Monday, September 16, 2013

Tourism and PR... My perfect placement!

The Tourism WA office is in the Perth CBD so as part of my placement I get to experience inner city work which I have never done before. Sometimes public transport is a bit of a hassle but I did enjoy walking through the city to the office and being able to get a better feel of the city that we were generating PR for.

In my degree, Bachelor of Commerce, I am doing a Public Relations and Tourism & events double major. So I am happy to be doing my PR placement in an industry I have been learning about and have an interest in. I enjoy learning about all the destinations, new tourism products and events in Western Australia and hope that I get the chance to eventually see them all. It seems like a really fun job because the others in the office often go out for lunches and dinners with different media groups although, at the end of a long day or a bad week this might not be such a good thing.

I was also asked to research and write short articles for the e-newsletter Innovations. Innovations is sent to Tourism WA staff as well as Australian and international media in order to prompt media articles to be written about Western Australia tourism products. So I began looking though newspapers and online news articles to create and report on stories under the categories: What’s Hot, Food & Wine, Lifestyle & Culture, Tours, Attractions & Accommodation, Feature Story, Events.

In the office, everyone is really knowledgeable on WA destinations. If someone needs information for what they are working on they will ask the team and get an impromptu brainstorm going which I really like listening to. I received some feedback on the e-newsletter articles I had written. It was good to get practical experience in the importance of ensuring the relevance (what media will be interested in) and timeliness (in relations to distribution) of information. By adding locations and what else can be packaged with it to make it an interesting destination will increase the probability that media will write a story about the destination or event.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Hi Bec,

I find it very fascinating that you are working in the tourism sector as I too have studied the Tourism and PR major.

It sounds like you are getting wonderful inner-city experience and gaining valuable skills on how to direct articles to the target media outlet which will be very beneficial in your career.

I have been involved in a similar process of trying to get target public's interested in WA events which has sometimes been quite difficult.

I think that, like your article suggests, we all must target our communications accordingly and when we finally find the right approach we will get positive results!

Amy