SoMeT Idea #2: Fish where the fish are: TripAdvisor

Posted: November 30th, 2011

This is the second post in a series of ideas that Rodney shared at SoMeT.

There are 50 million visitors to TripAdvisor each month.  These people are right at the center of the purchase funnel. They’re researching and planning trips.

 

A destination’s TripAdvisor page offers some simple functionality, much like the things you can do on a Facebook Fan Page.  On TripAdvisor, you can upload videos, photos and information for travelers.  This is a huge opportunity that is often overlooked by destinations in favor of a Facebook page.

While Facebook is an excellent way to maintain relationships with people who have experienced and love your destination, TripAdvisor offers a very immediate opportunity because the web traffic that goes there is pre-qualified.  If you share appealing content about your destination on TripAdvisor, you could convince people to book a trip while they’re in a critical stage of the planning process.

DMOs should share photos and videos (either your own or links to Flickr and Youtube) that are relevant to the time of year or what’s going on in your destination right now.

Are you actively managing your destination’s TripAdvisor page?

Posted in By Rodney Payne, Social Media | 1 Comment »

Guest Post: A new way to source content

Posted: November 29th, 2011

There were lots of amazing ideas going around at SoMeT this year.  One that I really liked came from Stephanie Lynch at Hoffman Lewis. Stephanie sadministrate and create the strategy for the State of Missouri’s social media channels: VisitMO.

Finding engaging content is key to community management. You’ve got to be interesting.  If you can share relevant and timely content or just make people laugh, you can keep Fans and Followers coming back for more. Sometimes it can be challenging to keep digging up entertaining content but Stephanie’s found a great solution:

“TVeyes.com is my favorite tool for five reasons:

1. it’s the best TV clipping service I’ve found

2. it has a built in editor for editing clips instantly

3. it clips all major cable networks and all news stations in most of the markets across the U.S.

4. it’s so cheap it’s freakish. $3,500 a year to start

5. it’s the perfect tool to find awesome content about your destination that you can quickly edit, post on YouTube and then post on your social media channels.

I found this hilarious clip about Momo, the Missouri Big Foot from the show “Cash Cab.” Edited it into a 30 second clip and posted it on Facebook. This took me roughly 15 minutes–from the power search on TV Eyes (for content) to uploading on YouTube to posting on Facebook with the line: Touring the fall colors this season just got a whole lot more interesting, baby.

This tool is the ultimate content curator. You don’t need to create any content for your social media channels if you have this tool combined with YouTube and Flickr.”

Thanks Stephanie!

You can follow Stephanie at @NtheMO

If you have an idea or initiative that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them: rodney@thinksocialmedia.com with the subject: Earth-shattering Idea.

Posted in By Rodney Payne, Social Media | 3 Comments »

Ideas from SoMeT

Posted: November 23rd, 2011

Dave Serino coaxed me into a Pecha Kucha-style presentation at SoMeT this year in Tunica.

At Think!, we’re constantly trying to come up with innovative ideas and solid strategies for digital and social marketing. Often we have ideas that don’t get used straight away so I thought I’d share some of them with you. After all, ideas have sex with each other and create better little ideas.

I’ll share the ideas that I talked about in my presentation over the coming weeks. Some you may have heard us talk about before, others are a little out of the box, but not all of them are flashy. We’d love to see DMOs and tourism businesses take them and try them. If you use any of them, please let us know how they work!

Here’s Idea #1: Create Social Objects

The transparency brought about by social media forces marketers to focus on offering a quality product. You can’t fake it anymore. Consumers are going to talk to each other and social media just makes it easier.

Destinations (and the tourism businesses within them) need to give travelers things to talk about. As Scott Stratten keeps drilling into us, people don’t talk about ‘Meh’. Give them something ‘remarkable’ to talk about. Remarkable meaning something people will remark on in conversation.

