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The brand new Dorset Tourism Awards have now launched and businesses need to get their entries in before 28 June. We are proud sponsors of the Awards which are a fantastic opportunity for tourism businesses to showcase the best of what Dorset has to offer giving them the chance to stand out from the crowd and be recognised for their contribution to the industry.

In particular, just like we have with the South West Tourism Awards, we are keen to support Sustainable Tourism in partcular. With more people deciding to take holidays at home it is even more important for us to reward those businesses who strive for excellence in the field of Sustainable Tourism so that visitors to Dorset can choose from a wide choice of accommodation, services and activities that embrace the values of responsible planning and management."

Last night, 18 February 2013 A Head for PR was delighted to discover that we had won the Small Business Sunday #SBS award this week!

Dragons Den entrepreneur Theo Paphitis selects six small businesses to showcase and promote via his website each week and we were chosen to join the exclusive SBS club after describing our business in one Tweet together with the hashtag SBS.

It just shows that persistence really pays off as we have regularly tweeted our business to Theo during the Sunday evening time slot.

This is now a great opportunity to get to know some of the other winning businesses and in true PR fashion to make the most of the opportunity andn encourage our clients to follow in our footsteps with a #SBS Tweet that takes just a few seconds to post but may result in a whole host of new business opportunities.

A great way to start 2013 with the news that A Head for PR will be working on the inward investment campaign Taunton Means Business, devised by Taunton Deane County Council, to encourage more businesses to relocate to Taunton and the surrounding area. In a competitive pitch we delivered an exciting and innovative proposal that we look forward to rolling out in the months ahead.

On 6 February A Head for PR is joining a distinguished panel of speakers at the Westcountry Tourism Conference: http://www.westcountrytourismconference.org.uk/ to talk about a subject very close to our heart: 21st Century PR. Come and join us and tell us what you think about the continuing development of PR in the 21st Century!

This year A Head for PR is sponsoring the Sustainable Tourism Award as part of the South West Tourism Awards www.southwesttourismawards.org.uk being held on 8 February at the fabulous Eden Project.

We are celebrating the news that A Head for PR has retained the Visit Devon account after a competitive pitch. We love doing PR for travel and tourism destinations and are particularly pleased to be helping the new Devon Tourism Partnership raise its profile and shout about the Visit Devon brand.

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.