Ms. Bohrod

Social Media & PR

Planning a PR Strategy: Don't shoot from the hip

By Georgi Bohrod, Principal, GBG & Associates

No matter what your job title, as a hotel executive you are always in the business of hospitality sales and marketing. The core of your success centers on the guest experience. The question is how best to convey the message that you adhere to your vision? How best to let people understand what makes you unique? How best to let people know that you fit their needs? If you say PR, I agree. But exactly what does that mean?

Public Relations (PR) is the practice of conveying messages to the public through the media. The intent of PR is to change the public's action by influencing their opinions. Usually, only certain segments of the public are targeted; these segments are called audiences. Our goal is to target distinct audiences with various messages to direct opinion and influence behavior.

The role of Public Relations in hospitality marketing strategy is to shape perceptions and behaviors to make the climate more favorable to generate guest nights and profits.

Your primary goal is to present your property and/or brand in a positive light in which to continue to build marketing and sales momentum. To be effective, both with budget and results have a plan. Shooting willy-nilly from the hip is wasteful. If you have a plan you may opt to change course from time to time, but never without analytic reflection and measurement.

Brief History of Public Relations

A brief history of public relations provides insights into its strength and deployment. The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) says that "public relations help an organization and its publics adapt mutually to each other." Many of the first PR professionals got their start with the Committee for Public Information, whose main function was to organize publicity on behalf of The United States and its objectives during the First World War.

One of the founding fathers of PR was a gentleman by the name of Ivy Lee who developed the modern news release. It was he who said that PR was a "two-way street" which consists of helping clients listen as well as communicate their messages.

Listen to the market while you plan your strategy. Know your potential guests and know how you fit into that arena. Do you focus on business travelers? Families? Adventuresome couples? The idea is to know your strength and approach the market from that vantage point rather than molding your image into something unrealistic. PR builds expectations, operations support those expectations. Make sure they are consistent.

Another pioneer in the field was Edward Bernays who is credited as being the first theorist of the PR world. One of his earliest PR "stunts" was staging a "smoke-in" in which New York debutantes marched in the Easter Parade smoking cigarettes as a way to combat the concept of smoking being unfeminine.

This formalized propaganda was unheard of in the early 20th Century, but has much bearing on the way we look at PR and Marketing Strategies today.

Consider the PR brilliance of "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." Shifting the public perception of Las Vegas to a family environment was always counterintuitive. Although it met with some modicum of success it no where nearly approached the "Sin City" approach which has been wildly successful because it looked at the niche and went with the flow.

Public Relations Today

Modern PR uses an array of techniques to assess public opinion including opinion polling and focus groups, combined with a variety of high-tech distribution techniques to disseminate information.

There are disciplines close to PR which are similar. The first is marketing, which concentrates on influencing the public to buy goods and services. Another important tool which works hand in hand with both PR and marketing is advertising. Your plan should incorporate all three to position your property appropriately within the hospitality industry.

There are a plethora of possible components to use when crafting a PR plan. Of course they are intertwined and often cross over each other. It is important to understand their validity in context.

Components of Public Relations

Managing Language

Word use is extremely important in positioning both positive and negative events. The labels attached to particular processes influence the way audiences regard them.

If a politician or organization can use an apt phrase in relation to an issue, such as in interviews or news releases, the news media will often repeat it verbatim, thus furthering the message. In politics we see this in phrases such as "new Deal", instead of anti-Depression; "pro-choice" instead of pro-abortion; "death tax" instead of estate tax, "faith-based" instead of religious and so on.

Listen to CNN. This is not an era of real estate "downturn" but of "correction." Other examples include "laid off" instead of fired, "layered" instead of demoted and "alternative lifestyles" instead of gay and/or lesbian.

In the hospitality business we have seen the move to "vacation ownership" over timeshare, "shared ownership" instead of fractional, "guest" instead of prospect, "sleeping quarters" instead of unit and many more.

In the design industry the use of words such has "traditional" have replaced "tired," "freshened" rather than "rehabbed," "enhanced" rather than "fixed up", "cozy" rather than "small," "intimate" rather than "dark," and so on.

Entertainment and Celebrity

Pick your celebrity spokespeople that fit your vision. Families may be positively influenced by a baseball player who brings his kids to play with the dolphins. Wedding couples will be apt to be drawn to a resort environment where the rich and famous come to get away from it all. Golfers want to know that those they admire put their personal seal of approval on your course. Don't sign up the Lindsay Lohan crowd if you are focusing on baby boomers looking for sophisticated quiet retreats.

Branching Out

If you listen to celebrities many will tell you that the only thing worse than being talked about is not to be mentioned at all. One of the key strategies of PR is to keep your name in the public eye. Today, this not only means in the magazines, newspapers and in public awareness, it means on the web and in different venues.

Plan to be available for charitable and community functions. The constant mention of your name in conjunction with good works will continue to raise awareness, but breed good will.

Strategic Public Relations

Good public relations do not happen by accident. The key is to figure out your primary message. What do you want the media to tell their audiences? The identification of communications objectives ensures that once your PR professional or in-house staff goes through the editorial pitching process, reporter filters, editorial review and cuts to fill time and space, your predominant messages are still in play.

Secondly, in addition to the message statement, all parties involved need to be aware of what the hook is. The hook is the element of a story that will attract the interest of the media. In other words it is what makes your story newsworthy. The best way to find a hook for a story is to look at the story from the media's point of view: Why should they care? They care to sell more papers, get better ratings or to be perceived by their readers as the number one source for information in your niche category. They get results when their audience responds. That is why superlatives like "best," "fastest", "smallest," "biggest," and "newest" are the "surest" way to sweeping coverage.

Also important are other hook platforms such as : Is there a disagreement and our point of views; How are specific individuals affected; Anticipated trends; Date-specific stories; Localization of national stories (and vice versa); Anniversaries/milestones; Fresh angles on old stories; Special events; Responses and reactions to others news.

Planning and Implementation

A good plan is the requisite first step toward implementing proactive and winning communications strategies. Without a plan, there could be no changes. So, while your plan will certainly not be etched in stone, there are certain premises that must be adhered to. Once the plan is in place results can be thoroughly measured. Concurrently, the plan provides opportunities for innovation and deviation, with a clear direction always in the fore front.

Finding a strong PR professional is the most direct path to putting together a strategic plan but there are other avenues. Many hotel and resort executives find strength in numbers through Visitors Bureaus, Chambers of Commerce, Sales and Marketing Alliances and certainly through their flagship corporate offices.

Overall, the most remarkable component of Public Relations is to have a strategy, a core value from which to build and to move forward from that point. Your business plan is not haphazard and your PR strategy should not be either. Stay on your course, but be ready to be flexible and spontaneous. This will keep you at the top of the market and increase your bottom line.

Georgi Bohrod, RRP leads a consortium of writers, media specialists and graphic designers at GBG & Associates. GBG specializes in the integration of multiple marketing and public relations strategies to fulfill client business goals. The company has implemented marketing, advertising and public relations programs for hotels, timeshare resorts, resort developers, small businesses, service providers and travel industry corporations. Under the leadership of Georgi Bohrod, the company has won countless awards for collateral material design, interactive media design and public relations. Ms. Bohrod can be contacted at 760-803-4522 or georgi@georgibohrod.com Extended Bio...

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