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Last week I posted about Service Design, what it is and why it’s important by comparing it to accepted interaction design processes.
Last week I wrote about asking WHY more often. Today, let’s build on this by using this to prioritize. Too often we do things because it’s the latest hype, or everybody else is doing things.
We take the list of everything we do, and be specific. For each item we rank
I’ve seen
1) Don’t dismiss the impact stakeholders
CEOs without DMO experience often dismiss the impact of stakeholders. Strong leaders are used to making decisions independently and push things along internally. These are good and necessary qualities in a leader.
But before you start making decisions and push things along, take the time to understand the stakeholder landscape. You need to consider tourism businesses, consider politicians or administrators, upward and downward DMOs. Understand the players, their agendas and influence. Most are supportive, some have an agenda and there’s always baggage. Like it or not, about half to 90% of your job will be managing external politics so you better know what you’re in for.
One of the first things a new CEO should do it map out the stakeholder landscape. This doesn’t have to take long by the way. Your staff already knows. Conduct a stakeholder mapping exercise to document what you’re dealing with. Do this in your first week. It should take a day and there are methods to streamline this process.
It might seem like a waste of time or a distraction. But believe me you cannot ignore this. You will get burned. A tourism board is a visible entity and directly or indirectly, most DMOs manage public funds. Without your industry and political stakeholders on your side, it’s going to be a tough road ahead.
2) Review existing strategies before adding your own ideas
New CEOs bring their own ideas. That’s logical. You want to make a mark, show people that under your leadership, things will be better than before. During the interview process with the board probably shared where the challenges are and you shared some of your ideas already. Let’s get it done right?
I’ve seen many DMOs move to implement great strategies, only to see years of work blow up because a new leader didn’t take the time to understand the strategy and moved to implement their own based on their assumptions going in. They often realize later they were wrong.
Blowing a fresh wind through an organization is often a good thing, and sometimes very necessary. But before you start opening windows to let the breeze in, offer your management team the opportunity to present the current strategies and processes. Go into these meetings open minded, curious and without assumptions. Give each VP a week to put a presentation of their strategy and processes together. Ask why a lot in these meetings.
Now we’re at the end of week two and you have a pretty decent understanding of current state.
3) Build consultation into everything you do
Hopefully you’ve done #1 and #2. There are probably opportunities to make things better. There always are. When making these changes, strategically and tactical, the most overlooked and ignored aspect of destination marketing is stakeholder consultation. Because it can be time consuming, frustrating and lead to bad decisions or mediocre programs and campaigns. Yes, all true. But not when you do it right.
Here’s the little secret I’ve known for about a decade. Having people involved in the process is more than half the battle. Give people a voice and listen. You might be surprised what you’ll learn and you’ll build allies who will be there when you need them.
4) Create a culture of innovation
Taking the the first two first two pieces of advice to heart can easily create another big risk a DMO leader faces. Management by consensus, risk aversion and inertia.
That’s where real leadership part comes in. Leadership for a DMO CEO means understanding the full scope of your destination and stakeholders, take it all in and develop a shared vision for the destination and rally people behind that vision.
5) Think twice before going retail
6) Stand behind your staff
THE CHALLENGE: A DMO has an incredible lineup of stakeholders. Most are supportive, some have an agenda and there’s always baggage. You need to consider tourism businesses. You need to consider politicians and administrators. You need to consider DMO’s who manage a destination within yours, or manage a destination yours is part of. You cannot underestimate this. You cannot ignore this. A tourism board is a visible entity. It’s part of your destination’s identify. And directly or indirectly, most DMOs manage public funds. That means the press is always ready to find a juicy controversy.
The mistake DMO leaders often make it to play it safe. This manifests itself
THE SOLUTION: Your stakeholders need to buy into your strategies. That means you need to have an inclusive and collaborative approach. But it’s a fine balance. Too little and there’s no buy-in, too much and things get bogged down. Sometimes you need to push, sometimes you need to take the foot off the gas. Strong leadership is crucial.
