Ideas from SoMeT

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?

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