Leif Pettersen, renowned P/R expert and juggler, joins the Destination Marketing Podcast to talk Public Relations for Destination Marketers. Topics include taking risks in P/R, creating urgency for the media, and common P/R mistakes destinations make.
“If it makes you a little bit nervous, it’s probably gonna be great…draw the line at panic. If you start to panic, probably a bad idea. But anywhere between ‘I’m bored’, and ‘a little nervous’, you’re going in the right direction” – Leif Pettersen on taking risks in P/R.
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Transcript:
Adam Stoker: Welcome again everybody to another episode of the Destination Marketing Podcast. I’m your host Adam Stoker and glad to be back with a normal episode this week. Thanks for bearing with me last week as I was recording from home. Although it was fun to get to know Kyle and learn a little bit about the man behind the computer. He puts a lot of the episodes together, does a lot of editing work and has to edit out a bunch of the weird, dumb, annoying stuff that I say. It’s nice to have him protecting my reputation there on the editing. Thanks, Kyle, for being with us last week. We’ve got another great guest for you guys today. I touched a little bit on this guest and that I was excited to bring him on. We haven’t talked PR a lot and today we have Leif Pettersen. Leif, welcome to the show.
Leif Pettersen: Thank you. I’m happy to be here.
Adam Stoker: Well we’re excited to have you on. We’re going to dive into all things PR. I read your bio that you’ve got on your LinkedIn page and for anybody that hasn’t seen Leif’s bio, you need to go check it out because that alone, is like a podcast episode in its entirety. I want to talk about a few things in there if that’s okay. First, every single episode we always ask people, and you’re a pretty well-traveled guy so you’re going to have some good answers to this, but if you could go anywhere in the world, what’s your dream destination?
Leif Pettersen: Okay, well I mean that changes from moment to moment, but at this moment I am plotting to finally get to Argentina. Not original, but I’ve never found the time and had the ability to take the time off and also have the money. I always either have too much time and not enough money or the other way around. So, Argentina, I want to go there and do it right, for three weeks. Also, I haven’t been to, strangely enough because we’re going to talk about this later, I haven’t been to Romania in almost 10 years. I really miss it and I would love to go back there.
Adam Stoker: All right. So leading into our next question, is that your favorite place you’ve ever visited?
Leif Pettersen: Oh, I have a very complicated emotional relationship with Romania. It’s a fantastic place to visit, it’s a challenging place to live. I did live there for about a year and a half, and most of that time was before they joined the European Union. Things were a little less reliable in terms of, hot water being available every day, stuff like that. The internet just disappearing. I lived there during a challenging time. By all accounts, it’s much better. The food is good. Back, even just 10 years ago, you didn’t eat food in Romania for enjoyment, you just ate it to forestall death. There was no joy in the food and now it’s having this huge uptick, they just need the tourism people to show up.
Adam Stoker: Okay. So you want to go experience the other side of Romania, maybe the more enjoyable side, it sounds like.
Leif Pettersen: I haven’t done a trip around Romania just for pure leisure in more than a decade. Actually, I’m going to say it was 2005 the last time I did that. Every other time has been work-related. So yes, I want to go and be a tourist and revisit the country where I’ve spent the most time outside of the United States.
Adam Stoker: Awesome. You brought up Argentina and you said you need three weeks to do it right.
Leif Pettersen: Minimum.
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