Thanks to Publicity Hound Paul Furiga of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for tipping us off to this story in the Pittsburgh Business Times. It’s about how the state of Pennsylvania is posting at its website blog items written by travelers making road trips across the state.
“It seems the state is pretty tightly controlling where the bloggers go and making it hard to contact them,” Paul says. “It would be ideal to email or contact them direct if you had an attraction or hotel or restaurant to promote. There is a form to post comments on their blogs, which is not exactly the same, and there is a warning from the state that it will moderate content with no guarantee of comments being posted.
That aside, Paul suggests these ideas:
–Do a “the Krugers slept here” publicity campaign playing up the fact that one of the blogger teams ate, drank, slept or visited your establishment. In email or on the web, you can link to the tourism blog page so people can see for themselves what the bloggers did.
–Towns could do an email or letter campaign asking one of the groups of bloggers to visit, using the campaign as the hook for media attention for their town and why it’s a great tourist destination.
–An attraction, hotel or restaurant visited by one of the bloggers could do their own blog on the experience of having the bloggers visit.
It’s a great idea that other states or tourist attractions might consider stealing.
Paul, president of WordWrite Communications in Pittsburgh and former editor of the Pittsburgh Business Times, has lots more ideas on how to get publicity in business journals. He was my guest during a teleseminar titled “How to Use Business Journals to Tell Your Story.”