What’s the difference between a website and a blog?

Posted: September 24th, 2010

Is there any difference between a website and a blog you’re using to pedal your own wares?

Lets look at the different options for a destion marketing organization:

1. A DMO can write their own blog.  To a consumer, this looks like a website that changes all the time.  Its shiny and polished to present the marketer’s view of the world.  It probably doesn’t rank high on the consumer trust-ometer.

2. A DMO can incentivize locals to blog on their site.  This can be challenging if they’re not already blogging.  Enthusiasm can wane or sometimes people may begin to promote their own interests.

3. A DMO can outreach to bloggers who already have an audience to encourage them to write about your destination.  This is similar to traditional travel outreach with a few big twists.  The more focused the blogger, the better quality audience.  Think quality not quantity.  Also, bloggers rarely get paid.  They’re doing it for passion.  You need to take the time to build a relationship.

4. A DMO could transition their website to become the hub for all of the content that people are already producing about your destination.  Take a look at the Calgary Stampede for an example of how to aggregate conversations, photos and video from around the web and make it look great!

I like option 4 best.  Which one do you like?

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Tourism Operators understand passion

Posted: August 17th, 2010

No one started a river-rafting company with a 5-year plan for listing on the stock exchange.

Equestrian guides don’t wake up at 6am in the morning to feed the horses because shareholders expect to see a return on investment.  Rafting guides don’t live in trailers near remote rivers because they’re in it for the money.   Scuba diving, sky diving, eco-tours and every other tourism business you can imagine probably started the same way.

The people behind tourism made lifestyle choices around their passion.  Their businesses grew through that enthusiasm and a natural demand for their services.  Cycles and trends sometimes cause natural demand to waiver.  Then passionate people are forced deeper into business to find new customers.

Marketing can be challenging when you’re already busy trying to run a business and don’t have the budget.  To many, social media sounds like a silver bullet because its free.  Never forget that online tools just trade advertising expenses for somebody’s time and skill in knowing how to use them.  Nothing is free.

How can you use social media to help your customers buy more of what you’re selling?

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Communities that really work.

Posted: August 16th, 2010

With another resident, I’m an admin for an online community for the new Woodwards apartment building where I live. The community is valuable because we can communicate with everyone and share information very quickly. We’re still trying to get the property manager and developer to come to the table.

I recently started a non-profit organization with Laurel Eastman entirely on a Facebook page. It works because its targeted to an existing community of kiteboarders who are passionate about the cause. It lets us communicate much faster than email.

If I was in the business of marketing cruise ships, I’d start a community for every single cruise that went out. Cruises aren’t for me – I’m not that type of traveler – but my mum loves them. She meets amazing people and they share many days together at sea. People seem to bond when they’re stuck on a boat together. Often they lose touch when the party is over. Why not facilitate a community that allows passengers to connect and stay in touch when the trip is over.  People might share photos for all of their friends and family to see and those images may provide inspiration for others to try a cruise themselves.  Friends who met on a cruise could plan more cruises together.   As a group they could cause each other to book the next cruise.   Your product champions could market your cruises to each other, for you.   You could go even further and involve past passengers in the brand and ask them what they would like in future cruises.

Hotels and airlines have a tougher time in social marketing because they tend (and I’m generalizing here) not to be as unique or memorable as the travel experiences themselves.  Accommodation and flights are often treated as a means-to-an-end rather than an experience in themselves.  Generally, a plane flies you from A to B and a hotel provides you a bed.   How many hotels have you stayed at where you felt like you were part of a community?  How many amazing experiences have airlines provided to you?  When you only have a few hours on a flight or at a hotel, the experiences have to be quite remarkable to be memorable. There are always exceptions, where the service is the experience; Jet Blue and Virgin do a great job of this.  There are a number of hotels that are the destination themselves; the Banff Springs Fairmont, the Ice Hotel

Why would someone want to join your online community?

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Communities form around Passion

Posted: August 11th, 2010

To help understand how we Think! about tourism campaigns, I want to share a some information about a little town called Hood River. If you’ve been in one of our strategy sessions you can stop reading because you already know this story.

Hood River is a small town on the bank of the Columbia River in Oregon in the United States.  Anyone who has been to Hood River will tell you that it is one of the windiest places on earth.  Everyone in tourism marketing has skeletons that they don’t want people to know and for Hood River its wind. Its unbearably windy, unless you like wind.

In the 1970s, Hood River became a mecca for windsurfing.  Windsurfers love wind.  Presumably, a handful of early-adopters figured out that Hood River is windy. Word of mouth quickly traveled to other windsurfers and all of a sudden a windsurfing community was born.

Some of those windsurfers stuck around after summer and needed something to do in the Winter.  Mt Hood is just nearby and skiing seems like a logical option.  When Spring arrives and the snow melts people turn to kayaking and mountain biking.. You start to see a natural overlap.  No one lives in isolation.  Some people who once windsurfed took up kiteboarding when it emerged.

Ideas flow fast within a community of passion.  Influencers are closest to that passion and they influence others.  Communities of different passions overlap. Passion is a shortcut to increasing tourism through word-of-mouth.

What passions do you have in your community?  What are you passionate about?

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Word of mouth, passion and communities.

Posted: August 11th, 2010

Positive word-of-mouth is really important for marketing. It’s important to realize that Word of mouth happens within communities. To understand social marketing we need to examine what bonds communities within our target markets.

Communities used to form almost entirely around geography. We were limited by how far we could yell and how far we could walk.  Information was passed on to others around the camp fire.  Air travel and hyper-communication have accelerated how quickly a message can travel and how far it will carry.

When we’re socializing, we  talk about things we are interested in and in doing so we like to offer advice and appear knowledgeable.  This happens within our immediate surroundings, when we’re traveling or online.  The more passionate someone is, the more they will talk about a topic.

People can talk more frequently thanks to social media. Our conversations go much further. People talk most often and most convincingly about topics that they are passionate and knowledgeable about.

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