A New CEO and a Little Navel-gazing

Posted: May 1st, 2013

Everyone at Think! spends most of their days thinking, planning and acting on behalf of our amazing clients. We have been doing this for four years now – four exciting years.

Rodney Payne, Think! CEO
Rodney Payne, new CEO of Think! Social Media
If you told anyone at Think! in 2009 that in four short years they would be part of a company that serves tourism clients around the world through offices in four countries, it is very likely you would have seen their eyes sparkling while picturing the possibility, but no one solemnly saying “Indeed, we will.” Though that could be mostly because no one has actually said “indeed” since the Victorian age. So, to us, the past four years have been amazing. They have brought a wave of nail-biting excitement, ambitious growth, heart-pounding leaps of faith, a few toes being stubbed and a bag full of ideas running the gamut from brilliant to out-of-this-world. Along the way, we found clients willing to make the journey with us, and together, bringing to life clever strategies and creative concepts to let people do what they love most: dream of fulfilling their passions. It is remarkable how often people’s passions are tied to their experiences in other places and with other cultures.

All of these journeys have been driven by a growing team of voracious travel-loving, online geeks who are also digital marketing professionals that wholly believe we can make the world a better place, one destination at a time. With four years and four offices under our collective belts, we realize that it is time for Think! to take a slightly sharper shape. In the beginning, we were a classic, energetic startup: A core group covering anything and everything that needed to be done. We still feel like those start-up kids but know, realistically, that we have matured into a small but focused company where specialists are filling the ranks of our project teams.

To reflect this latest advancement in the Think! journey, we have done a bit of organizing. We still have our early values at heart and believe in everyone working closely and communicating freely with each other. We are not big on hierarchies here. But to guide the continued development of Think! more formally, we have set up a limited structure within the company. We have shunned the traditional org chart and instead created an org Venn diagram. We now have a central management team that oversees three core areas of activity within Think!: Ben Vadasz leads business development, William Bakker leads strategy, and Holly Cuny leads implementation. Everyone who works at Think! falls within one or more of those areas.

Think! org Venn diagram

Leading all of us is Rodney Payne as our new CEO. Those of you who know Think! well are not surprised by this. Rodney’s vision gave Think! its original shape. He and Ben founded Think! in 2009 (even earlier, if you count the Platypus Express; though you will need to ask one of them if you want to know that story). For our current clients and our clients-to-be, we are happy to introduce you to our first CEO. If you have not met Rodney yet, chances are you will soon. In his new role, he will be focusing on where Think! goes in the next four years and beyond. That work can be successful only when he has a chance to meet and talk with many of you to understand how the tourism industry is developing and what you need to thrive.

To see the whole Think! team, check out our people.

THINK! Tank: Conferences and events where we’ll be presenting/attending

Posted: April 23rd, 2013


ThinkSpeakers

Think!lings are always on the move; in addition to working with great international clients, we attend and speak at tourism/social media conferences, events and general meetings around the world. Here’s where some of team members from our international offices will be over the next several months.

Be sure to say hello or reach out via @ThinkSM to let us know where you’ll be.

Think! Amsterdam

Think! Detroit

Think! Sydney

Think! Vancouver

  • Ben Vadasz will be presenting at the SimpleView Summit in Tucson, AZ - April 28-May 1
  • William Bakker and Ben Vadasz will be attending and presenting on the topic ”Be Unforgettable in Social Media”  at the Idaho State Conference in Boise, ID – May 7-9
  • William Bakker will be presenting at TBEX in Toronto  - May 31 – June 2
  • Ben Vadasz will be also attending the Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) Annual Conference  in Orlando, FL on July 15-17

Learn more about each of our team members here. If you’re interested in having us speak or attend your social media event, please contact Ben@thinksocialmedia.com

 

 

How to Win with Twitter in Travel? (And How New South Wales Won With #Unmapped) – Think! Presentations from ORC13

Posted: April 18th, 2013

Think!’s Dave Serino and Ben Vadasz both recently spoke at social/travel conference Online Revealed Canada in Windsor, Ontario. Wished you were there? Now you can be, in a way.