As a leader, our #1 priority should be your staff. Make sure they have the right skills and motivation. Create a culture of trust and learning from mistakes.
4)
Often
4)
The tourism industry was under the gun in the years leading up to the pandemic. The different aspects of overtourism exposed several negative impacts of the tourism economy on local quality of life. Climate change activists put a spotlight on the carbon emission through tourism, especially through aviation. Most of our clients were actively engaged in addressing these challenges.
During the pandemic, the call to Reimagine tourism started almost as soon as the pandemic started. I’ve participated in, and watched dozens of virtual conferences and webinars and have read numerous articles and posts. And even though they are inspiring, most focus on pointing out the challenges with the current system and the consequences of inaction.
Besides broad concepts and vision there is a big gaping hole to address the how. The how starts with redefining success. Tourism has almost exclusively been measured in economic terms. The size of the visitor economy in GPD, the amounts of people employed, the amount of taxes collected are typical measures. And growth is always a goal.
Focussing exclusively on economic measures poses the risk of selling long-term quality of life for short-term economic gains. Instead of setting pure economic goals, set goals that include social and environmental goals. This simple start will frame decisions moving forward in a better way.
Instead of
Clay Shirky once said, “It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”.
Google cornered the filtering market for content on websites through search engines. Bringing back the most relevant content based on user intent. The intent is based on keywords, geographic location, past search history and more to personalize.
Search Engines
By creating lots of good content about your destination or business, you can tap into niches. Niche interests, ranging from experiences to niche criteria for a hotel amenities. The long tail theory will tell you that all these small niches will add up. Organic Search on HelloBC.com accounts for more than 50% of traffic and the increase in quality content has increased organic traffic by well over 100% in two years. In August 2010, over 150,000 unique search queries drove search engine traffic to HelloBC.com.
Outbound vs. Inbound
I’ve been listening to people talking/complaining about media fragmentation, information overload and the challenge to reach their audience.
Yitzhak Rabin, former prime minister of Israel once said: “If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a fact.”
There is a lot of information out there and it’s accessible anywhere. I remember the first time I settled an argument over a beer by Googling on my Blackberry (I won the argument by the way, Tony Hawk is taller than 6 feet). Marketers talk about how media fragmentation and information overload make it hard to reach consumers. But is it?
Clay Shirky once said about, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”
Google and Bing are fixing this problem through search. By finding the intent behind somebody’s search, they create better filters to present relevant results. They personalize results based on your geographic location, your search history, your social graph and more. Google CEO Eric Smith (in)famously said:
<div class=”quote”>With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.</div>
What can we learn from this? A lot.
A good filter separates relevant from irrelevant information. And relevancy is personal.
Yesterday Google announced it will discontinue Google Wave at the end of the year. Wow, somebody must be in trouble for such a failure right? Wrong.
Google is not afraid to take risks. “Our policy is we try things,” the Google CEO [Eric Schmidt] said, hours after the company announced it was halting development of the complex real-time communication tool. “We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new.” (CNET)
This is part of Google’s culture. Try things, fail or succeed, learn and move forward. Sometimes the biggest failure is the foundation for future success. This is important. Especially in online marketing. If you don’t keep innovating, tinkering and trying new things, you’re not moving forward.
How pro-active and innovative is somebody allowed to be in your company or team? What happens when somebody tries something new and it doesn’t work? Punishment or reward?
Encouraging people to be innovative, and taking risks by giving them enough space and authority is crucial. Amazon.com even has an award for trying something innovative without asking for permission.
Yesterday I posted about a few examples about remarkable experiences and word of mouth marketing. The AdAge article How Experiences Are Becoming the New Advertising details some evidence of what’s happening.
Some of the biggest modern brands use little or no advertising. Google, Facebook, Facebook, Zappos rely on a superiour experience instead. A superiour experience leads to word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth leads to a consumer trying, or at least investigating, a product. This is the new marketing.
The AdAge article also reports that a far majority of consumers are influenced by peer reviews and positive digital experiences.
So what?
What it means for DMO’s/CVB’s
What it means for tourism businesses