ALWAYS be very nice to the Press…

Story by Dr. Michael Lim The Travelling Gourmet TM

All rights reserved

MANY, many years of being a member of the Press as The Travelling GourmetTM specialising in Food, Wine & Travel, have taught me many useful things. One of which never ceases to amaze me…It is how some Marketing Communications Managers/Directors, Restauranteurs, Hotel GMs, F & B Managers/Directors, Chefs, etc are such good communicators and have such high EQ, and are so Media-savvy and Media-friendly, it is positively delightful &  scary simultaneously! No wonder that some restaurants and hotels ALWAYS get very good and positive write-ups, features and articles…very frequently. They are the sweethearts of the Media and enjoy extremely good and friendly relations with the Media.

Alas, on the other side of the scale there are some in the Hospitality industry that are so Media-ignorant and Media-offensive that they somehow invariably offend the Media. They are then suprised when they get NO write-ups and bad write-ups! One of life’s little ironies.

I always tell my friends in the Hospitality business who are new to the job that when it comes to the Media, it is blindingly simple or in French ‘c’est tres simple’. Either we write bad things about you, good things about you OR Nothing about you. What you get depends on…

Those in the know already know, but those not in the know should either get another job or learn fast…

The classic case was a MarCom Manager of a 5 star hotel in sunny Singapore. We’ll call her Ms. P. She was from Hong Kong and managed to upset and offend many Press and Media journalists and editors and advertising managers. She loved to include excerpts of poems in her Press releases, many of which had a ‘double entendre’ and offended their recipients!  To be brutally frank, the Media/Press is very much like La Cosa Nostra (In Italian it means “The Honoured Society” or more commonly, The Mafia). We can be very nice or we can be very nasty…Consequently, her hotel and F & B outlets never got any Press coverage, or if it did, it was bad press…She later resigned and left Singapore..

So eat well, drink well and always be very nice to the Press…

By the way, have you ever heard that when the Press does not like someone..in the feature story, they always choose the most unflattering photo of the subject to splash across the front page. It is true.

So ist die Medien… 🙂