Politicians do it. Rock stars do it. Authors, actors and athletes do it.
Whatever kind of public figure you are -- or work for -- one thing is true: Your suitcase will get battered and you'll spend far more time than you'd like in tour buses, taxis and airports.
How can you maximize the value of a road trip?
And how can you avoid common problems that pop up, time after time?
Here are three key tips for maximizing road trips and three ways to avoid common problems.
Three tips for maximizing your tour:
1) Reach Out Before the Trip
The real work happens long before the plane touches town or the tour bus pulls off the highway.
Contact the local media and get interviews and coverage done ahead of time.
Not only to save time, but to make sure the local people know you're coming. That way, you get stories telling people you're coming, not that you already came and went -- and that means more live bodies at your book signing, rock concert or stump speech.
2) Keep a Public Log During the Trip
Not a diary, because it's not about you.
Use social media to post photos, tweets, short blog posts or video clips about the place you're visiting and the people you meet. Make it about them. They're the reason you're coming. They're the reason you're a public figure in the first place.
Go beyond knowing the name of the city you're playing.
Show that you're paying attention and cared enough about their home to shoot some photos of landmarks on your iPhone, take a video of an interesting person you met or post a photo of you with a local fan.
3) Reach Out After the Trip
Tell people thank-you. Tell it to the reporters who interviewed you, to the people who helped organize the event and to anybody interesting you connected with, in person or online.
Because hopefully, you'll be back in that same town. Another concert, a new book, another campaign. Something.
3 Ways to Avoid Problems on the Road
1) Always be Ready for the Press and Public
When you're on tour, pretend that the cameras are always on and the microphone is never more than a foot away.
Public figures are always getting in trouble for behaving badly on the road. They're tired. Road weary, cranky. Plus being in a different city can make you feel anonymous.
For some reason, airports bring out the worst in celebrities. This is where the paparazzi tends to get into fist-fights with Hollywood actors, where TV crews ambush politicians and where public figures of all sorts get caught (a) wearing pajamas, (b) looking like zombies, (c) abusing baristas at the airport Starbucks for messing up their Americano or (d) being pajama-wearing zombies who abuse the Starbucks baristas.
When you leave home base and go on tour, you're on tour until the tour is over and you close the front door.
2) Don't Go Crazy with the Quotes
This is a particular problem for authors and politicians. For authors, you're talking to hundreds of reporters and fans about a book you wrote. How do you not go insane saying the same thing over and over and over?
Stump speeches are even worse. Speechwriters and the PR staff want the candidate to be disciplined and stick to the same stump speech, the one that's been perfected and practiced after weeks or months of sweat and trouble.
But the candidate doesn't want to be a robot, and the traveling press corps -- the big shots from The New York Times and Associated Press and The Washington Post -- punish candidates who give the same boring stump speech ten times a day.
No reporter wants to follow a candidate through the cornfields of Iowa and the snows of New Hampshire to file story after story about the same exact stump speech. This is why reporters like candidates who don't have a set stump speech at all. Every campaign stop, they might say something different, interesting and newsworthy.
Both extremes are wrong. You can't let the road turn you into a robot, but you can't abandon all discipline and give voice to whatever pops into your head, unfiltered.
Be interesting, sure. Before you say something risky, ask people you trust.
3) Don't Take It for Granted
Going on the road can turn cities into a blur of days and weeks.
You've got to focus on the moment, on the reporter doing an interview or the fan asking you a question or the event itself.
To a public figure, that interview or question from a fan might not be a big deal. It may happen twenty times a day. The event may happen three times a day in three different cities.
To the small-town reporter doing the interview, however, this may be the biggest story they've done so far. To the fan asking a question, it might be a dream come true to meet you, ask you that question and shake your hand.
And to all the people coming the event, it matters. You've got to focus on right now, because the press and public can tell when you're phoning it in. There's no generation with more experience and exposure to celebrities. They can spot it when somebody's faking it or is too tired to care.
A great lesson from rhetoric is simply this: you have to feel the emotion that you want the audience to feel.
What do you want every person you meet on tour, and every audience you see, to feel?
You want them to be excited, to be inspired, to feel something intense and out of the ordinary. So you've got to feel -- and broadcast -- those emotions. You've got to feel excited and inspired.