Category

Internet

• Internet, Marketing, personal, Travel & Tourism

  Presenting with a live twitter feed at PNWER

  07.19.10 | Permalink | Comment?

  

  Today I presented our social media strategy for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games at the PNWER conference in Calgary. One of the things that goes through my mind while I’m presenting these days is “what are people in the audience tweeting about this presentation RIGHT NOW?” Today was different. I could see exactly what was going on.

  At the start of my presentation I asked @seattlemaven (who runs Seattle’s Twitter account and was invited to speak but couldn’t be there in person) and the Twitterverse in general a few questions about social media via Twitter. I set-up Tweetdeck notifications and throughout the presentation, answers and comments popped-up on the screen.

  The result was organized chaos, but I think it told an interesting story about the power and immediacy of social media. Either way, I had a lot of fun and great feedback from the audience.

  Here are the questions I asked and the answers that came by during my presentation.

  @seattlemaven When did you start, how many interactions do you have a day on average, and how much time does it take you?

  • @wilhelmus Began Soc Med in June 2009. Currently 120K FB fans & nearly 6K Twitter followers. Brings truckloads of positive sentiment! #PNWER
  • @wilhelmus Generally I answer between 10-30 ?s in a day. Time allowing, I also ‘jump into’ convos already happening about our city. #PNWER
  • @wilhelmus Public tweets approx 10x/day – generates a lot of responses & builds our following AND the essence of Seattle/NW #PNWER
  • @wilhelmus 1 hr/day, I’d estimate (but the fun-factor’s HUGE!) :o) #PNWER

  @seattlemaven How are you different from a phone or in-person interaction with a consumer?

  • seattlemaven: @wilhelmus Twitter allows me to speak to broader audience. 1 public tweet may answer question of 200 followers – that’s powerful! #PNWER
  • seattlemaven: @wilhelmus Following me early (B4 arrival) they gain greater sense of area & more comfortable/willing to explore once they arrive. #PNWER

  @seattlemaven What’s the best new hot bar in Seattle for a bachelorette party? (audience question)

  • seattlemaven:@wilhelmus Pnk Ultralounge opens in a month – we can’t wait! Swanky & hot!!
  • seattlemaven:@wilhelmus Amber in Belltown’s hip & fun – great drink specials & a private room that’d knock their socks off!

  Tweeps, join me live at a conference. 1) Why should businesses care about social media? #PNWER

  • mikalat: @wilhelmus Best advice for social media: figure out where your customers are/what they’re using. Start there, don’t worry about the rest
  • seattlemaven: @wilhelmus #1 reason to start SM: People are talking (about you and others) you can either jump into the conversation or not. Do it! #PNWER
  • mikalat: @wilhelmus Also – LURK! Read, follow and find out what your competitors are doing and take notes. Learn first, dive in second.
  • erikrolfsen: @wilhelmus Don’t be a stranger. Fill out that profile information and do it in a way that will interest people.

  2) What’s your #1 piece of advice when starting in social media? #PNWER

  • nigel220: @wilhelmus we could learn a lot by listening to our youngest employees when it comes to social media!!
  • seattlemaven: @wilhelmus über-important to be authentic — your audience knows canned vs. real! Real = experiences, voice, personality #PNWER

• Internet, Marketing, tourism bc, Travel & Tourism

  New on HelloBC.com: interactive driving routes

  07.14.10 | Permalink | Comment?

  

  A few weeks ago we launched new functionality on HelloBC.com and it’s probably the best work we’ve done to date.

  BC is a large and diverse province and in order to fully experience it you need some wheels. To make planning a driving vacation easier,  we added new functionality to enhance our driving routes content and make it easier to plan a trip.

  This new section takes full advantage of Google Maps, includes detailed maps, driving routes and information about cities and towns you pass through. The location of our Visitor Centres are also present. Long routes, like the Heritage Discovery Circle Tour (3,498 km) are divided into manageable parts. You’ll read about highlights, what you can expect and see photos of the scenery you’ll find along the way.

  Go check out our new driving routes. We’re already working on Phase 2 to make the experience even better.

  Thank you Holly, Patrick, Tammy, Sarah, Karen, Mikala, Rob, Ana, Galina and everybody else who made this happen.

• Internet, Marketing, social media, Travel & Tourism

  Tripadvisor offers a glimpse into the future

  07.12.10 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  

  Science fiction writer William Gibson once said “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” You can see what some of the future will look like with Tripadvisor’s ‘Trip Friends’.

