SoMeT Idea #4: Use TripAdvisor to get the right Facebook Fans

Posted: January 23rd, 2012

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

A Facebook page is a great place to grow a community of people who love you.  The most effective strategy isn’t to grow a massive number of fans and then broadcast to them.  People tune out spam and Facebook filters information by determining who engages (clicks like or comments) with which Pages.

The best way to use Facebook is to grow a community of people who love what you offer.

On TripAdvisor, people can write reviews of tourism accommodation and businesses.  The majority of these posts are positive.  Each business has the ability to respond to these reviews by setting up an account. Best practice for reputation management is to respond to each and every review. It’s important to respond to people who’ve taken the time to give you feedback.  If someone comes to your customer service counter, you don’t stand there and stare at them. You engage them in conversation.

It’s also important to remember not to focus on the negative reviews.  If you ignore the positive reviews you can quickly begin to look defensive. It’s important to be conversational and human.

The people who take the time out to right positive reviews must really love what a business does. You’ve positively affected them enough that they remember to go online and take time out of their day to tell the world how great you are.

You should thank them.  Better still, why not invite them to come and join your Facebook Page so you can stay in touch.  These people could become your best advocates and most engaged fans.

If a tourism business doesn’t have time to maintain their own Fan Page properly, you can always send them to the destination’s page.

It sounds time consuming, but in reality most businesses only have a few hundred reviews in total.

Are you responding to all of your reviews?

Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Kicking off the new year with Karen

Posted: January 6th, 2012

Think! has started the new year with a new team member. We are really happy to have Karen Brackett join us as a client service manager. She has a valuable blend of digital marketing experience and high-quality project management drawn from seven years of working with agencies in Vancouver. She’ll be bringing communications excellence, strategic focus and logical thinking to the projects that she manages.

Karen is in the office and getting up to speed quickly, so please join us in welcoming her!

Now we just need to get her a desk. Soon, very soon! :-)

Posted in Around the office | No Comments »

The New Insights

Posted: December 21st, 2011

Last week, the old version of Facebook Insights faded into history, replaced by a leaner, more focused version. The new Insights places less of a focus on Likes, as maturing Fan pages switch from Growth to Engagement+Growth. Troy Thompson at Travel 2.0 made this observation earlier this year.

2012 will be all about Engagement.

It’s not enough to have tens or even hundreds of thousands of Fans if they aren’t interacting with your Brand. Engagement is about turning passive observers into passionate contributors. The Holy Grail of Engagement is a Brand who barely posts content because Fans are sharing their own content that reflects the Brand. The example below is the Powder Highway page, which has seen incredible Fan posted content.

The new Facebook Insights makes steps towards creating Intelligence on what content is engaging and highlights 4 important metrics:

  • Weekly Total Reach
    • The unique number of Fans who have seen content posted to your page
  • People Talking About
    • The number of Fans who have shared your pages content to their network by way of Comments, Posting to your Wall, Liking a Post, Answering a Question, etc.
  • Friends of Fans
    • The number of potential Fans you can reach through your pages current Fan network
  • Total Likes
    • The current number of people who Like your page (Fans)

For Tourism Organizations, the primary KPI’s to measure using these metrics are

  1. Reach (Awareness)
  2. Engagement (Organic Conversation)
  3. Industry Leads (Conversions)

Your Reach can be targeted in two ways: targeting to potential Fans, and targeting Friends of Current Fans. In a funnel Structure, this is the top and largest part of your funnel.

Your Engagement percentage is the number of Total Fans divided by People Talking About. The Goal here is to increase the People Talking About number, turning passive observers into passionate contributors.

Depending on the structure of your particular organization, Industry Leads are the Conversions that happen when Engaged Fans take your desired action, such as a click through to your website, sign up for a newsletter, or filling out a form. It’s important to note that Facebook currently does not track Conversions, so a Link Tracker must be used (such as Bit.ly) to see this data.

As part of a Social Media Strategy, filling this funnel and strengthening the levels within it is key to keeping your Fans, while turning them into SuperFans who impact your business.

