Walt Shiel of Lake Linden, Michigan writes:
“Our publishing company has just started working with a local nonprofit foundation that operates an outstanding nature park with miles of beautiful trails and three miles of waterfront land—all of which will soon be connected to the local university’s cross-country ski trails.
“We are casting about for ideas to publicize and promote this free, local resource. Besides providing an excellent recreational outlet for local citizens, we want to come up with some ideas that would feed into the area’s broader tourism goals.
“We are in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and tourism and outdoor recreation are our meat and potatoes. We are considering some events to spark media interest beyond just our local print and broadcast media. Also, a website with maps, information, nature guides, and maybe a web cam.
“We just began brainstorming this, and any and all suggestions will be appreciated.”
Walt,
Find some locals who are avid geocachers and invite them to hide geocaches along this trail. There are hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic geocachers of all ages around the world, including some already in your community who will help you quickly get the word out about a new local trail, and others who travel within their region to do geocaching.
Go to http://www.geocaching.com, plug in your zip code and see what’s already hidden in your area and who the most active local geocachers seem to be. Then ask them for help. Don’t try to hide the caches yourself if you haven’t already tried to find some.
For those who haven’t heard of this fast-growing hobby, geocaching is a high-tech treasure hunt using a GPS (global positioning system).
It’s a wonderful way to enjoy the outdoors, find neat places in the woods that only other locals generally know about and experience a three-dimensional challenge, since some of the caches are rather hard to find even when you get to the GPS coordinates.
It’s popular with young families, outdoorsy couples and retired people, some of whom have found thousands of geocaches already (the sport just began in 2003 or so).
As you might have picked up by now, I love geocaching!
I’ve seen a few places advertise “geocaching vacations” and expect this business wrinkle to grow. But I have no doubt whatsoever that it’s brought a lot more attention to many obscure local trails in many places.
Regards,
Marcia Yudkin
Author, 6 Steps to Free Publicity (Career Press)
http://www.yudkin.com/6steps.htm
Hook up with the local hospitality industry. Leave brochures for their racks.
See what your Chamber of Commerce can do for you (join). Promoting local tourist opportunities is their bread and butter and many operate a website for visitors as well as tourist information booths.
Write articles with lots of pictures of your area and pitch them to tourist and RV magazines. They may use them or send a staff writer up there to do a piece himself.
If you wanted to visit an area, where would you look for ideas of what to do? Be at those places for your area.
We have several areas like this in Santa Barbara, and they’re very popular for outdoor weddings. Perhaps you can promote the natural beauty of the park as a perfect place for weddings or other celebrations.
Also, running races are popular here, and most of them are fund raisers for local nonprofits. We have one 5K race series that’s held at 6 p.m. on Wednesday evenings all summer long, with music and food, and it’s quite a community event. You could host a race series and raise money at the same time.
Connect with the college alumni for something new to do, during football season, graduation, etc.. You don’t necessarily have to pay for an alumni list to
find them with all of the social networking sites now available. You might check out the Journalism School to track those alums for publicity.
Consider hosting a Women’s Nordic Ski Day. The New England Nordic Ski Association (www.nensa.net) holds an event like this every year, and while they move it to a new venue every year, you could make it an annual event. They draw on former Olympians (XC and also running) to teach the classes. It draws anywhere from 100 to 300 women each year – obviously it is weather-dependent. Local businesses have tents at the event and help sponsor it. Go to the nensa.net website and you will find more. A great PR opportunity as well as tourism draw.
Another very successful event in New England is tour that runs concurrently with an xc marathon; however the recreational event has skiers tour approx. 25 kilometers interspersed with food stations created by local inns. http://www.craftsbury.com/skiing/marathon/home.htm
Hi Walt,
How about developing a pitch targeted at local businesses suggesting that they coordinate a trip to the nature park for a different, exciting and challenging team-building activity? I’ve participated in one of these types of events before and I will never forget the good times that I had on the trail, helping my co-workers hop over rocks and squeeze through narrow crevices, etc. And best of all, hearing my boss say to me as I’m hopping along the trail, “Wow, I didn’t know you were that limber.”