Dave’s presentation focused on Twitter wins for travel destinations and is packed full of facts and recommendations about how to excel on a channel with 140-character limits. Have a peek here:

Meanwhile, Ben’s presentation focused on what we at Think! believe in most: passionate communities. Here he highlights examples from a campaign called Unmapped, created for Destination New South Wales. What happens when you send six bloggers and influencers on an #Unmapped trip around New South Wales with only the suggestions and tips of the community to guide them? Authentic content. Best of all, this was a campaign that engaged communities both online and off; fans, DMO, businesses and stakeholders were all involved. For more on Unmapped, check out this video.
And whether it’s across 140 characters or the vast expanse of Australia – the key to success is listening to your community.

Why is the new Facebook cover image important for DMOs and brands?

Posted: March 26th, 2013

With all the tweaks Facebook has made to the timeline and its plans for its newsfeeds over the past month, one thing really stands out: the Facebook cover photo just  became increasingly important.

In the past, only a small percentage of people would visit your actual Facebook page to see “everything”, so fans might not take notice of your cover image apart from the times when you first post or change it.

With the latest round of Facebook changes, every time someone likes your page, the entire Facebook cover photo – along with the profile picture – is shown in their friends’ newsfeed.

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Sounds like a fantastic new opportunity for pages, however it also means that little more thought may need to go into which cover image you use to represent your destination or brand page.

Your page cover image needs to be current, interesting and should show off the best from your destination or Facebook community.

Some important tips to remember with your cover image:

  • Cover photos are 851 pixels wide and 315 pixels tall
  • Cover images must be a minimum 399 pixels wide
  • Cover images cannot include more than 20% text

The official guideline from Facebook states that “Covers can’t be deceptive, misleading, or infringe on anyone else’s copyright. You may not encourage people to upload your cover to their personal timelines.”

In our experience, we’ve found that the best cover images are:

  • bright in colour
  • not too detailed or busy
  • featuring something remarkable
  • comprised of one strong image rather than composed images
  • reflective of the time, for example a season or event

Make your covers count!

SoMeT Australia, crowd-sourcing events and what DMOs can learn from it

Posted: March 22nd, 2013

Each year, Think! runs the Social Media Tourism Symposium in the USA. It’s a conference designed specifically for destination marketing professionals to learn about the latest ways to apply social media for their organisations. This year, we’re holding a SoMeT event in Australia.

SoMeT is held in a new destination each year but we have an innovative way of choosing a host city: where most conferences have a complicated process behind the scenes, we do it in the open.

The organizing team determines the criteria that we need from a host destination and outlines them in a publicly released Request for Proposal (RFP).  The

BrisbaneWlg

RFP for SoMeT Australia went out last December, and by the end of January we received incredible responses from all over the country. Our team short-listed the responses down to seven finalists that really impressed us through their passion and creativity in the way they met the criteria. This is where the real fun begins. After we were satisfied with all of the destinations, we turned the decision over to the online community through an online voting process run entirely through Facebook. The process for choosing the US host destination is similar.

This year, we held three rounds.  In round one, all seven destinations competed head-to-head. The bottom three were knocked out and the remaining four went into the semi finals.  In the semis, Wollongong played Brisbane and Margaret River played Townsville.  Each destination had to rally as many people as possible to vote for them to host SoMeT.

The winners of the semis went into the final round; Townsville vs. Wollongong. More and more momentum built throughouthe voting process. The final alone attracted nearly 10,000 votes to determine the host city and the process also attracted a significant amount of press along the way.

Wollongong was named our winner and is very excited to host SoMeT Australia on 17-18 July.

What are the benefits for a destination for turning its planning over to a community? 

Turning the destination selection over to our community gets a large amount of exposure for SoMeT. Asking peoples’ opinion builds advocacy. Getting people involved in the process before it’s determined for them is hugely valuable. We let our delegates choose where they’d like to go rather than making a decision for them, and then trying to sell them tickets later. Through the process, we also find that the destination becomes even more passionate about hosting us. A host community that’s engaged and welcoming also creates a much better conference experience for attendees.

