue’s passion for what they do that attracted the judges.

“What swayed us towards Ningaloo Blue Charters was a dynamic and unique experience that could translate well to the television screen. That, coupled with a professional and passionate team, made Ningaloo Blue a standout entry.”

This comment from Alex Ristevski, Hidden Jewel judge and travel series producer for Channel Nine, sums up the essence of Ningaloo Blue and that extra something that is likely to get you noticed too.

The combination of professionalism and passion make for great TV - and this also applies to print media, especially when there are stunning photographic images involved.

Now to the state/territory winners:

NSW: Tribal Warrior
NT: Anangu Waai
QLD: Undara Experience
SA: Bookabee Tours Australia
TAS: Live History
VIC: Auswalk
WA: Faraway Bay – The Bush Camp

We will be running publicity campaigns for all the winners, and setting up a travel blog for Ningaloo Blue to attract more visitors to the region and the tours offered by the team.

Congratulations to the winners, and thank you once again to all our entrants. A big thanyou also to my diligent co-judges: Channel Nine’s Alex Ristevski, Australian Traveller’s Greg Barton and AAT Kings‘ Les Cox.

I’ll leave the final word to Greg Barton: “It was an extremely difficult - but thoroughly enjoyable - judging process, since there are so many operators out there worthy of attention. Bring on next year’s PublicityShip Hidden Jewel Awards!”

Well, we’re in full swing with judging the PublicityShip Hidden Jewel Awards for small tourism operators.

We’ve chosen our national winner - but I can’t tell you who it is until the information on all the winners is released on Friday.

What I can tell you is we already have two travel magazine editors who are pretty excited. And when an editor gets excited, you know you’ve hit the jackpot! We’ve achieved this by creating a story of value to the media.
Now we’re in the throes of choosing a winner for each state and territory.

Other exciting news is that one of our judges, Postcards series producer, Alex Ristevski, is currently working on a brand new national travel series.

Alex is one of those media people who believe in bringing quality ventures into the limelight. He’s been impressed by the Awards entries and is always on the look-out for fresh material, so the new series could provide more publicity opportunities for the hidden jewels of tourism.

Work on the PublicityShip Hidden Jewel Awards is seriously happening.

We are in the middle of judging the entries and will be choosing the national winner this week. The state winners will be finalised next week, with all the results to be announced on 16 February.

We’ve been really thrilled with the standard of entries, particularly from South Australia and Tasmania, and the large number of quality Aboriginal enterprises right across the country.

I’m really enjoying the whole judging process, although it’s harder than you’d think. The awards aren’t just about what’s new and different. We’re also looking for who would really benefit from publicity. Often this means having the potential for more than one story angle.

I’m not the only one finding it tough. Greg Barton, a fellow judge and editor of Australian Traveller magazine, sent me an email saying, “Some wonderful entries in here. Choosing only a few seems unfair!”

But the struggle is an enjoyable one, and as I’ve been poring over the entries it’s reminded me what gives one small business an edge over another, what makes one more newsworthy than another.

It is about having something that sets you apart, that’s original or that fills a gap in the market. And ideally, you need have a product or service that is constantly creating new stories for you.

This is how business blogs can also work really well. Each blog post can focus on a different point of interest that keeps more life into your business.

So ask yourself: What makes you special? What are the kinds of stories that would make someone want to do experience your product or service? What are the special changing sights, tastes, smells and feelings you offer your customer?

For many people in the travel industry it is their local region that will feed them new publicity angles: e.g. seasonal migrations for animals, the wildflower season, a glut at harvest time leading to more and new products, new itineraries going to rarely-visited spots, client stories of new experiences.

All of those who entered the PublicityShip Hidden Jewel Awards have potential to create publicity, so congratulations on getting your entries together – and good luck!