Do people know about Malta?

The other day I was attending a truly interesting breakfast meeting about tourism and one of the speakers said, quite correctly, that whereas Stonehenge was known throughout the world, Hagar Qim, or even Mosta church with its wonderful dome, were not.

I added that even more worrying was the fact that today Malta as a country and its location were not generally known by the vast majority of people outside the Maltese islands.

I will elaborate.

A few weeks ago, my son was returning from an overseas property exhibition in London. Some 60,000 people, all interested in purchasing homes abroad, visited the exhibition. My son told me he was most surprised that few people knew about Malta and where Malta was.

We eventually had a very good response from the exhibition but this entailed a hard job selling Malta and its merits before we even started on property.

I am sure that many who are reading this article have experienced the situation when abroad - people you talk to asking where Malta is and what it does. Some don't even know it is a country!

Why is this? I'll tell you why. Because nobody bothers to tell them.

How can we succeed as a business or financial centre or as a tourist destination if people don't know about us?

We can advertise, but this costs money and to get all the people who matter to know about us will cost a fortune, but we do have to get people to know Product Malta.

We must sell people the idea of Malta by effective advertising and through the determined use of our embassies. But, more important than this, we must use effective public relations, which at the moment is practically non-existent in Malta.

We do not have a good, or even mediocre, public relations organisation in Malta that could tell the world about us.

Example: Our small company last year used a public relations firm in London and we managed to get a very good article published in the national press in England, which greatly helped create awareness of our company and our islands, increasing sales considerably.

What Malta needs is a Malta-based, first-class professional public relations organisation, spending all its time contacting the world about how good we are and what a great place it is to come and visit or set up business. Anything good that happens in our islands must be told to as many people as possible.

The weather, for instance, is one of our prime assets. Malta is hardly ever mentioned in weather forecasts on prime media. In fact, in most weather maps Malta disappears from the screen. Public relations would help to get us mentioned on a regular basis.

Soon Malta will be hosting the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference. This is an ideal time to grab the world's attention and our public relations organisation would be working full blast, that is...if we had one - and I do not mean a government department of information.

All local organisations and businesses that try to bring wealth to Malta should cooperate and insist that we have a professional body to tell the world about us.

A professional public relations organisation will effectively help everybody and make Malta known throughout the world for the correct reasons.

I added that even more worrying was the fact that today Malta as a country and its location were not generally known by the vast majority of people outside the Maltese islands.

I will elaborate.

A few weeks ago, my son was returning from an overseas property exhibition in London. Some 60,000 people, all interested in purchasing homes abroad, visited the exhibition. My son told me he was most surprised that few people knew about Malta and where Malta was.

We eventually had a very good response from the exhibition but this entailed a hard job selling Malta and its merits before we even started on property.

I am sure that many who are reading this article have experienced the situation when abroad - people you talk to asking where Malta is and what it does. Some don't even know it is a country!

Why is this? I'll tell you why. Because nobody bothers to tell them.

How can we succeed as a business or financial centre or as a tourist destination if people don't know about us?

We can advertise, but this costs money and to get all the people who matter to know about us will cost a fortune, but we do have to get people to know Product Malta.

We must sell people the idea of Malta by effective advertising and through the determined use of our embassies. But, more important than this, we must use effective public relations, which at the moment is practically non-existent in Malta.

We do not have a good, or even mediocre, public relations organisation in Malta that could tell the world about us.

Example: Our small company last year used a public relations firm in London and we managed to get a very good article published in the national press in England, which greatly helped create awareness of our company and our islands, increasing sales considerably.

What Malta needs is a Malta-based, first-class professional public relations organisation, spending all its time contacting the world about how good we are and what a great place it is to come and visit or set up business. Anything good that happens in our islands must be told to as many people as possible.

The weather, for instance, is one of our prime assets. Malta is hardly ever mentioned in weather forecasts on prime media. In fact, in most weather maps Malta disappears from the screen. Public relations would help to get us mentioned on a regular basis.

Soon Malta will be hosting the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference. This is an ideal time to grab the world's attention and our public relations organisation would be working full blast, that is...if we had one - and I do not mean a government department of information.

All local organisations and businesses that try to bring wealth to Malta should cooperate and insist that we have a professional body to tell the world about us.

A professional public relations organisation will effectively help everybody and make Malta known throughout the world for the correct reasons.