QLDWLG

The principles behind planning through crowdsourcing can be applied to many functions that destination marketing organizations are accustomed to doing behind closed doors. Getting your community’s buy-in to decisions builds advocacy. Now that everyone has an audience in social media, rallying your local community through advocacy can get you massive exposure.

Best of all, getting your community to make decisions for you can often mitigate a lot of risk. You get the wisdom of a crowd, rather than relying on your own judgment. This can become a self-fulfilling prophecy that dictates success. This process can also be very cost-effective and allows you to build buzz and momentum along the way.

Social media also removes barriers to entry for smaller destinations. It’s usually easier to rally a small, passionate community.

Said Lisa Budd from Townsville Enterprise Limited: “The campaign has given us so much exposure as an organisation and destination! The community really got behind the entire campaign which is great to see – and it ticks off so many boxes with regards to our goals in building local awareness.”

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How can DMOs apply something like this?

DMOs could apply this learning to their day-to-day activities. You could crowd source a lot of the decisions around campaign planning. We helped Northern BC with a campaign that let fans choose which images to use in their brochures.

like we did as part of an Outback Queensland campaign. Or you could crowd-source images and footage for a campaign like we did with Tourism Ottawa.  Or you could crowd-source the itinerary for a family trip, and build a whole campaign around it, as with Unmapped in Australia.

Turning over your planning to the community totally disrupts the traditional creative process. It can be scary, but with experience you’ll see that the risks are all manageable (that’s why we vet our finalists before voting). But putting social media at the core of all of your activities can really amplify everything you do.

As Tabitha Galvin from Destination Wollongong says: “The most incredible and unexpected benefit of this journey has been the incredible sense of strength and unity throughout the Wollongong community that continued to build as more and more people jumped on board.”

 To learn more about #SoMeT13AUS and #SoMeT13US, please visit sometourism.com or SoMeT’s Facebook page.

Strategy vs. Tactics

Posted: March 12th, 2013
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“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

One major topic of discussion at Think! is whether a client who ask for strategy really wants a strategy, or wants a list of tactics.

Here’s a guide to strategy and tactics.

STRATEGY VS. TACTICS

A strategy is a long-term approach to achieving a big goal. It spans over a longer period of time and describes an approach to achieve that goal. It’s often complex and muli-layered. A strategy allows you to set priorities and focus your resources. It should also define what success looks like.

Tactics are smaller, short-term actions to deliver on the strategy. Tactics need to be evaluated and adjusted constantly based on what is learned along the way. But a strategy needs time and typically stays in place for a longer time unless the goal or other macro variables change.

THE DANGER OF TACTICS WITHOUT STRATEGY

Some people are focused on doing. Strategy to them looks nebulous and intangible. It doesn’t contain specific tasks. But random tactics without a strategy leads to short term actions with unpredictable long-term results. It’s like driving a car around without knowing how to reach your destination. And everybody on your team is driving their cars around in all directions hoping to eventually get there.

That’s why every tactic needs to deliver on a strategy. “Running ads to grow a Facebook page” is a tactic. But why are we doing it? What purpose does it serve? Why is it more important than anything else? And once we have more fans, then what? And how does Facebook fit in with everything else?

WHAT TO ASK YOURSELF (AND US)

  • Do you need ideas for things to do over the next few months based on your existing strategy? You need a tactical plan.
  • Do you need an approach in order to reach a long-term goal and the starting points to go about it? You need a strategy with tactical starting points.

NOTE: This post is reprinted from wilhelmus.ca, the blog of Think!’s William Bakker.

What is Vine and Why Should a Tourism Destination Care?

Posted: March 6th, 2013

Just when you thought you’d wrapped your head around the value of Facebook for your tourism destination brand, and have Instagram (and maybe even Pinterest) in your sights or as part of your social strategy, comes another little big thing: Vine.

Vine

What’s Vine?
Vine is a new video app that Twitter launched at the end of January. It allows users to create short, six-second looping videos. You can take a video that lasts six seconds and then loops, or you can record-pause-record-pause-record etc for a total of 6 seconds, and those clips will be instantly stitched together and posted on your Vine account, or across to your other social channels. It is, in effect, a video version of Pecha Kucha crossed with Instagram. And it’s quite easy to use.

