Volume II | Issue no. 1
Key Takeaways from the Queensland Case StudyUser generated content will challenge your intestinal fortitudeSome of it will be pretty good.
But most of it will be awful.
Some of it will be controversial.
Maybe even downright offensive. Make peace with it and leave it alone. If you try to remove it, you will likely do more damage than if you just ignore it. Social media costs more than you thinkAccording to Chris Chambers, no new marketing dollars were allocated for The Best Job In The World campaign. They funded the entire program by diverting the bulk of their annual marketing budget to the six week campaign and convincing their various partners to pool funds slated for other, more traditional tactics. Politics aside, this was a big leap of faith for a lot of people accustomed with doing things the same old way. While the total budget for the campaign has not been disclosed, the advertising portion alone has been estimated to be $1.2 Million. Add to that the cost of developing all of the creative, the website, the social media channels, the public relations effort and paying the winning applicant, and you have a pretty significant spend for a small tourism bureau like Queensland. It takes more effort than you can imagineIn terms of human effort, Chris said they totally underestimated the time required to pull the social media effort off. In addition to the 34,680 videos, they also received over 20,000 emails. On their Facebook page, fans would respond to questions, but they had to moderate by actively listening and correcting mistakes and misinformation. And someone had to watch those 34,680 job application videos to pick the winner. The Tourism Queensland folks were totally overwhelmed and had to work crazy hours. They had prepared 3-4 people to watch 4,000 videos in a few half day sessions. It turned out they needed 35-40 people to vet the final 9,000 videos over the last weekend. In a panic, they enlisted volunteers from the community to help. Their advertising agency help out, too. | ||
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.
Great comments. Please send me more links of researched articles and journals to the topic
It certainly is a good strategy to make use of social media to promote your business. It may cost a little but definitely the return will be enormous. - GAR Labs
It certainly is a good strategy to make use of social media to promote your business. It may cost a little but definitely the return will be enormous.
As long as there are people there will be social. We are joined together by interests, community, or service in one capacity or another. Technology has evolved to the point where we can communicate quickly, effectively and more frequently. Social media is new for business because they now are being pulled in through the virtue people are talking about them whether or not their in the conversation. It's in their best interests to join in and promote their brand. Social media marketing is a big deal in today's environment. Very lucrative potential to those who embrace it.