Best Practices for Media FAM Trips

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By Rebecca Chappell, Account Executive

Facilitating a FAM trip – a free or reduced-rate trip offered to travel professionals to familiarize them with what a destination has to offer – is a great opportunity to build relationships with media as well as provide an experience that they can recreate for their audience.

In the case of our client Wuksachi Lodge, a full-service hotel nestled in the heart of Sequoia National Park and operated by Delaware North Companies Parks & Resorts, our FAMs have focused on what sets the hotel and surrounding area apart from other destinations. By customizing itineraries that showcase unique seasonal and year-round elements (versus one-off news items that have a quick shelf life), we are able to host media from short and long-lead outlets simultaneously. This is important, as long-lead magazines and television shows typically plan two months to a year in advance.

Executing a successful FAM trip requires a great deal of organization and there are a number of items to consider from start to finish. Here are just a few preliminary steps that will help ensure smooth sailing once guests are onsite:

Consider Timing and Resources

You need to first decide on dates for the trip, length of stay and the appropriate number of guests. Media generally prefer midweek to weekends and at least a two-night stay. Avoid holidays if possible. When contemplating how many guests to accommodate be sure to think about sightseeing opportunities. Will your guests walk or do you have a passenger van and trusted driver? And don’t overlook potential weather issues! If it rains on your outdoor activity or a heavy snow shuts down a thoroughfare, what’s the contingency plan?

Design an Invitation

Your invitation serves as pitch to entice media. In addition to the five W’s – who, what, why, when and where – it should convey the answer to the question: What’s in it for me? With all the invitations travel media receive to explore various destinations throughout the world, what makes yours worth saying “Yes!” to?

Find Qualified Participants

A great way to attract media to your FAM is to send your invitation through a professional database that specializes in the travel journalism. But just because someone accepts your invitation doesn’t mean you have to book them as part of the FAM. As part of the qualifying process you’ll want to request credentials, writing samples, links to published articles, etc. You can also pick up qualified leads from trade publications, sales and trade show activity and referrals.

Create an Itinerary

A well-thought out itinerary is imperative. Sightseeing destinations in Sequoia National Park, for example, are a great distance apart. Many require a vehicle as well as walking time. This is the sort of thing that needs to be accounted for when trying to get a media group to a tour on time. Also imperative is providing plenty of down time between activities. Sure, you want to showcase the place, but don’t pack the daily schedule so tight that media have no time to rest or explore at their own pace.

Supply Travel Tips

Before media depart for your destination you'll want to send them a list of travel tips, from driving and/or flight directions to important phone numbers to all the localized things in between. Since there are no gas stations within Sequoia National Park, we provide a list of the last gas stations you can fill up at before ascending the mountain. Because Sequoia is home to black bear, we provide bear safety information. And, as weather in the mountains can be unpredictable, we always offer suggestions for what to wear and what to pack.

These tips merely scratch the surface of what it takes to pull off a successful FAM trip. They do require a lot of organization in advance, but the results can be very beneficial for a client when all goes well!

Journalism Skills for a PR World

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By Kristina Houck, Research and Online Content Specialist

Thinking about leaving the newsroom for the PR world?

Many reporters successfully make the transition into public relations. (Several of us on the (W)right On team have a journalism background.) To do so, you’ll need to learn about the field and obtain new skills. Still, you will find more than a few journalism skills useful in your new career. Here are the top four:

Write well

Although you will be doing much more than writing as a public relations professional, you’ll still depend on your excellent writing skills to succeed. As a reporter, you’ve likely received a number of news releases that read like sales pitches or user manuals. Because of your writing and editing experience, you will know how to present the facts without the frills while making sure your client’s message is compelling, but also accurate and clear.

Communicate effectively

Your interview skills will come in handy in the PR world, which actually requires a lot of time listening to clients as you come up to speed on their industries, business models and products or services. Instead of speaking with sources on the phone, you will pitch to media. To get your client’s message across, you will need to know how to communicate effectively with others.

Understand newsworthiness

As a reporter, you’ve had years of experience pitching story ideas to your editor. You’ve also received countless phone calls and emails from PR pros looking to get their stories published. Therefore, you understand what gets published and what doesn’t. You also understand what makes the front page and what receives a brief mention. Understanding newsworthiness can help you relate a client’s message to a current events story or a larger trend piece so your story gets picked up.