Why should I care?
We know that people are sharing their travel experiences in real-time through photos and posts, uploading on the spot to their network of friends and influencers. With Vine, these same people are now able to upload video quickly and creatively to their Twitter account and not have to faff about with YouTube or another method.

Think! about Instagram
Just last week, TNW reported Instagram had surpassed the 100M-user mark and grew a staggering 11% in 40 days. Elegantly (and sometimes not-so-elegantly) filtered pics of food, friends, hotel rooms, landscapes, events and everything under the sun are being captured and uploaded by people on the move. Your destination, your experiences, your businesses are being shown off to the world – and they probably even have their own hashtag. #Thisisagoodthing

Destinations have started to twig to Instagram, and that’s good, and right. The channel is a viable place finding ambassadors and advocates of your destination, and it’s a creative one, too. But it’s still a channel, and one that requires a strategy, content plan and savvy community management if you’re going to add it to your social media mix.

One of our clients, Tourism BC, has been experiencing good success with its new Instagram channel, and the use of the #ExploreBC hashtag. Photographers are happy that their photos are being shared, and Tourism BC gets to dip into a content pool of excellent photos submitted by normal folks who WANT Tourism BC to see its photos. We’ve been buoyed by the sheer diversity of photo “conversations” that are happening all across the province.

Tourism BC Instagram

But let’s get back to Vine.
Because of its Twitter integration, clean design and usability, it’s not a stretch to expect that Vine could become “the Instagram of video.” Destinations would do well to get in on the action now. There’s not much conversation going on yet on the channel itself, but the fast pick up of the app and use of the videos in tweets means that people are not only talking about and taking pictures of your destination, they are now uploading videos of your destination INSTANTLY. There’s some fertile ground to explore here.

For example, Ian Pagdham created this (okay, advanced) video of San Francisco Civic Centre, which got 51 retweets and was favourited 20 times. His video was named Editor’s Choice by Vine. (Click on the video itself to “pause” it.)

And Globe & Mail travel writer Amberly McAteer proves that you don’t have to be a movie director to get across the point of a simple walk by the ocean. Her posts (as part of a “Week of Vines” in the Cayman Islands for the Canadian national newspaper) were RT’d by the official Cayman twitter account.

So what should we do?
At a minimum, you should be experimenting with this new platform to learn about the opportunities. Get staff to download the app, encourage them to take vids of their day-to-day experiences in your city and then RT or post them on your channels. Find out what residents and visitors who are already using Vine around your city are posting and share the best ones. Leave comments.

Or be strategic about it and discover how (and if) Vine fits within your social strategy. Learn how you can build a community of creative videographers and establish a source of great, short destination videos.

Talk to us if you’d like some help.

How Social is Your DMO?-US Tourism Office Edition, Q4 2012 Edition

Posted: December 13th, 2012

How Social is Your State DMO?

As the  year is coming to a close, we will take a look at the final US State DMO Social Media Rankings for 2012. The How Social is Your DMO? – United States Tourism Office Edition, Q4 2012 rankings have been released and the data is now available for you to see how your state’s DMO measured up at the end of 2012.

Since social media is ever changing, we have again made a few adjustments to the algorithm. Both Pinterest and Instagram were included due to their increasing popularity and online influence.

This quarter, congratulations are in order for Michigan as they grabbed the number one spot and pushed the reigning Florida to number two with Colorado, Hawaii and California rounding out the top five.

The digital marketing efforts of many DMOs improved this past quarter, as there were plenty of “movers” in the Top 25. California moved up seven spots to number five from 12. Illinois also jumped seven spots to number 19 from 26. Indiana raised eight spots to number 23 from 31. Massachusetts soared ten spots to number nine from 19, and Georgia climbed ten spots to number 11 from 21.

