Companies: Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation and Pew Charitable Trusts
Timeframe: 2006-present
When Suzanne Biemiller, senior officer for Pew Trusts' civic initiatives, read an article in the New York Times about underground podcasts being developed for the Museum
of Modern Art, she was hit with a thunderbolt of inspiration. Why not apply this podcast idea to the work her organization was doing to promote tourism in Philadelphia?
"We're always looking out for new [ways] of presenting Philadelphia to new audiences," she says, recalling how Boston has a version of a podcast tour that employs cell phones.
Combining a tour with modern technology would be perfect, she believed.
Biemiller approached the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) with the idea, which it embraced avidly.
Armed with a $350,000 grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts to implement this initiative, the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC) set out to develop and
market SoundAboutPhilly, a Web site that offers podcast tours of Philadelphia. In addition to the Web site creation and design, the windfall also covered legal costs for
copyrights, overhead costs, advertising, public relations, marketing efforts and consultant fees. The target audience is people looking for high-tech ways to tour the City of
Brotherly Love.
Beyond being funders and inspirers, the Pew Charitable Trusts also acted as an important sounding board for the GPTMC during the early phase of the project.
"We had preliminary discussions on ways to tell the Philadelphia story," recalls Caroline Bean, who heads national media relations for GPTMC. "The Pew Charitable Trusts really
liked the idea of a podcast tour [of] Philadelphia history, so they identified our organization as the people who could really tell that story through podcasts. We worked with
them to make a proposal for a grant and they awarded us a grant; then we started from there."
Setting The Tone For Success
When GPTMC launched the project, they set to fulfill three goals:
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Create and market SoundAboutPhilly, a series of free and completely customizable podcast tours of Philadelphia on a specifically created Web site for persons seeking to
explore the city.
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Generate publicity about the new podcast tours and the stories they tell about Philadelphia.
One of the first things GPTMC did was organize a tour advisory committee, comprised of a University of Pennsylvania historian, a local culture expert and a tech-savvy staffer,
that would determine what the tour content would be.
It was especially important that the podcasts be user-friendly and accessible to people who were unfamiliar with the technology; otherwise, the team knew, no one would download
them. But, at the same time, "We wanted to make it technologically advanced enough that it was an impressive new thing for a tourism agency to do," Bean says.
Out of a series of brainstorming sessions came SoundAboutPhilly, which was launched in September 2006 on SoundAboutPhilly.com. The site includes the following components:
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Audio with Google maps that can be customized for selected tours;
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Mix-and-match tour segments for visitors to customize their own tours;
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Tours directly on SoundAboutPhilly.com or segments that can be downloaded onto iTunes;
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RSS feeds that send out new tours uploaded to the Web site; and
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Original music by a local Philadelphia composer.
Also developed for the site were 10 three- to six-minute audio segments for seven tours, which run the gamut from dining in different ethnic neighborhoods to the best places
for vintage fashions. Among the highlights:
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My Philly: insider tips from local residents;
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Philly Noir: a podcast tour of the African-American experience in Philadelphia;
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Keepin' the Faith: a look at the religious history of Philadelphia; and,
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Once Upon a Nation: stories about Colonial Philadelphians.
Getting Creative To Overcome Challenges
However, coming up with the ideas for the tours was a mind-bender. It was inherently difficult to narrow a wide focus that encompassed specific details.
"Each of the seven tours are different, so we had to adjust for each theme," says Bean. "For the African-American experience in Philadelphia, for example, we pulled together a
group of people who we knew were active in the African-American community and brainstormed what those 10 segments would be. It's really hard to cover all of the African-American
experience in Philadelphia, so we worked with a group of consultants on that. We covered sports, history, food and everything from that angle."
For the segment covering the 300 years of Philadelphia history tour, GPTMC enlisted the services of the aforementioned history professor from the University of Pennsylvania.
According to Bean, the Ivy League academic has his own local tourism enterprise called Poor Richard's Walking Tours. This made his contributions even more invaluable to the
project. "He's familiar with what audiences like to hear, what facts are a little lesser known and more interesting," adds Bean. "And he really was the main voice on that tour,
whereas other tours had different voices for that segment."
While working with locals and experts was key to the program's success, there were still challenges, most of which had to do with keeping the stories as truthful as possible.
"We were out there on the street talking to real Philadelphians," explains Bean. "We wanted to keep it authentic and not so polished that it sounded like an advertisement, but
not so rough that it was unlistenable."
Have Podcast, Will Travel
The GPTMC publicized the podcast tours by promoting it to travel media in the U.S. and Canada. A blogger relations campaign was also mounted as the story was sent to several
high-profile local, national and travel blogs, such as GoogleMapsMania.com and Gridskipper.com. GPTMC sent press kits containing tour materials from the podcasts to a National
Hispanic Journalists Association meeting, to journalists at luncheons in New York and Washington, D.C., and to visiting journalists participating in press trips in Philadelphia.
Promotional postcards were distributed to tour participants, conventioneers and other visitor sites. GPTMC announced an iPod giveaway via an e-mail newsletter to a 95,000-
person database.
SoundAboutPhilly garnered media coverage in nearly 100 outlets in the U.S. and Canada. Within hours of the launch, bloggers were giving rave reviews of the podcasts, as
exemplified by the following blurb from blog Breakaway Content: "Great example of podcasting for the travel industry and tourism promotion." The enthusiastic feedback prompted
other bloggers to pick up the story and write their own posts.
Pew Charitable Trusts, which conceived and subsidized the project, was delighted with the end result. "[GPTMC] really have an eye and ear as to what Philadelphia tourists are
looking for. They took this initial idea and really just ran with it--and made SoundAboutPhilly what it is."
For Bean, a key lesson learned was to remember that the podcasts were a story that could be pitched in myriad ways to media. "We pitched the [African-American] podcast story as
both a business story and as a text story," Bean says. "Then we also pitched each tour to appropriate niche media. That inclusion really worked well for us."
In the eight months following the September 2006 launch, 84,457 visitors have made 129,686 visits to the SoundAboutPhilly site. Also, there have been more than 529 visitors
site per day and 56,786 podcast tour downloads. PRN
CONTACTS:
Caroline Bean, [email protected], Suzanne Biemiller, [email protected]
Keeping It Real
Caroline Bean, who heads national media relations for the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, has this cogent advice for other tourism agencies looking to boost
their tourism via podcasts:
"We definitely have gotten a lot of interest from other cities and attractions [as a result of these podcasts]. Even a couple of museums have called. We had a fantastic grant
that covered a lot of things beyond just the creation of the tours: It also covered the marketing, and not everyone can have that. The important thing is just to keep it
authentic. It doesn't have to be a perfect audio recording, but what you do have to have is truth in the storytelling."