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leadership, Management, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
The state of the DMO in 2013
(this post was first published on Tnooz)
I attended over a dozen tourism conferences this year on four continents, including our own #SoMeT conferences. Looking back at the pictures I took and the presentations I’ve downloaded, there’s a common thread and it tells a compelling story about the future of the DMO.
Change is needed
William Price – South African Tourism (#SoMeT13AU)
At #SoMeT13AU in Australia, William didn’t mind shaking things up with some provocative quotes including this one. We need to stop doing stuff that doesn’t work and start doing things that do work, and South African Tourism is blazing trails.
What I’ve realized this past year is that we’ve passed the phase where people are skeptical or in denial. We have entered the phase where we are starting to ‘sort out‘ the model, as Clay Shirky calls it. The only things standing in the way are fear, lack of the correct skills and/or not knowing where to start.
The winners aren’t the ones with the biggest budget
Jacques Massardo – Ogilvy Cape Town (#ETAS13)
(Please someone correct me if I got the presenter of this slide wrong. I took it at E-tourism Frontiers in Cape Town and forgot who it belongs to.)
I really like this quote because it’s very relevant to what’s going on right now. I see it all around me. The DMOs with the biggest budgets aren’t necessarily the ones who are going to win. They can hide the fact they’re falling behind through big media buys, but there will be a tipping point soon where those who didn’t adapt will have to deal with massive change in a short period of time. And that’s going to hurt. Those who have transitioned and adapted strategically over a period of time will reap the rewards.
By the way, the tipping point is when boards and/or politicians move away from judging activities based on how things look or make them feel, and instead look at the numbers that matter. I’ve started to see early indicators of this already.
The winners are the ones that think outside the box
Heidi Sørvig – Visit Sørlandet (#ENTER2013)
At #ENTER2013 in Innsbruck, Heidi Sørvig from Visit Sørlandet gave a very to the point presentation about how running a DMO in the 21st century really doesn’t have to be that complicated if you’re not afraid to lead, challenge the status quo and make changes.
I’ve been a fan of Heidi’s strategy. It’s very innovative and practical. Her primary KPI is repeat visitation. Because if people come back, it means they like the experience. It also means they will probably recommend the destination to others. She also understands that it’s more efficient to train industry operators about how to manage and market a tourism business than pouring that money into traditional advertising. She has created a program for operators that’s probably the most extensive and sophisticated of any I’ve seen. And all on a small budget.
The winners approach change strategically
Emmanuelle Legault – Tourisme Montréal (#SoMeT13AU)
Tourisme Montréal (a Think! client) has been one of the most innovative DMOs in the ‘big city’ category for years. With leaders like Emmanuelle, TM is not afraid to challenge the status quo, take risks and experiment. I admire her courage because she wants to do what’s right. At #SoMeT13AU, Emmanuelle shared how they’ve been transitioning from a Destination Marketing Organization to a Destination Management Organization over the last few years and how they have dealt with some of the obstacles.
The winners understand to let go of control
Frédérick Ranger – Tourisme Montréal (#SoMeT13US)
Accepting that a DMO doesn’t create a brand, but consumers do was one of the common threads at #SoMeT13US. This is a major shift for many marketers who are used to keeping a brand under tight control. At Tourisme Montréal, one of their guiding principles is to let go. Fred gave a passionate presentation in which he demonstrated how Tourisme Montréal is implementing programs and campaigns that deliver on this principle.
The winners understand the consumer
Donna Moritz – Social Media Strategist at Socially Sorted (#SoMeT13AU)
Donna shared this wise quote from Apu Gupta. What it means is that the transaction will happen as a result of an emotional relationship, and one that grows over a long period of time. It sits at the essence of most modern marketing philosophies including social media, content marketing and permission marketing. In the tourism industry, however, we often seem to be chasing the next “head in bed” or “bum in seat”. Tactics are focussed on the short-term, but we need to take a long-term view to build reputation and loyalty over time.