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Posted in By Joel Marc, Facebook, Social Media | 3 Comments »

SoMeT Idea #3: Facebook Ads are like gold

Posted: December 20th, 2011

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

There aren’t many opportunities as powerful as the targeting available through Facebook ads .  The demographic and interest-based targeting is almost unparalleled.

You can target an ad using traditional demographics like age, gender and location.  However you can also get more detailed and dabble in psychographics like sexual orientation, marital status or where someone went to college.  One of the most powerful tools available is targeting Facebook users’ interests – ie what they ‘Like’.

You can run ads for a variety of objectives:

1. Acquisition: One of the best ways to use Facebook ads is to grow fans for your destination or business. Make sure you’re acquiring the right fans – people who love you – rather than people who clicked ‘Like’ to win a competition or for special offer.  If you have a budget for this, spend it all at once. There’s not much to be gained by spreading it out over time.  The trick, though, is to manage the community carefully once you’ve got fans so that you don’t disengage people. This takes skill and experience.  If you do it well, you have a cash cow of advocates that you can rely on for web traffic, referrals and feedback that can offer value for the life time of your fans.

2. Engagement: Facebook offers a Sponsored Stories promotion that allows Fan Page owners to promote specific conversations in news feeds.  This is a great way to get extra exposure for a particular topic or offer.  It also helps to bump up engagement on the page and can lead to some organic fan acquisition.

3. Traffic: You can use Facebook ads to send users to anywhere on the web.  I’d recommend against linking outside of Facebook but you can use ads to drive to a competition, custom tab or application quite effectively. Generally speaking, Facebook users like to stay in the Facebook platform.

We’re seeing prices increase steadily and expect this trend to continue.  At the moment, the value that Facebook’s ad platform offers is a bargain.  As large media budgets shift towards digital in the coming months and years, they’ll force up bid prices for the same eyeballs.

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

Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Think! opening in Amsterdam starring Isabel Mosk

Posted: December 19th, 2011

We’re very happy to announce Think! will open an office in Amsterdam on February 1, 2012 to serve the European market.

Our operations in Amsterdam will be lead by Isabel Mosk. She is well respected and brings a wealth of modern destination marketing knowledge and expertise to our team.

Isabel joins us from the Netherlands’ Board of Tourism and Conventions (NBTC) where she started in 2007 as a marketing consultant. In 2009, she made the jump to being an online consultant and started focusing on social media, online campaigns, trends and development.

While at the NBTC, she established the Innovatielab – a joint initiative between the NBTC, HSMAI Netherlands and NHTV Breda University. This group works together to increase the knowledge of social media in the Netherlands’ tourism markets and helps bring consumers and operators closer together. Isabel also established #LoveHolland, a social platform where visitors and residents share their finest videos and photos of Holland.

She earned her degree at the NHTV Breda University for Applied Sciences, specializing in Tourism and Marketing. She also spent time as the marketing communications specialist for Beverwijkse Bazaar B.V., Europe’s largest indoor bazaar – a multicultural market that saw four million visitors a year.

Having traveled around the world, Isabel has found a natural match in tourism with her love for travel and getting in touch with other cultures.

Her experience and passion for tourism will fit right in with the innovative crowd at Think! We’re all thrilled to be opening operations in Europe and are very pleased to have Isabel on board to kick things off.

Interested in learning more? You can reach Isabel at Isabel@thinksocialmedia.com and follow her on Twitter @isabelmosk

Posted in Around the office, By William Bakker, Social Media | No Comments »

Think! outside the box this holiday season

Posted: December 5th, 2011

As we have all seen over the past few months, Facebook is making a lot changes to its newsfeed, and  you may have noticed that when lots of people and pages are talking about the same thing they get grouped together.

Unless you want that happy holidays post you have planned to go unnoticed this season you are going to have to be a little more playful with your wording. The best suggestion I have for wishing your fans a happy holidays is with imagery. Encourage your fans to share a happy holidays picture like the one below or have fans use our postcards application and send cards to their friends. It will not only keep you out of the conversation filter but will grow your fan base and bring your engagement up.

Posted in By Phil Moad, Social Media | No Comments »

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 | No 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 »