Travel The Extra Mile With Your Pr

You’ll have heard us talk about the ‘so what’ factor before, which encourages you to question what is interesting about your story and why people might want to read it! You’ll also know we encourage you to ‘think outside the box’ when it comes to identifying an angle and look at what you could make a story out of!

Travelodge has done just that and every year, they publish a list of the mundane, quirky, unusual and sometimes downright odd items that grace their ‘lost-and-found’ boxes. This year £3,000 in £1 coins, a freshly-baked gingerbread village and even a husband made it onto the list, alongside more than 12,000 smartphones and tablets. Now this isn’t perhaps an ‘obvious’ story, one you would think of immediately when you think of corporate PR, yet it’s one of the more popular ones with consumer and trade publications alike! Our seemingly un-stoppable demand for an insight into the lives of others leaves us questioning just who would take a pink, electronic children’s Porsche into a hotel in the first place, and then even more bizarrely, leave it behind! The same premise applies to the ‘feng shui’ fishtank complete with nine fish and an inflated six-foot bouncy castle! Bonkers!

Anyway, we digress; here’s what you can learn from Travelodge with this #PRExample…

• Think outside the box; reiterating what we say time and time again, think outside the box. Lost and found has absolutely nothing to do with the service Travelodge provide, or the quality or calibre of their holiday portfolio, but it does provide interesting PR content that they can leverage. Significant amounts of coverage mean this simple story is worth its weight in gold (or maybe pound coins in this case), and it’s a simple case of identifying an appropriate angle. Go through your daily processes and see if there is something interesting, innovative or unusual that you can make the most of!

• It doesn’t have to be new; just because you did it last year, doesn’t mean you can’t do it again; in fact in some cases you can make it a tradition and a memorable ‘date for the diary’ as you release a sought-after story. Obviously, there is also the possibility of ‘too much of a good thing’ if you overdo it, but quarterly, bi-annually or annual releases can be great. In this case Travelodge release an annual list of lost-and-found, which gains coverage every year. Whatever your idea, it will have to be a regular occurrence and interesting enough to keep gaining the coverage.

Although many of these stories will ‘stand-alone’, a great way to take advantage of regular or annual releases is to link them to a topical event or national ‘day’. Sit down with a calendar and look at what you can do with key dates like Valentine’s for example; it doesn’t matter if you did something last year, as long as the content is suitably different and remains interesting, you’re bound to get coverage again.