Developing a travel PR campaign for affiliate clients presents a particular challenge. After all they don’t own their own hotels, boats, planes, they don’t sell their own package holidays and most of the time they don’t even mind who you travel with.

That leaves us a bit short of stories on the PR side.

Travel affiliate clients just want traffic, which they can then convert to clickers to send on their way to happy merchants in exchange for a slice of the pie.

There’s very little there for a traditional travel PR to get their teeth into. Or is there?

Andy Barr head yeti at 10Yetis has considerable experience representing affiliates – most relevantly to us the travel site Sunshine.co.uk.

I asked him to share his views of travel PR for affiliate marketing.

Andy, how do you start getting your affiliate clients ink?

There are two elements to this. Going right back to Marketing 101, it is all about the brand. Regardless of whether or not you are selling tours or holidays that are packaged in your name or in another operators name, the brand that you use as the platform for making this sale must be credible.

Once you have the basis of a credible brand, good search positioning, unique, intriguing content, good customer feedback and all the other areas that go into this, you can begin to spread the word using public relations activity.

Is everything aimed at driving traffic or is there a reputation element?

Our approach to this is three pronged and  combines both the need to increase traffic along with building a reputation. If you are working with a brand that has no presence within the media then you first of all have to create a profile and “noise” to get yourself established.

The three areas are:
1. Consumer stories
2. Reactive stories
3. Feature pieces in the travel sections.

This means doing releases on everything possible within your sector, and maybe even outside it to try and attract attention and get your company name in the papers.

From this initial stage you are then in a better position to look for larger features within the travel sector that will deliver more relevant stories.

Finally, once you are in a position where you are known by media across both consumer and travel sectors, you can strive to be the first to react to breaking industry news in order to become an authority and the first port of call for journalists looking for an alternative to the older travel brands that are out there.

It is important that from the outset you know how far you want to push your brand: if you want to do the more fun and consumer led stories or if you simply want to stick to the drier, more conservative travel angles.

What travel company owners across the affiliate sector need to keep in mind is that, as with most sections of national newspapers, the travel sections are shrinking in size and readership, meaning it is more important that their PR work focuses on getting ink in the front of the paper, in the news and general consumer sections.

Very useful. Thanks very much for your time, Andy.

Rosemary Gallagher has written a good piece about Reputation Plus the real time customer service in today’s Scotland on Sunday.

Businesses will be able to monitor their reputation on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, and react in “real time” using a service launched this month by Scottish company Reputation Plus.

Set up by Neil MacLean, a former journalist, and Claire Dean, a TV and radio reporter and presenter, Reputation Plus claims to offer the first “online, real time customer service for UK business”.

Although Scotland on Sunday particularly mentions our real time customer service in terms of providing reputation services for financial institutions, there is also a strong travel PR element to ReputationPlus as you would expect.

An increasing number of tour operators, hotels and specialist travel companies monitoring their brands online and actively participate in social networks.

Matt Parsons’ list of travel companies on Twitter documents this growth nicely.

However for some social media is “yet another thing” said with rolled eyes, another spinning plate which they do not have the time, experience, resources or corporate culture to deal with.

That is why we have launched Reputation Plus as a standalone service to monitor any mention of a travel brand on social networks, respond where appropriate to complaints or praise and to promote the travel company in a useful and appropriate way to anyone looking for its products or services on Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Facebook or whichever social space next holds consumers’ attention.

There has been discussion on Twitter over the last few days on the role of SEO in contemporary Travel PR. I am massively biased in this; my reflex action on opening a new travel site is to view source code. And I have a keyboard shortcut which turns H and 1 into <h1></h1> in a nano second.

I believe an understanding of how to be more easily found online is vital to travel PR.

At the very least, if you are a travel PR and you want to get your client’s story across to the widest possible market, you need a basic knowledge of SEO.

I don’t necessarily mean the shady and complex world of buying authority links without Google registering the acrid smell of cheque book – although, wait a minute that sounds like a better reason than most these days for a press trip.

I mean the business of making sure everything you publish on behalf of your client is useful, easily found and as widely distributed as possible.

Is there a place for the various PR wires in this? Absolutely. I’ve seen time and again the advantages of making sure a news release was published on the right list.

But don’t just post your release off to a press wire service and sit back waiting for the rankings.

That is just part of the strategy. I believe more travel PR agencies should publish ongoing news themselves – and not static rehashes of their latest releases. These should be on their own sites, properly optimised to make sure they appear on the search engines.

SEO tips for travel PR’s

You are aiming for three audiences: the media and the public and your client.

There are far more journalists out there researching stories than you will ever have in your little black book, so make sure they can find your client’s latest news.

As for the consumer, we are talking about public relations here and there is a strong case for going direct to the person buying your client’s holidays.

Is that beyond the brief? Outwith the contract? Perhaps. Call it a little extra something – something which might keep you employed and prevent the client switching their PR budget over to a search company or digital agency instead.

Let’s get practical here with some quick top level SEO tips for a travel PR agency wanting to create an online media room for its clients’ news.

1. Set up a WordPress blog. It is cheap and easy but needn’t look cheap and easy. Then link it to the navigation on your corporate site.

2. Write short useful news posts about your client’s new hotel, destination, cruise ship, daily life. Avoid the stilted, verbal straight jacket of the formal release. Let’s have a bit of genuine enthusiasm and puff-free excitement. If it doesn’t excite you, don’t bore us with it.

3. Link out, generously – obviously to your client (first link) but also to other useful resources. Pay attention to the link text and don’t overdo it

4. Write an informative eye-ctaching headline for humans, a concise tag line for search engines, and a useful address slug for good for navigation.