Here are some other honorable mentions from the Q4, 2012 results:

  • California flourished in online photography taking first in the Flickr category and tying for first with Michigan in the Instagram category
  • New York led the way in the Twitter category
  • Hawaii ranked number one among DMOs for their Facebook efforts
  • California also took first place in the blog category
  • Michigan held strong with the highest ranked Google+ page

To view the full rankings for November 2012 please visit this link. Keep the comments and feedback coming, as we will continue to consider them in future measurements.

For more info on social media and tourism, be sure to follow Think! Social Media on Twitter at: @ThinkSM or visit us on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/ThinkSocialMedia.

Collaboration, Content, Community: Think! at #SoMeT12

Posted: December 4th, 2012

Think! at SoMeT12, pic by Brandon Williams

Whether it was meeting new people, taking in great presentations, quaffing margaritas, or winning the Social Media Smackdown (what? Parachuting armadillos is a GREAT idea!), members of our Vancouver, Detroit and Sydney offices were out in full force for the 2012 Social Media Tourism Symposium.

Hosted by Think! and held November 7-9 in El Paso, Texas, SoMeT was created to provide an opportunity for DMOs, CVBs, hotels and attractions to get together to swap ideas and tips on how to leverage social media within the tourism industry.

At SoMeT, content and community is key. In keeping with our belief in listening to – and sparking the excitement of – passionate communities, the conference location is determined via online voting and engagement campaigns; speakers pitch a topic that is then voted on by the community; and attendees past and future all have a say in how the conference unfolds. This is what makes SoMeT special. And our symposiasts agree:

With 27 of the top tourism/digital marketing experts in North America and Europe on the speakers’ roster this year, you couldn’t move for good content and advice. The themes that emerged included empowering advocates/ambassadors, curating content from new channels, being mobile, putting social at the core of business, and being interesting. Here are just a few of the takeaways that resonated with us:

  • “If you don’t have interestingness in campaigns, you might as well give up on it…you can try to outspend but that’s a futile attempt. Give away your brand, let people remix your assets. People love their city, love to talk about it and compare and contrast, so give them the assets and let their voice be louder than yours. Your job is in amplifying their stories.” – Dave Olson, Hootsuite
  •  “Stop promoting and posting crap.” – Theresa Overby, Miles Media
  • Get on G+. “I promise you, we’re not letting it go anywhere. It’s only going to become a bigger deal.” – John Thornton, Google
  • Think about Mobile Behaviour before Mobile Technology – think about where [people] are, what it’s like to be in their shoes, and don’t go do what you read about in Mashable or Techcrunch. Everyone’s audience will be different, and you have to be able to nail what will work for your audience before you can think about the technology.” – Tim Hayden, Edelman Digital
  • “If you want to find your most dedicated and devoted fans – share passionate stories. A campaign lasts a short time, but a movement lasts longer. People are the platforms not the tools – give people a platform and it gives them superpowers.” – Amanda Hite, Talent Revolution Inc
  • Want to run an ambassador program? “Keep it small; be picky; do your research into the amabassadors. Let them go behind the scenes; let them do the talking; communicate with them….and never directly tell ambassadors what to say. If they’re true ambassadors, they’ll figure it out.” – Ryan Goff, MGH Inc
  • “In order to be really, really effective, we need to go beyond having a social strategy. We need to understand what the impact is on the organization as a whole. What kind of skills do we need? How do we organize ourselves? What would you do if you could start again and compete with your own organization? Would you do everything the same? Would you produce the same collateral? Would you still have the same people with the same skillsets or would you do it differently?” – our own William Bakker, Think!
  •  “We need to change OUR organization. We need more people with the right skills, we have to train our people who are more used to traditional marketing, and we need to find more bloggers and key influencers…we’re going to keep working and learn from the things we could have done better. We need to work better.” – Thomas Vanderplaetse, Tourism Flanders

So – where to start? Why not share your favourite SoMeT12 moment here, or join us next year at SoMeT13? After all, there there will be not one, but TWO Social Media Tourism Symposiums in 2013.

SoMeT hits the road and makes its debut in Australia on July 17 and 18, while the North America SoMeT runs November 6-8. See you there!

For more information, visit sometourism.com or join our Facebook page.