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The A Head for PR team had plenty to smile about at the first ever Devon Tourism Conference when their talk, Creating a Story out of Nothing was described as "excellent" by esteemed Travel Editor Simon Calder who also spoke at the Conference.

Emphasising the importance of grasping a nugget of information or something that may be right under your nose, but which sometimes is too close for the client to see, we looked at a couple of examples of campaigns we had carried out for Visit South Devon, North Devon+ and the Dartmoor Tourism Partnership.

South Devon crab was a prime example - who would have thought that a successful campaign that got over £1 million of editorial and broadcast coverage - could have been based on this largely ignored crustacean? And what about the beautiful gardens of North Devon - packaged together these have become a "must see" for many visitors to the area. And of course sometimes you are really fortunate and an idea falls into your lap. Thanks to War Horse and A Head for PR's research on what to see and do on Dartmoor, the area received over £342,000 in editorial coverage, just in January 2012.

Our short talk gave lots of pointers about looking after journalists and ensuring that good images and the right information gets to them ahead of their deadlines. In the final analysis, good PR is about creativity and imagination combined with the skills and experience to make the ordinary extraordinary.

Two more clients came on board in the last two months of 2011. The SCCI Group announced its acquisition of security specialist Alphatrack. We are working with both companies to show there are very positive stories to be told around investment and safeguarding jobs plus a very bright future ahead involving national expansion of an already successsful regional business. Watch this space for more on this story.

Associate company, SCCI Energy published a case study of a Dorset based farmer who thinks that there is still everything to play for when it comes to the generation of solar energy on his Tarrant Crawford farm.

A Head for PR recognised the existing press interest in solar energy and used the angle about cuts in the Government's Feed-In-Tariff to maximise the story. We pushed the messages out to key specialist press writing for agricultural and energy sectors as well as to local and regional publications and some national business writers.

BBC Countryfile came to film at the farm, and two key farming publications will be publishing the story in the New Year together with a number of energy magazines. And we haven't finished yet.....

We are delighted to have won the contract for the marketing and PR of a fascinating project called Harvesting Voices and will be working closely with the Blackdown Hills AONB and oral historian Judy Simmonds to promote the new "Harvestories" oral history website.

The project is funded by Making It Local, a Rural Development Programme England grant programme and AONB's own Sustainable Development Fund.

Harvestories aims to preserve and bring together the material gathered through an earlier Blackdown Hills AONB project called "Voices from the Hills" and other related existing local collections of voice recordings. The project will encourage greater appreciation of the AONB's natural beauty and in particular its cultural and social heritage for both residents and visitors to the area.