There’s a little town in Alberta called Vulcan. It doesn’t currently have a huge tourism draw so the local DMO got creative. They’ve played up to their name and branded the whole town around Star Trek. The visitors’ center is a giant space ship. They have a scale model of the Enterprise. Even city hall has been rebranded as the Intergalactic Planetary Headquarters. I can’t even imagine that conversation…

There’s lots of other examples too. Fargo have created a replica of the ‘Wood Chipper’ from the movie so visitors can take pictures to share with their networks.

Love Virgina brought their brand to life offline with ‘LOVE’ sculptures . There’s tons of photos that people take with these ‘social objects’ being shared all over the web.

Being remarkable can be as simple as surprising travelers by welcoming them in social media when they arrive in your destination.

What are you doing to encourage travelers to share their experiences?

Posted in By Rodney Payne, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Qantas Twitter Fail shows the importance of a social media crisis plan

Posted: November 22nd, 2011

The unfortunate happenings of a Twitter campaign by Qantas is making the rounds through the blogosphere, Twitter and traditional media as we speak. Qantas was running a hashtag based giveaway promotion during a time where passengers were stranded around the world because of a strike, leading to massive complaints on Twitter instead.

The timing of the promotion was poor, and so was the way Qantas dealt with the underlaying customer service issues. But the reality of of social media is that this situation can happen to anybody. Qantas could have seen this one coming but it’s not always this obvious (ask Nestle, United Airlines or Seaworld).

Calling for a boycot of tourism in a destination is a well known tactic for activist organizations who take issue with something controversial that happens there. Social media is the perfect vehicle to get this message across and organize a stunt with the purpose of attracting main stream media. There are also incidents such as riots, diseases or natural disasters that can seriously affect a destinations image through the stories floating around in social media.

Anybody active in social media needs a crisis communications plan where issues are detected early and responded to in a timely and appropriate matter. We’ve worked on a few of these and the biggest challenge organizations face is that traditional PR methods don’t apply in this situation. It requires a new and unique approach.

When you do it right, you can turn a crisis in a moment of glory as the Red Cross did with a rogue tweet. Qantas should come clean in a transparent way, fix the root customer service issue and offer the prize for their competition to every stranded passenger who has tweeted a complaint.

Everybody else, get a plan ready.

Posted in By William Bakker, Social Media | 2 Comments »

Ensuring that frontline employees experience the best of your destination

Posted: November 17th, 2011

Every day a travel writer somewhere urges readers to ask local experts for advice on where to go and eat during their trip. As a result, millions of travelers every year ask front desk clerks, bell hops, housekeepers and taxi drivers for restaurant suggestions and advice on what to do and see. If the front desk clerk has never been to the attractions in your city or if he/she has only ever eaten at the fast food joints downtown he/she may be hard pressed to get visitors excited about the awesome tapas restaurant with a great wine selection or the moonlight canal rides that they could experience.

As a CVB, we realized that we needed to take steps to make sure that frontline local experts are well educated on what Augusta has to offer, so our Visitors Services Team created FAM tours for frontline employees. Our Visitors Center manager took employees to visit attractions, experience trolley tours, eat at locally-owned restaurants and browse through the galleries, shops and boutiques downtown. (If you find that you don’t have the time or budget to organize extra FAM tours, work with your attractions and restaurants. See if your attractions will allow hotel employees or cab drivers to visit for free or approach local restaurants about offering a free appetizer or dessert when frontline employees wear their work badge or uniform.)

You can never assume that just because people work in the hospitality or travel industry means that they know everything there is to know about the city. Many just don’t have the time or the money to explore everything. Ensuring that frontline employees experience the best of your destination makes it more likely that they’ll spread the word – not only to visitors, but also with friends and family. By organizing these FAMs, we’ve built stronger relationships and watched as frontline employees become advocates for Augusta and champions in customer service.

Guest blog post written by Ashton Randall, Electronic Media Manager at Augusta Convention and Visitors Bureau

If you want to be a guest blogger email Phil@thinksocialmedia.com

Posted in By Phil Moad, Social Media | 2 Comments »