The winners measure the right things
Andrew Pozniak – Kuoni (#ENTER2013)
Kuoni is a very large luxury travel brand. In many ways they are very traditional, but I’ve seen a few presentations from them now and the way they go about things will set them up perfectly for the future…if they get their online strategy right.
Kuoni places a lot of value in NPS (Nett Promotor Score) and they measure this at different stages of the customer journey. I like this slide because it’s almost identical to one I use. NPS is the best quantitive measure for the overall destination experience. The science behind NPS shows a correlation between NPS score, loyalty, referral and corporate growth. It’s also easy to do.
The winners take charge of designing the destination experience
Marc Stickdorn – Think! Hangout
Marc is one of the real thought leaders for service design. He co-authored a book called This is Service Design Thinking and now runs My Service Fellow and Smaply. I’ve known him for a few years and he was kind enough to do a presentation about service design for the Think! team over Google Hangout. Service Design is a methodology, process and a set of tools that will deliver on this objective, just like Information Architecture, Usability and Interaction Design for websites.
Now that we need to build a brand on the ground, through stories people tell, a DMO needs to design the end-to-end destination experience. By using the dollars typically spent on advertising to work on designing the complete destination experience, people will have a better destination experience. As a result, your NPS score, the stories people tell, repeat visitation and referrals will go up.
The winners build their brand through the experience on the ground
Gregg Sauter – Saskatchewan Roughriders (#HostSK2013)
The Saskatchewan Roughriders (a Think! client) have a strong brand and very loyal following. Gregg explained at Host Saskatchewan that they way they’ve built their brand is primarily around experience. The result is incredible: 2/3rds of all merchandise sales in the Canadian Football League are for his team.
This slide maps some of the touch-points with their customers before the game even starts, from the parking attendant to the stadium host. Mapping the customer journey like this is part of the service design process. It’s the starting point to examine, benchmark and redesign critical touch points where required.
The winners constantly experiment, measure and adjust
Jori Kirk, Cypress Hills Eco-Adventures Ltd (#HostSK2013)
Jori operates an adventure tourism business in Saskatchewan, Canada. I loved his presentation during which he described the keys to his success. As a small business owner, he keeps things simple and focused. He does this by cleverly using technology, offering value while embodying the right corporate values and engaging staff (mostly guides) to empower them and make the experience awesome for the customer. The result is a runaway success.
Jori understands the story his customers what to be part of, how to deliver it and and how to get the story told. If he misses the mark, he will adjust elements to fix the plot of the story.
The winners add real value to the consumer
Jay Baer – author of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help not Hype (#SoMeT13US)
Jay Baer‘s message is all about creating value for the consumer. You can’t compete for attention anymore and the best way to gain trust is by adding true value to people’s life. He wrote a good book about it.
It’s not hard to figure out how this applies to travel. Great customer service is key and visitor centres have traditionally facilitated a way for DMOs to deliver it. But customer service has moved outside of those four walls and a roof. Customer service now happens online, on Twitter, Facebook and message boards in all stages of the customer journey.
The winners will engage their network
Sarah “Sos” Mattsson – Tourism and Events Queensland (#SoMeT13AU)
While presenting their online video content strategy for Tourism and Events Queensland at #SoMeT13AU, Sos explained how they have identified key groups of video content producers and described how they fit into their strategy.
It’s important to recognize who the main groups of storytellers are and creating strategies that will help get the best stories out there. It’s also a great way to scale customer service. For example, TripAdvisor destination experts are doing customer service work for free.
The winners market to niches that matter
Catherine Bates, General Manager Brand and International PR, Tourism New Zealand (#TEEC)
Catherine presented Tourism New Zealand’s three-year strategy to leverage the Hobbit movies as a niche marketing opportunity. Even though it’s very traditional (and I wish I could make it social at the core), it’s a perfect example of marketing to a niche audience. For example, Catherine shared the fact that while only 1% of visitors to the city list the Hobbit as a primary reason for a visit, but it still represents $33M.