  About 7 years ago we ran some focus groups in San Francisco to learn more about the trip planning process. I remember that involving real people was a very important part of the process. I concluded that people prefer to talk to people in this order:

  1. People they know and live in the destination they want to visit
  2. People they know and have been in the destination they want to visit
  3. People they don’t know and live in the destination they want to visit
  4. People they don’t know and have been in the destination they want to visit

  Tripadvisor is serving up information from group #4 very well; with it’s reviews and message boards. With their ‘destination experts’ on their message boards they also started using group #3.

  Now Tripadvisor has also figured out a way to include groups #1 and #2, the most credible sources of information to a trip planner.

  A few years ago, Tripadvisor bought the Facebook app “Where I’ve been” for a reported $3M. At the time it was a gimmicky app where you could plot pins on a map for places you’ve visited anywhere in the world. The app was successful because it taps into one key motivator for travel; making my friends and family jealous of the places I’ve been. Tripadvisor also bought it’s 2.3M users. Tripadvisor rebranded it “Cities I’ve visited” and incorporated it into it’s website and has done a decent job of improving it.

  Users can add cities they’ve visited, where they want to go, their favourite cities and what cities they can give advise for. The app has an active userbase of 4.8M when I checked today. And I’m sure there are many more users on the Tripadvisor website. As a result, Tripadvisor has an incredible amount of intelligence about their member’s travel history and desires.

  Tripadvisor has mashed up with own intelligence with Facebook’s through Facebook Connect and the Open Graph. When you log into Tripadvisor with Facebook connect, and you visit a city page, you’ll now see a list of your friends who:

  • live in a particular city
  • have a particular city listed as a favourite
  • have been to a particular city
  • are going to a particular city

  Tripadvisor allows you to use Facebooks social networking tools to send a message to one or more of your friends to ask for advise about your upcoming trip based on this information.

  Even though it’s a small step, it’s very useful and also a significant indicator of future possibilities for combining your own consumer data (like Tripadvisors data about where people have been) with Facebook’s social graph and social networking power.

  “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”

  Note: I intended to write this post much sooner. But the future is also unevenly distributed by individual and my attempts to login to Tripadvisor with Facebook connect has resulted in error messages for a month now. I’ve reported the error at least a dozen times but I had to resort to using my wife’s Facebook credentials to have a look at this feature.

• Internet, Management, Marketing, social media, Travel & Tourism

  Sheraton Tripadvisor Cards

  07.01.10 | Permalink | 1 Comment

  

  A few weeks ago I spoke about our online marketing activities during the 2010 Olympics in Seattle. I stayed in the Sheraton; great hotel. They left a really nice note in my room, including this card to encourage me to share my experience on Tripadvisor. Simple and effective.

• Internet, social media

  Social Media and the path to conversion

  06.16.10 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  I was watching a keynote from Gary Vaynerchuk the other day and in his special style he basically said that people shouldn’t jump to fast to conversion in social media but work on building relationships first and business will follow.

  My conclusion:

  1. Social Media is about relationships
  2. Relationships build trust
  3. Trust generates business

  Building trust is about integrity, telling the truth, being transparent, helpful, reliable, unselfish and fair. Whether you’re a big brand or a small operator, if you and your staff behave in the  ways above, you’ll be one step closer to social media happiness.

• Internet, social media

  Facebook down for a week!

  03.18.10 | Permalink | 4 Comments

  Got your attention didn’t it?

  This is purely a hypothetical scenario. It’s also an experiment in dual-blogging (think bloggers meet dual-pianists in Vegas). Rodney Payne from Think! and I are going to be hypothesising about the effects of Facebook shutting down for a week. Instead of commenting on each other’s blogs, we’re going to be posting each other’s responses as a blog.

  [WB] Day 1. The Facebook URL stops responding. First thing that happens is an insane amount of activity on Twitter reporting the news. After that all hell breaks loose in the tech blogosphere; Mashable, Inside Facebook, All Facebook, Techcrunch, Techmeme et all just go crazy over the news. Traditional media follows a few hours behind.

