Travel PR has changed #3: video news releases (VNRs)

It has long been important for travel PRs to secure TV coverage on behalf of its clients. I wrote way back in 2007 about how BBC Holiday and Wish You Were Here gave way to ‘Feelgood Factual’ programmes like Coast and Britain’s Favourite View. I also wrote about how celebrity-led travel programmes are really the only way you can get any decent-length coverage on the main TV channels.

It’s clear that this is still the case by the way, with John Sergeant and Alexander Armstrong battling it out. As with the Griff Rhys Jones and Paul Merton series, it turns out these programmes are prone to stereotypes and storylines too obscure to be worth targeting. And that goes for challenge-based celeb travel programmes too.

So it’s important to either instigate your own series, or make sure that you’re tailoring your client’s news to broadcast.

One way of doing this is by producing your own Video News Release (VNR) footage. A broadcaster can use some or all of the footage to produce their own tailored report on an event or story. They can re-edit the footage, add voiceovers, music, or additional footage including pieces to camera.

Here are a few examples for our client Tourism New South Wales:

1. We produced a Video News Release to maximise UK media coverage of the Vivid Sydney festival. The Video News Release included a 3:00 minute A-Roll package voiced by a reporter and a 10 minute B-Roll that included the best sound bites and cutaways from two filming days. The VNR and Vivid Sydney achieved excellent coverage, specifically in the online fields. Having the video made a huge difference and enabled the websites to take the content and highlight Vivid. Coverage value totaled £1,378,334. Examples of the coverage can be seen here on the BBC, MSN and ITN.

2. Six thousand people in Australia tucked in to an unusual breakfast sitting on the world-famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. The bridge, which on weekdays is packed with commuters on their way to work, was closed to traffic and its eight lanes covered with grass for a picnic, as part of a Sydney food festival.

VNR footage was commissioned, and can be seen in full here. An example of the coverage can be seen here.

Now – VNRs are not new in themselves, but we have certainly been using them much more over the past 12 months with a number of our clients. There is an added cost, but once the potential benefits are made clear to the client, there is a compelling case to find the extra budget.

Another example of this is our recent work for Jamaica and the recent launch of a British Airways service to Montego Bay. We shot the following footage – primarily to be sent to TV networks in Jamaica.

Here it is up on the TTG website.

And here is another example of actual VNR footage from an event we recently held to launch Jamaica’s Jazz & Blues Festival – this footage was sent out to UK and Jamaican media.

We really enjoy working with video, and it is something we will be doing more of as time goes on. The benefits are clear, and as more channels are introduced, and newspapers turn into broadcasters through their websites, it is an area that will grow and grow.

Travel PR has changed #2: search engine optimisation (SEO)

Following our first ‘travel PR has changed‘ post, there was a small uproar about it’s fairly blatant motivation: SEO. The merits of the post have been discussed, but the way we see it is, it was an experiment, and though its credibility is debatable, there needs to be room for experimentation in blog posts otherwise nobody learns. For that reason, all criticism was welcomed, and we hope everyone involved at least found the subsequent debate interesting.

Regardless of all that though, the post seems to have gone some way to achieving it’s aim, and one particular comment caught my attention -  Alex Bainbridge asked on Twitter, whether travel PR now = SEO?

My immediate answer was yes, of course travel PR now means SEO!

The first and most obvious crossover between SEO and PR is link building. We’ve been getting our clients links on authoritative sites like Times Online and BBC.co.uk for years – now we are just learning the importance of these links,  what kind of links work best for traffic and what kinds work best for SEO, so we can improve the quality and quantity of them. Many SEO specialists’ weakest area is link building, as doing it well depends on building relationships  – something which is a natural skill of a PR. So all that’s changed in this respect is we have to learn how to use this skill for SEO.

SEO is further applicable in PR though. As the media is swiftly moving online, so are we. As James wrote in the original post, it used to be enough to fax a release to your standard media list. I wasn’t in travel PR quite that long ago, but this has changed even in the relatively short time I have been. When I started you would email your release to your targetted media list. Now that is not enough – and emailing it to some influential bloggers doesn’t make you a cutting edge PR either.

All releases now need to go online, in HTML, with keywords and format considered for SEO, so anyone and everyone can find them and the content spreads – be it through bloggers, journalists or straight to consumers.

We have experimented with an online press room, and seen some great results – most of our releases have been Google indexed within an hour or two and received hundreds of views. We’ve yet to launch a permanent format for this but it is coming soon.

Did you realise travel PR now = SEO? Do you agree that PRs are in an advantageous position to master SEO?

PRs, do you know your way around Google Analytics yet? Do you know your anchor text from your page title? Your deep links from your keywords?

Travel PR has Changed #1: Comments & Forums

It used to be the case that we would write a press release, send it out and that would be it. We would hope it generated some coverage, which would be picked up by the press cuttings agency. But once we’d sent out the release, we would essentially move on to the next task or story for the client.

Now, we can’t just leave it at that, it’s important to monitor any coverage in real time – as it will sometimes generate comments. These comments could be positive or negative, and could thus impact on the nature of the coverage. Should a PR agency be allowed to / expected to comment in defence of / to explain something on behalf of a client?

I recently attended a seminar organised by the Tourism Society and Travmedia – speakers included Steve Keenan from Times Online, Lyn Hughes from Wanderlust and Charlotte Walsh from TTGlive. I asked if PRs should be getting involved in comments, forums and ‘communities’.

The answer was a resounding ‘yes’. As long as we stated upfront who we were and what our client was, we would be very welcome. It would be a valid part of the conversation to offer a ‘company line’ or an answer to a question, or to point out any inaccuracies.

I’ll be honest – this is not something we have done much of at all. But we’ll be doing more of it in future – certainly on Times Online, Wanderlust and TTG anyway. I’d be interested to hear from any readers what they think. Should PRs get involved in consumer discussions, or is it an unwelcome step too far?

There’s clearly scope for the South Africa Tourist Board or a relevant tour operator to comment with some useful information on this forum post. But there are some more challenging ones – for example this article on Times Online – loads of airlines mentioned, some positive, some negative – should airline PRs be getting involved here? If so, how?

Travel PR has changed

Travel PR has changed. When I started my career in travel PR at the tender age of 21, for each client we faxed (yes, remember fax?!) out one press release per month – no matter whether it was newsworthy or not, that was the quota. We arranged for journalists to visit hotels. We followed the features lists from the trade magazines.

And that was it. We collected the coverage at the end of the month, wrote a report and sent it to the clients, who seemed pretty happy.

Looking back on it now, it seems pretty hard to believe. There is so much more to travel PR nowadays. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting about the ways in which travel PR has evolved, and highlighting some of the new strategies we’ve developed.