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

Many DMOs use contests to drive web traffic and collect consumer data, run surveys or grow Facebook Fan Pages.  There’s a huge number of contests on the web these days and it’s getting harder to get noticed.

Good online contests will have sharing in mind.  There are many mechanisms like Facebook’s Open Graph and Twitter’s API that let you design contests that self-promote.

If you design your contest cleverly, you can make it remarkable enough that it promotes itself. The prize itself can be one of the most effective talking points.

When you’re dreaming up prizes and competitions, get to know the niche that you’re targeting. Offer something that appeals within a community that means something special to that group of people.  Kootenay Rockies Tourism Association in Eastern British Columbia does this with their bi-annual Ultimate Ski Bum competition.  The region has some of the best skiing in the world. They work together with the industry in their region to offer a prize that skiers will talk about: One lucky person wins 8 season passes, 3 months of hotel accommodation, a rental car and 12 days of heli and cat skiing.

By far the best prizes offer something that money can’t buy. The Cook Islands ran a very clever campaign in the scuba diving market.  The prize: the winner gets to name their very own dive site in the South Pacific.

What could you offer that money can’t buy?

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

I was in a burrito joint in Los Angeles with Ben last month.  On the counter, there was a jar full of business cards.  You could put your card in to win a monthly prize: a free burrito!

Many destinations maintain an email newsletter to market to travelers and a common objective is to grow the size of the database.  Destinations invest a lot of resources in capturing new leads but there could be a better way.

Why not work with all of the businesses in your industry to create a network to collect email addresses of travelers?  You could offer a small monthly prize – say a free hotel night.

People are often skeptical of marketers when the incentive is too big.  Perceived value needs to equate to input.  A business card is worth a burrito.  If there’s a bigger reward, there’s either a catch or I’m not likely to win.

Have you thought of any clever ways to collect email addresses?

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

How many hotels have we stayed in that send guests to their website once you’ve logged in to wifi. This seems crazy to me. Am I the only one?  I’ve already bought a hotel room… I’m sitting in it!  What else can you possibly sell me from the home page of your website?  Why wouldn’t you use the opportunity to connect with guests on your Facebook Fan Page. You could even give them some great information to make their stay better.

If your hotel doesn’t have time to do a good job of maintaining a Facebook Page, why not try and send traffic to your destination’s Fan Page?

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

One of the best opportunities provided by social communication tools is for destinations to stay in touch with consumers post-trip.  Until recently, this has been quite costly and time consuming.  It’s very hard to have a relationship through a newspaper ad, direct mail or email newsletter.  But now you can keep in touch easily online.

The best way to connect with travelers to start a relationship is when people are in-market.  There are a variety of ways that you can do this but one of the best is when they’re actually online.

Most destinations have an airport, train station, bus station or visitors center that offers WIFI and sees a large proportion of visitors come through the doors.  Getting people to connect on Facebook right there and then is one of the most under-realized opportunities in destination marketing.  If you could get every person who uses WIFI in your airport to connect on your Fan Page, you’d quickly have a big community of the right fans.

You’ll get a lot of locals too but that’s actually a good thing.  Locals are your ambassadors online. They’re often passionate about where they live. They can support travelers. Many of the people in their networks will live elsewhere and can become visitors.  That’s a pretty huge opportunity when you consider that the average Facebook user has 130 friends.

Most airports send people to their web page once they’ve logged on to the Internet or even just set them free on Google.  This is a huge mistake.  If you send them to a Facebook page and offer them a reason to click ‘Like’, you can stay in touch with them forever.  Better yet, why not give free WIFI to fans. Make people click ‘Like’ to access the Internet.  There are 800 million people on Facebook so chances are your air travelers are there. If they’re not, they may prefer to set up a Facebook account than pay.

Calgary Airport is coming close to this by allowing people to ‘connect’ to get two hours of free WIFI.

Imagine if a destination could get all of this traffic to their Fan Page.  I know there are political challenges to this but surely someone out there has a strong enough relationship with the local airport to try?

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

TripAdvisor reviews are really important for hotels and accommodation providers.  The better your reviews, the more exposure you get to the c50 million visitors that TripAdvisor’s gets each month. We’ve worked with hotels that can track a direct correlation between room bookings and their ranking on TripAdvisor.  If there property falls by one place, they see an instant drop in bookings.

I’ve spoken to a hotel in Seattle who is part of a large chain.  They get one million people through their door each year but have less than 200 reviews on TripAdvisor.  Something doesn’t add up.

On Facebook, users can click ‘Like’ on a business’ Fan Page.  It’s most likely that people will stay in touch with a business after they’ve experienced what the business has to offer.  It’s also pretty likely that they’ll love what you have to offer.  It would be really great to see businesses engaging Facebook Fans to write positive reviews on TripAdvisor.  After all, you already know that they ‘Like’ you.

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?

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