Focussing on a niche creates big opportunities because you can narrow your focus. Engaging a niche audience via their passions is much easier because it’s very relevant to them. And when you do it right, they will respond by sharing and influencing friends.
The winners empower staff
Kate Duffy – Canadian Tourism Commission (#SoMeT13AU)
Kate described the Canadian Tourism Commission’s social media journey. When a consumer is social, a brand needs to be social as well, and that will ultimately lead to a social business.
A social business will be the end game – we call it a Level 5 DMO. Organizationally, it means letting of the control internally. The rate of change is only going to increase and as the role of the DMO changes and marketing becomes real-time, it’s really important to reduce bureaucracy and empower staff. It might sound scary but you’ll be surprised to what level people will rise to when they feel a sense of responsibility and empowerment.
The winners enable change from within
Jesse Desjardins – Tourism Australia
At #SoMeT13AU Jesse from Tourism Australia shared some of the strategies and approaches to managing the largest DMO Facebook page in the world. It’s very practical and another demonstration that it doesn’t have to be complicated. Just like Kate, Jessie also promoted the fact that it is the responsibility of the people within the organization to champion changes.
For DMO leaders, my advice is to listen to the teams that are running your digital and social platforms. There is an incredible amount of talent out there and you need to use it. I’ve seen good people walk away out of frustration and that hurts all of us. Support your staff and take some risks. Let them create a plan. Park your skepticism, and invest in the future. Learn. And share it with your industry so they understand your new role better. Start the journey so you can manage it over time.
For DMO staff, be an advocate. Find opportunities to create proof of concepts and promote them internally. Help your leaders and your industry understand what is the most efficient and effective way of destination management. Things won’t change by waiting for somebody up top to do the right thing, be pro-active and promote successes.
Conclusion
This year was an exciting year. Many DMOs have done incredible things and I’ve learned so much. I’ve seen many more great presentations I didn’t include here. The future of the DMO is bright, as long as we let go of sacred cows, let go of fear, create a plan to move forward, learn and adjust as we go.
Where to start? Benchmark your current activities, set clear objectives and create a strategy. At a minimum, create a plan for next year to start moving in the right direction.
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Internet, leadership, Management, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
Building the social destination brand
09.16.13 | Permalink | 3 Comments
The Iamsterdam sign is an invitation to take a picture and share it
Building a destination brand is done primarily through the stories people tell each other. And social media has only accelerated that process. Getting more of the right stories told is a massive opportunity but how do you go about it?
Here’s a 5 step strategy for this.
1) MOTIVATE
A destination is the stage where memories are made and stories are created. People ignore or forget the ordinary and remember and share what’s remarkable. These remarkable experiences often turn into the primary motivators for others to visit a place. In order to get more stories told in social media, you need to make sure things are worth talking about. The IAmsterdam sign in Amsterdam (above) is always surrounded by tourists taking photos. Not only is it a cool piece of art, it’s also the perfect way to tell your (Facebook/Instagram/etc) friends where you are.
For a tourism business it’s important to build in moments that motivate people to share in the overall experience. For a DMO it’s important to increase the number of things worth talking about overall. Educating your operators about this principle is the low hanging fruit. Every tourism business should have at least one reason for people to talk about them. Often it’s just a matter of making a few tweaks to get people talking. Getting involved in city planning might be more difficult but can pay-off with massive dividend.
2) ENABLE
When there’s something worth sharing, people need to be able to share it right away. For international visitors, data roaming is often an obstacle and the availability of free Wifi will increase social sharing. It’s not just the responsibility of operators. Viewpoints, beaches, mountaintops, buildings of great architecture typically don’t have a tourism operator associated and Wifi is nowhere to be found. This is where the DMO can step in. Taiwan gets it, they offer free nationwide Wifi to tourists.
But there are other obstacles. Some businesses don’t allow pictures to be taken while others don’t have the proper lighting to make photos or to make them look good. It’s a missed opportunity, you have to give people the opportunity to share, even if it’s in a limited capacity.