  [RP] Day 2. Facebook led last night’s evening news and is splashed across the front page of newspapers worldwide. Twitter traffic has more-than-doubled overnight with almost every tweet referencing #Facebook. Tweets have largely replaced status updates. New account registrations have grown significantly. The ‘Twitter Whale’ is displayed frequently to show that Twitter is slow and overwhelmed with traffic. Cell-phone carriers and email providers see a noticeable increase in messages. Blogs are filled with stories guessing at what’s going on.

  [WB] Day 3. Everybody who threw a party and used Facebook Events to organize the party is ticketed off because nobody showed up. The first “Life without Facebook” t-shirts are starting to appear. ‘Experts’ on the news networks make suggestions about how to deal with Facebook detox. Facebook is scheduling a new conference for the next day.

  [RP] Day 4. People realize that life A.F. (after Facebook) isn’t too scary. Facebook isn’t a matter of life-and-death like internet banking or email. It’s just a convenient social tool. Productivity at offices has surprisingly decreased slightly because many people can’t focus on one task without some distraction. Employees who had learned to collaborate using Facebook messages and Facebook chat are now forced to return to slower methods of communication.

  [WB] Day 5. Facebook promises the network will be back up soon. Some businesses complain drops in sales because of a reliance on Fanpages and Facebook ads. Legal action is discussed. Flickr reports an increase in new accounts and uploaded photos. Some kids fear their Farmville animals will die.

  [RP] Day 6. You would have thought that with 450 million people addicted to social networking and gaming that a rival-site would rise to meteoric success. However, MySpace hasn’t seen too much of a bump in traffic, commentators think its because of the lack of privacy built into people’s social graph. People who log in to their old accounts find a social wasteland with no posts from legitimate friends and just a scattering of links leading to creepy websites. People are beginning to think that Facebook may never come back online. Google Buzz and Orkut are getting an increased trickle of new users but its just not the same, all of our photos and friends were on Facebook.

  [WB] Day 7. Media has nothing left to talk about and tech bloggers are too busy with the latest Apple iSomething. People stop caring about it. Life goes on without Facebook although they wonder what their friends are up to. Facebook announces service will be restored tomorrow and blames a proprietary Microsoft product for causing the crash of it’s service.

  [RP] Day 8. The reckoning is upon us. Zuckerberg flicks the switch and issues a press release to that affect which is picked up by every single news organization in the world. Facebook blows past its previous 30% of web traffic to attract over 50% of internet users. Facebook’s servers overload and go down for another hour or two. When they come back online, people connect again, pay-per-click ads resume, and Farmville animals are revived just in time… Life goes on.

• Internet

  Must see presentations #4: Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Bing’s augmented-reality maps

  03.16.10 | Permalink | 3 Comments

  I saw Blaise’s first Photosync presentation at Web 2.0 in 2006 and was utterly impressed. He’s now working on Bing maps. This explains why Bing Maps is getting better and better and better.

  His presentation at TED recently is a must see.It shows how Bing (and Google) Maps have become so much more than simple mapping tools. And the innovation will continue relentlessly. Let your imagination go wild after watching this presentation. What will Google and/or Bing Maps look like 5 years from now?

• Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism

  Small DMO’s, Facebook is more important than your website

  03.05.10 | Permalink | 7 Comments

  When I was meeting with the online directors of European DMO’s, we all agreed none of us will have a website 10 years from now. Why wait? Smaller city or community DMO’s often run great websites with very little traffic. Small budgets and a lack of expertise makes website maintenance, content management and online marketing a challenge.

  These DMO’s should open up shop within Facebook instead. Facebook has 400M users and is still growing. Your consumers are effectively all on Facebook. Go where your consumers are, by creating a Fanpage:

  • It allows you to do pretty much anything you do with your own website from a content perspective. And it comes with build-in apps for things like blogs, photo galleries, events calendar and more.
  • You can engage consumers by allowing them to like, post and comment on your content and engage in other ways.
  • Once somebody becomes a fan of your page, you can market to that person in a way that’s better than email marketing.
    • Anything you post shows up on your fan’s newsfeed, potentially triggering a repeat visit. It can also be read by your fans friends, this can lead to a new visitor
    • Any engagement on your fanpage by your fans will be displayed on your fan’s friends newsfeed, also a potential for new visitors to your fanpage
  • You can run promotions and sweepstakes within Facebook (although this is getting more difficult)
  • A fanpage can be indexed by Google, you can still get organic search engine traffic to your page
  • Facebook gives you great analytics and insights about your Fanpage and fanbase
  • Facebook allows you to laserpoint your advertising on Facebook; allowing you to cost effectively find your target audience

  Most of the above is free.