Work on deadlines

Reporters know a thing or two about deadlines. You’ll need to manage your time as a PR professional, too. Instead of working on multiple stories with different deadlines, you will work on multiple accounts with different expectations. Many PR firms require account executives to document the time they spend on each account, so be sure you use your time wisely.

Happy job hunting! Oh, and if you’re actively seeking a new opportunity, check out ours at (W)right On Communications: http://www.wrightoncomm.com/careers.htm

Don't let by-lines pass you by

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If you work with the media, you need to pay close attention to by-lines.

By-lines tell you who wrote the story you are reading. The Economist has a policy of no by-lines, but that's the exception to the rule and is supposed to reflect that every article in that magazine is the work of the entire masthead.

A PR professional has to make note of what kind of stories each reporter follows or produces. We approach the Sunday morning paper a little differently than the average reader.

While this practice seems so obvious to me, a number of times I've been in conversation with a journalist and brought up a story they wrote that I remembered and found interesting.

Their reaction is often surprise. They so rarely get direct feedback from their readers. Most feedback these days appears to be via online comments--and much of that is ranting, complaining or name-calling.

So the next time you read an article and appreciate the content, information, angle or the writing style, drop the author a note. Their emails are usually at the end of each story. He or she will surely appreciate the feedback, and it may lead to a relationship with that writer too.

Part 1: Pressures of Publishing in 2010

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The last 18 months have been hell on journalists and, therefore, to a lesser degree, on media relations professionals too. To adequately explain what late 2008 and 2009 have been like in our field, we’ve got to start with the journalist’s view. Hence the two part approach to this post.

In 2008 and 2009:

• Journalists feared for their jobs. Therefore, they wanted only to cover the most compelling stories. (To understand what a compelling story is, see our last post.)

• Journalists were forced to cover more beats. One columnist we work with had his column frequency and coverage area doubled, was assigned obituaries and asked to contribute regular human interest profiles. Another had to produce streaming video product reviews for the paper's website while blogging and producing daily business news coverage.

• Journalists had less space to cover stories. Page counts shrunk in print publications and with them coverage opportunities became tighter too. A story that might have merited coverage two years ago now literally had nowhere to run.

• And, of course, journalists did lose their jobs in layoff rounds and many of the press contacts we'd made over the years were downsized.

In this environment, (W)right On Communications simply worked harder and smarter to give our clients' stories the edge.

In 2008, we began adopting more social media strategies to find additional avenues to deliver client messages and help our clients engage with their audiences and stakeholders. We watched as traditional reporters and columnists joined Twitter and Facebook and news media began to embrace real-time social media tools to break news and encourage reader participation and commentary. (In that regard, the trends weren’t all bad – given a different set of circumstances, this would have been pretty cool. But the triple threat of Craigslist, media fragmentation and decimated advertising budgets took a lot of the fun out of it.)

Our support of traditional media relations continued, however, with a greater than ever emphasis on best practices.

What are these best practices you ask? At their heart, they’re consuming traditional and social media in frequent and large doses. We read a lot! That means blogs, newspapers, and magazines as well as journalists on Twitter and Facebook. This is how we know who’s writing what, what’s new with who (or, er, with whom), and what they’ve been writing about lately as well as what they are likely to write about in the future. In addition to this, we’ve had to stay on top of trends in our own industry, first and foremost, but our clients’ industries as well.

Such research has always been necessary to produce results for our clients, but never more so. It’s not just the current economic environment. It’s also the low barriers to entry in the PR profession--from easy leads via HARO to easy and cheap press release distribution via PRWeb. These tools as well as more expensive but convenient databases like Vocus and Cision that allow people to send thousands of emails with the push a button mean that journalists are receiving 400 emails or more a day—and many to most of them are either completely outside of the journalist's beat or perhaps in their beat but containing no real news.

So, yes, sticking to best practices is, unfortunately, the way to stand out and serve the last journalists standing.

And, no, 2009 was not an easy year for media or PR professionals and 2010 may see some small improvement, but for those who haven’t cut corners and have kept their skills, knowledge and relationships fresh, the outlook is much brighter.

Stay tuned for our part two post, in which we acknowledge more of the perils of our industry.