You can also arrange to have a guide teach the general public about any unusual plants or animals that are only found on that side of the country and publicize the events in the calendar of events section of your Web site, in the local community events section of your local newspaper as well as the online version of the newspaper, if available. When Halloween comes around again, why not host a guided spooky trail tour?
Natasha Henry, Freelance Writer – write.impression@yahoo.com
What about a snowman building, or ice sculpture, contest?
Or a cross country ski event for charity?
Get a professor or grad student from the university interested in conducting some sort of research project on site, that could be periodically documented in the local media?
To mark the joining of the two venues, hold a run (or ski, or bike, depending on season) event, from one end of one to the far end of the other.
Thanks to one and all! As usual Joan’s readers are a treasure trove of great ideas (or should that be a geocache of great ideas?).
Walt Shiel
http://www.SlipdownMountain.com
http://www.FiveRainbows.com
Why not create a pdf brochure of your area, available for electronic download, free of charge, in conjunction with Amazon and the new Amazing Kindle (the e-book reader)? Also, if you’re looking to be connected to the local university, there is no better resource than Facebook for that.
Walt, here’s another idea that I blogged about a few weeks ago.
Waymarking.com is a cool site that lets you promote specific events, locations, etc. The nature center would be perfect for this site.
You can read the blog item I wrote several weeks ago at http://tinyurl.com/yoao64
The best idea I had last year for my Irish festival was to add 5K run. It opened another type of person to come to my festival.
Why not have winter festivals? Include a 5K cross country ski event or a dog sled race that you maybe able to get ESPN 2 and the other ESPN’s to host the event.
In addition one big lesson I have learned is to have a good website and make sure the local chamber of commerce has plenty of brochures about your area as well as the state of Michigan because they have a tourist website and tourist magazine. See if you can get an article about your area in the tourist magazine. Also there is limited airlines to your area in-flight magazine may also be a source for exposure. My best Irish luck to you!
You note that you are a publishing company, what about putting together a short book or booklet featuring X number of things to do at a nature center/on nature trails.
Whatever you create, try to get it downstate targeting families and groups that come up for weekends/vacation.
Also, how about holding some sort of competition between the university and a rival(they must play someone in Wisconsin):-) Winners could get simple bragging rights, or you could tie in fundraising for just about anything a school could use.
Cheryl Pickett-fellow Michigander
There are a bunch of Michigan blogs that get good traffic. Absolute Michigan has regular reviews, and I know that they drive serious traffic to sites (one mention I had when the Sleeper Lake fire was going in Newberry generated hits week after week).
http://www.absolutemichigan.com/
Right in your back yard, Pasty Central / pasty.com
http://pasty.com/
has a daily photo and lots and lots of people who used to live in the area regularly commenting and linking and telling stories.
There’s a group in Marquette, Save the Wild UP, which is aimed at stopping the sulfide mine proposal there but that has some more general set of interests for people interested in the area.
The Hunt’s Guide to the UP is available in print, but also online, and they’ve done a good job at making it concise and findable.
http://hunts-upguide.com/
If you have a story with an Ann Arbor tie, John Hilton is the editor of the Ann Arbor Observer and a yooper.
There’s a bunch of ski trail books that get published – the one on my shelf is “Trail Atlas of Michigan”.
Look for winter events in the UP that draw people in in bunches – Tech Winter Carnival, the Noq ski race, the Trenary outhouse race – and piggyback on that publicity.
Everyone likes ski and weather reports – make sure that e.g. the Weather Underground http://www.wunderground.com has current conditions from your area.
Hire a yooper to help you do your marketing 🙂
Ed (who grew up xc skiing in Ishpeming and wishes there was enough snow in Ann Arbor to ski)
Promote accessiblity and create an accessibility play area for children with disabilities.