  As a small DMO, should you shut your website down tomorrow? No, but you you start taking your Facebook Fanpage seriously and start using it strategically today and it could be your primary channel sooner than you think.

• Internet, Marketing, tourism bc

  Tourism BC 2010 Online Olympics activities: #11 – Social Media

  03.01.10 | Permalink | Comment?

  An event like the Olympics makes all media, including social media, light up like a Christmas Tree. Everybody’s talking about it, and that’s exactly what we want. Instead of adding to the noise, our strategy for social media during the games focussed on supporting and encouraging key influencers while leveraging our own network.

  Listening

  

  Tourism in BC related social media volume during February

  Social media is the largest focus group out there so we treat it as a huge research opportunity. Data has been collected and will be analyzed. We’ve also used our monitoring tools to provide insights to our media, SEM Field Reporters and content teams. This enabled us to quickly respond to unexpected stories.

  After the games, we can look at the data to identify what resonated about Vancouver and BC as a destination, potential new markets or product opportunities and key influencers in social media for future engagement.

  Assisting and encouraging key influencers

  Working with key influencers is a lot like working with travel media professionals (with a twist) especially since many traditional travel media have their own blogs. But there are also pure social media influencers, including local bloggers, athlete tweeters, etc. Jose from our online team has been working closely with our Travel Media team to coordinate efforts.

  Building our community

  

  We used the pre-Olympics to experiment with running contests on Twitter. We managed to more than triple our number of followers by giving away some Olympic tickets. We were wondering if people would leave right after, but they didn’t and instead are engaging with Karen, our tweeter extraordinaire, and re-tweeting our messages to their networks.

  As an added bonus, our contest winners have been tweeting and blogging about their experiences and traveled around with our Field Reporters.

  Engaging our community

  

  Facebook fans and Twitter followers are a diverse group of BC residents, past visitors, tourism industry stakeholders and people who would like to visit. During the games, we tweeted information about the games, general trip ideas based on what was being talked about and re-tweeted messages from others. URLS’s were being tracked and during the games period, drove almost 50,000 visitors to our website.

  

  Karen set up searches in Tweetdeck to filter people who expressed an interest in visiting and started the conversation to make the trip a reality leading to wonderful conversations, new followers and hopefully visitors soon.

  Lifepoints campaign

  

  Lifepoints is a Facebook application where you get points for your life experiences. Points are based on how people have rated each experience. Compete with your friends for who gets the most out of life and create your own bucketlist by ‘wanting’ things. A natural fit with tourism so we’re running a campaign with Lifepoints to highlight some of the great experiences British Columbia has to offer and promote our contest.

  Field Reporters
  
  And of course we wanted to capture the excitement of the games through our Field Reporters. They’ve been all over town, and the rest of the province, to capture the Olympic vibe, the reactions from spectators, athletes and celebrities, against the backdrop of the destination.

• Internet, Marketing, tourism bc

  Tourism BC 2010 Online Olympics activities: #10 – Content is King

  02.25.10 | Permalink | 2 Comments

  When somebody is interested and inspired in British Columbia as a result of the games, we’d like to the person to start the planning process. And in the planning process, content is King, and details matter.

  Over the last few years, our product management and content teams have done an incredible job of turning HelloBC.com into an in-depth travel planning resource. HelloBC contains information for over 100 different activity categories in 6 regions. But that wasn’t enough. Our website users told us they need more information at the community level in order to make the decision to visit.

  

  The 139 communities with in-depth content

  Over the last 18 months, our content team, lead by our content Queen Mikala (also part-time indie rock groupie guru) has completed a monumental task by creating in-depth information for 139 communities across the province before the start of the games. In strong collaboration with of our regional and community partners, our writers visited 139 communities across the province, meeting with local stakeholders, touring the community and creating in depth information for HelloBC.com.

  

  Long tail content: dining in Klemtu

  The result is unprecedented. Thousands of pages of content; whether you’re interested in Cat-Skiing near Kaslo, Kermode Bear-Watching in Klemtu, mining tours in Trail, Aboriginal & Cultural experiences in Kamloops or visiting farms & Orchards near Harrison Hot Springs, the information is all there on HelloBC.

  Anybody interested in BC as a result of the games will have all the information to create their BC vacation.

William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog