Volume II | Issue no. 1
Social Media Best Practices in Destination MarketingDon’t try to make it viralThink big, but keep in mind that very few social media campaigns break through. If you are lucky enough to get on the wave, ride it for all it’s worth. Six weeks is a short timespan, and when its over, its hard to maintain that kind of momentum without the money to pay for it.
Planning and execution are keyThe Best Job In The World campaign was highly orchestrated. Timing was critical. It was a tough time for the tourism industry and they had planned phases to draw out results. It was important to launch before the Obama inauguration to avoid getting lost, but take advantage of the lift from Australia: The Movie. They had to alter their plans on the fly whenever opportunities arose. Set goals so you can measure successThe Queensland marketing team struggled with setting goals for the campaign as they had never undertaken anything like it and there were no benchmark metrics to consider (one of the biggest challenges with social media). They were spending a lot of money and expending significant effort, so they needed to define what would constitute success. Their constituents and partners would demand it. They finally settled on a goal of 400,000 total visitors to The Best Job In The World website (as of the end of October, they had exceeded 8.4 million visitors from every country in the world), with 1-3% applying for the job (2.8% actually applied). Don’t try to fake it: you’ll get caughtAt the start of The Best Job In The World campaign, Cummins Nitro seeded the website with a video story about a woman who tattooed an advertisement for the Great Barrier Reef on her arm to win the job. According to Chris, their intention was to give an example of the kinds of videos they were looking for from applicants.
Unfortunately, when word got out, the social networks took over and the outcry, “FAKE!! -The Best Job In The World FRAUD EXPOSED!!” and the accompanying anger went around the world in no time. It took several days of damage control (using additional unplanned resources) and a public apology to eventually quell the storm. There you have itQueensland successfully used social media as a part of an integrated destination marketing campaign to drive traffic to their website (8.4 million site visitors, from every country) and visitors to their destination (Australia tourism down, but Queensland tourism up 20%). We've got our first ROI story from other sources and the start of our social media integration best practices list for destination marketers. If you have something to add, please comment. And don’t forget to check back as our research on this subject uncovers more insights. | ||
Social media strategies conference in San Francisco – six key takehomes.
After two packed days of listening to some of the best tourism companies in the world presenting their current strategies, I thought I’d give a rundown of the things that struck me as good topics to take home from the event and also, hopefully, some salient points of those not fortunate enough to have attended.
The event run by Eye for Travel was the most successful of its kind to date, with standing room only during most of their presentations. Here are a few of my personal takehomes from this event – I hope you find them useful.
1) Is social media the new email?
Is this true? I don’t know yet – but it’s a very good question. Nowadays many people ignore a lot of the emails they get. I myself receive about 45 emails a day that I simply delete without reading. Junk email is the new junk snail mail / post and therefore as more and more people are switching off to the marketing messages that reach them via email, is social media the way to now communicate with your audience? This begs the question – will social media junk mail soon become an issue and what will be done by consumers to combat this? As I mentioned, I have no set opinion on this yet – but I’m going to use this question and rationale to shape my thinking about social media and ponder this concept.
2) Facebook rules OK! But are we wise to avoid the rest?
The majority of presentations at the Eye for Travel event focused on Facebook strategies.Facebook’s market penetration is undeniable – stats show that if Facebook were a country it would be Pangaea, and a community of 400m users is hard to ignore. But I believe we need to be careful about putting far too much stock and effort into this single resource. Using the share functionality you can currently add content from your own social media solution to 246 social media sites and social media networks including Facebook. None of the 245 are as big as Facebook, yet how wise is it to concentrate almost exclusively on FB when every major brand is trying to engage with this 400m community? Wouldn’t it be better to focus on some of the other communities and become the best represented brand on there? It’s definitely something to consider.
3) Look to the future...please?
While it’s clear that today many people are running Facebook campaigns, building their FB communities and Tweeting regularly, where will all this be in 5-10 years? Remember what happened to Friends Reunited – or, more to the point, perhaps you don’t. Is it possible Facebook and Twitter could go this way? Twitter is still very new and has already become the new golden child of the internet. What is next? To use a well-word cliché, it’s probably not wise to put all your eggs in one basket, or all your connections into one social media solution. At the same time it’s important to remember that while the current ‘big spending’ demographic uses Facebook, this will change. Are the younger generations just as likely to use FB? Are there other sites that younger users (tomorrows travellers) using instead? It’s my belief that in a few years time, FB will still be massive, but there will be other equally big players. By investing in each major social network that comes along we are responding to the current trend, but that’s all it is – the current trend. What about the future?
4) Invest in your own social solution.
In my opinion the very best brands are engaging on the current social network and social media communities OFFSITE but they also have a strategy to build their own online community and social media archives ONSITE. By doing this, they are preparing for the future and building a loyal and lifelong community, base not to mention leveraging organic search engine traffic from their social media content.
While your own social site may not grow as fast as your group on Facebook could, I am convinced that the benefit of slowly but surely growing a lifelong base of users in your own community and under your own branding is the most logical and sound strategy to adopt for the longer term. After all, do you really want to invest a large amount of your budget on building a community within another brand that you have little if any control over?
5) Social media is still a baby – what will it grow up to be?
Social media is still a baby and none of us knows exactly what’s going to happen with it. What we do know for certain is that there’s a huge amount of sizzle about this particular area of marketing, and many projections about its significance and its place in marketing budgets over the next few years have been made.
6) Social Media should be judged by the same ROI as other marketing activities and campaigns – but it isn’t! Yet...
Today’s organisations are quick to get involved with Facebook and Twitter but very few are able to show a demonstrative ROI.
Anthony,
Thanks for the summary of the Social media strategies conference. You make a lot of great points, most of which we totally agree with and have written about - especially the point about building your own social solutions on your own internet real estate. I'm sure the readers of our newsletters and blog will find your corroboration valuable.