Stop spitching!
As we start to think about getting Travel In Papers (TiPs) in front of journalists, our attention has recently turned toward the mechanics of PR, and more specifically, the writing and distribution of a press release. During our initial research we unearthed some gems in the world of PR blogging.
A quick rummage around the PR blogosphere and we ended up at this post by Stephen Waddington: stop spam pitching.
So, what on earth is spam pitching ?
Spitching, as we are now calling this phenomenon, is where PR executives use email as a means to distribute irrelevant press releases and pitches to journalists.
Type spitching into Google and the first result you’re likely to see will be from Urban Dictionary. According to them, the word is currently defined as:
Spitching is when people from wherever come and dig through your garbage or trash or go to a dump and pick up used items that are old and beyond repair.
Right, we’re off to update the Urban Dictionary with a new meaning for our mash-up of words: spamming + pitching = spitching.
If that fails, we’ll then try submitting the term spram, i.e. PR spam.
About Stephen Waddington: Stephen is the managing director of Rainier PR, a tech PR firm with offices in Cambridge and London, UK.
Former Sunday Times travel writer ‘gets it’
Today we unveiled the UK edition of Travel In Papers (TiPs) to a select few, mainly travel writers, with former Sunday Times journalist Neil MacLean being particularly quick off the mark with a favourable write-up on the Travel PR Blog.
In his post entitled a shortcut for tour operators and travel pr companies, Neil immediately identified the benefits of TiPs, summing it up in a nutshell with the following…
…tour operators and travel pr people will be glad of anything which extends newspaper coverage - or at least helps make it more accessible.
He went on to provide an interesting insight into Irvine Welsh’s all-expenses paid trip to Greenland in relation to the author’s article for the Observer, before signing off his post with the following gentle warning to travel PR companies…
…travel PR’s need to look beyond newspaper coverage these days to help their clients publicise their products.
About The Travel PR Blog: Written by Neil MacLean, a new media strategist in the UK , his blog covers social media technologies and the travel business, with a particular interest in the impact of consumer generated content.
Yahoo’s amazing pipe dreams
In order to create the ’round up’ feed, the default open tab on Travel In Papers, we used Yahoo’s Pipes to mash-up the feed data from all the newspapers we selected. The feed for The Guardian’s travel section required extra work because it outputs two dummy articles, or navigational elements, which would have looked odd and become repetitive.
Using Pipes we managed to block these dummy articles from being displayed and we then limited the output for each feed to show only one article from one newspaper.
We borrowed this approach from the excellent Chipwrapper.