5. Use your PR skills to compose a decent meta description. The kind that people will click on if Google decides to show it within the search results. Google says it doesn’t bother with meta keywords anymore but I still think you can throw seven or eight into the mix.

6. Link to your online media room in every communication you despatch, including your business cards.
7. Leave relevant, useful, friendly, helpful comments whenever you come across an appropriate online conversation, including Twitter, with your link.

8. Set up Google analytics to help measure traffic and so you can respond to trends such as what is popular, how do people find you. When something works, do it again.

Anything else? Yes, lots, that is just a start. But it is an important start and something which can be done right now.

You may not be able to waggle a Google-approved search professional certificate under the noses of your clients but at least you can tell them you optimise their releases and  ensure their news is more widely read online. And in an age of struggling newspaper figures, that can only be a good thing for a PR business.

I shall cover more specific SEO issues as they relate to travel PR in future posts.

By way of yanking this blog back out of hibernation, I thought I would recap a guest post I wrote for Travolution last year.

It pretty much sums up what I thought then and still think now of traditional travel PR.

For the sake of our clients we need to totally rethink travel PR in this country. And by the way, signing up for a Twitter account just doesn’t cut it.

The Problem at the Heart of Travel PR (from Travolution)

The marketing blogosphere is navel-gazing again, this time about the current state of PR.

No surprise there then. Every few months somebody declares PR dead and a bevy of PR’s write about how the world would go to hell in a hand basket without them.

Eventually the whole thing settles down until yet another A list blogger gets hit by a hundred irrelevant pitches.

It makes me wonder though about the state of the travel PR business, particularly in the UK where I personally lobbed press releases into waste bins for the best part of 20 years.

Is the UK travel PR business dead?

Not totally. It just smells like it.

The problem is the business still swivels on traditional media relations.

Scan the PR’s own pitches and you’ll find all the emphasis on cosy relations with journalists and the “ability to control press coverage on our clients’ behalf”.

It doesn’t take a PhD in fragmented media to know that model is about as up to the minute as Mr D’Arcy’s breeches.

Sure, some travel PR’s make noises about new media and getting down with Facebook, but many still gaze at email with the wonder of war-time kids setting sight on a banana.

They’ll protest – ok, I’ll protest for them – that they have had great success getting, I don’t know, three regional hacks out to Barbados to cover the Deck Chair festival.

But travel companies increasingly find those sums don’t add up anymore. It’s just not worth it.

I know a travel company which scored a four page spread in a Sunday broadsheet and only received one call about the trip next day.

Besides, traditional press coverage is like a sugar rush. The returns are short-lived and you have to keep on doing it over again.

PR needs to be more closely tied with results. It must be seen to generate measurable revenue for the client. It needs better strategies to generate long-term benefit.

For that it needs to speak directly to the public as well as hacks, build relationships with customers, treat Google as vital media, drive search traffic, communicate the benefits of the product to anyone with a broadcast voice, official or not. In short it needs to go where the market is and go online.

Here are some of the skills a modern PR agency needs – online copywriting, web monitoring, SEO, search marketing, basic web dev, multimedia content creation, web analytics.

The alternative? Marketing money will continue to shift to the people who already pitch this stuff and therefore can provide truly measurable results: the search marketing companies and digital agencies.

And then what will be left for the poor travel PR’s? A few quid for organising cocktail parties at WTM.

PR in this country needs a travolution (that’s not trademarked or anything is it?).

While researching restaurant reviews for the Sunday Times – and by researching I mean spilling gravy down my shirt – a manager would often stop by and ask how everything was. “Fine” I would say. “Read about it on Sunday,” I would think. “Thanks,” I would say.

If it had been awful – if maggots had been playing in the venison stew – I would be itching to pull the trigger, to tell the world while I was still pulling on my coat. But sadly there was no way to actually publish a restaurant review directly from the table.

Well, now there is.

Thummit (US only just now as far as I can see – and still very much in beta) will let you text a restaurant review to your friends while the rancid sauce au poivre is still congealing round your pork. No more waiting to get home to boot up the pc and write a review. Now, if you get a gruff word from the waiter, you can deliver a thumbs down while he is still sashaying back to his station.

Oh the power.

As a consumer, I love the idea but it is a potential nightmare for restaurants. Staff used to be told to look out for reviewers, sad diners with dandruff making copious notes about the chicken supreme. Now they need to watch out for every customer with a potential grudge and predictive text. And that could be most of them.

Google Alerts has a new option: you can now subscribe to feeds instead of receiving periodic email messages.

Google’s travel team in the United States has just posted a recording of their travel research webinar from earlier this month. YouTube: Research Road Trip: A Traveler’s Road to Decision. The sound quality is terrible: it sounds as if contractors are working overhead. But there are nuggets for anyone interested in online travel buying behaviour across the pond. We can hardly be surprised online video is gaining influence with 15%  using video as part of their trip planning process, mostly via YouTube. Interestingly, consumers trust both professional and user content with “videos made by people like me” rating 59% on the trustworthiness scale compared to 47% for professional clips uploaded by travel firms. Google travel’s recommendation is to think about adding video to your efforts. Mine is more specific: set up a channel on YouTube, populate it with good quality video and establish programmes with suitable awards to encourage customers to upload their own. And by the way, it’s not just about sealing sales: customers are still gleaning information/inspiration even after they have booked their holiday.

“In times like this you need anything you do on a marketing front to be recoverable and effective. And that’s why online is a good idea.” Daily Telegraph