3) ENCOURAGE
People will share an experience when they find it remarkable. For people on the fence it’s easy to pull them over the line by encouraging them. This can be achieved by things from signage to incentives. Disney identifies places in their theme parks with photo opp signs. Some DMO’s are starting to do the same. We worked with a ski resort last year to do put signage up to encourage sharing combined with and a contest for the best photos shared.
At an operator level it’s often a matter of reminding and asking people. Remind people on checkout to give a review on Tripadvisor for example, or follow up with an email. Others take it a step further. When I was in Wollongong, Australia, the Skydiving operator filmed and photographed the experience and gave me a link where I could download the images with an easy way to share them through my social channels.
4) CURATE
When people share stories, it’s important to find them. Social Media is like a world-wide, real-time, always-on focus group. You’re crazy if you don’t take advantage of it. You need to find them the relevant stories about your destination, good or bad.
A lot of other opportunities and insights can be gained from the massive amount of stories out there. Brands like KLM, Gatorade, Nascar and many others have dedicated social media team that monitor social media for a variety of purposes. These programs separates signal from noise by curating the content and processing it for specific purposes. Some data might need to actioned on while other data serves specific research purposes.
5a) ACTION – AMPLIFY
Some of the best stories told in social media are worth incorporating in your own marketing. People share stories with great emotional appeal and the quality, creativity and authenticity often rivals what a DMO and their agencies produce. Use the best content you find to enhance your own activities of amplify them through your own channels.
Visit Britain started sourcing the majority of the photos on its website from Flickr back in 2009. Tourism Australia only posts photos on Facebook submitted to them by their community. Many DMOs find the best photos on Instagram and reshare them while Pinterest is probably the best example of content curation with the best photos people find online.
But why stop there? You might want to give some quality content even more exposure. You can use some SEM budget to amplify a great blog post from an influencer for example. Some amplification can go even further. The Canadian Tourism Commission turned some of the best YouTube videos they found about Canada into TV commercials and recently crowd-sourced another. It doesn’t matter who created the story or where it’s located. What matters is that it moves a person down the funnel.
5b) ACTION – CUSTOMER SERVICE
Social Media will identify customer service challenges and opportunities. DMOs are already in the customer service business but have often limited themselves to a box called a visitor centre. Step outside the box and start assisting visitors in real time by responding to people in social media. Customer service challenges can be resolved quickly before they turn into negative stories.
In the meantime, the overall visitor experience will benefit from assisting travellers through social media. KLM will respond to any social media question within an hour. Most tourism operators don’t have the luxury to set-up these kind of services but the DMO can fulfill that role on behalf of their industry.
5c) ACTION – MITIGATE
Listening can also help to find information about a destination on the internet that’s incorrect (yes, there is incorrect information on the interwebs). This information could be viewed by many potential visitors who could make the wrong decision as a result. Often it’s just a matter of contacting the owner of the source to correct the error. Start by asking nicely!
If something slips through the cracks and negative stories start to emerge it’s important to mitigate these as soon as possible. There are also specific events that could cause a social media crisis. Think about a natural disaster, a call for a boycott or an influencer will a horrible experience. Being prepared and having a social media response plan in place will streamline communication before things escalate far and wide and cause considerable damage. Don’t rely on old corporate communication strategies, they don’t apply to social media. Just ask United.
5d) ACTION – LEARN
People will take pictures of things they find remarkable. And when they put themselves in the photo it’s even more remarkable. The things people find remarkable might surprise you. Insights gained from a curation program can provide you with all kinds of new marketing ideas or even identify potential target audiences. You will also identify the challenges visitors might have with the destination experience overall, sometimes in places you might not expect. Addressing these challenges in a fundamental way through service design will allow you to create a more favourable perception of the destination overall. You can measure these things over time, segment them by audience, experience and other parameters. It’s a massive opportunity and part of the future of destination marketing.
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Marketing, social media, Travel & Tourism
Why Social Media outside your own channels is more important
Storytelling
Destination Marketing is storytelling. And by now every DMO is generating content and distributing it through their own channels. Content is shared, people engaged, fans, followers and engagement is measured and reported. Social Media is firmly established as an important channel.
But if you want to start thinking like a level 4 DMO, one of the first things to do is look beyond storytelling through your own channels. The stories people share with each other in their own networks (often private and invisible to marketers) is more credible and trusted than any story a DMO creates.
Evidence
At #SoMeT13AU, Carl McCarthy from Facebook shared that over 70% of travellers update their status and/or share photos while on holiday. Let’s look at the Capilano Suspension Bridge, a populair tourism attraction in Vancouver. The public stats for their Facebook page show a respectable 12,401 fans with 1,275 people talking. But look at an often overlooked little statistic; 449,930 photos have been tagged with this tourism experience.
Let’s look at ten of the more populair attractions in Vancouver (selected by myself from memory).
attraction likes photos tagged Capilano Suspension Bridge Park 12,404 449,930 Vancouver Aquarium 30,777 694,427 Grouse Mountain Resort 22,597 148,824 Vancouver Art Gallery 20,631 64,857 Cypress Mountain 18,270 161,182 Granville Island 15,445 265,967 Science World 14,480 87,268 Museum of Anthropology 6,766 26,146 The Vancouver Lookout 3,003 17,747 Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Chinese Garden 2,446 29,980 Total 146,819 1,946,328 Collectively, these pages have 146,819 fans. More than 3x the fans of Tourism Vancouver’s page. The total number of photos shared is almost 2 Million! If we consider that the average Facebook user has 150+ friends it means that those 2 million photos probably reached tens of millions of people. And those are just photos of attractions where people geotagged the photo. The true number of tourism related photos shared online for Vancouver is exponentially larger. That’s the real Facebook marketing.
There’s also plenty of research that demonstrates the effect of somebody posting a Facebook picture has on their network for example. Anywhere from 20% to 52% of consumers have taken a trip to a destination as a direct result of seeing a photo posted by a friend.
And that’s just Facebook.
Implications for DMOs
The implication is that a DMO marketer needs to look beyond their own channels. Most of the conversation is happening elsewhere and often invisible. But as you can see in my examples above, that doesn’t mean you can’t measure it. The success of growing tourism in your destination goes beyond the activity the DMO manages. It’s a collective effort.
- First thing to do is collaborate with your operators to make sure they make the most out of their own social channels.
- Second is to actively grow the number of visitors sharing their experiences through their social channels. Through encouragement but also by enabling sharing.
- Third, and this is where we get into the future of destination marketing, by actively managing your destination to give visitors more reasons to share their experiences and mitigate any negative stories.
[By the way, I only used Vancouver as an example because I live there, no other reason]
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Internet, Marketing, Travel & Tourism
8 lessons learned for DMOs when working with bloggers
06.21.13 | Permalink | 5 Comments
Packed room for my TBEX preso
This is the second post about the key takeaways from my #TEBX presentation a few weeks ago. Yesterday, lessons for bloggers, today lessons for destinations:
1) A blog trip IS NOT a press trip
I’ve seen too many blog trips miss the mark because the press trip was taken as the template for a blog trip. Most press trips follow a “standard” format by planning the trip in detail, hosting the writer/photographer/video crew for a certain amount of time and then wait for the piece to be published.
Bloggers have very different motivations than traditional travel writers. They also work with different schedules, deadlines, etc. Some don’t even have a home to go to. They live on the road. Some, maybe a lot, don’t even want to be hosted. They just want to do their own thing. Some publish fast, often in real time, some take longer to publish.
When planning a blog trip, think about your objectives. For example: do you want lots of content in the moment or would it be okay to wait for (better quality) content? This makes a difference. Do you want copy, photos, video? This makes a difference. What niches are you after? There’s a long tail of bloggers for pretty much every criteria. There’s a blogger who travels the world dancing. There’s a blogger who travels the world singing karaoke. You get my point.
2) Invest time to find the right bloggers
A lot of DMOs are passive about bloggers. They wait for a blogger to come to them, and deal with things as they come. There are hundreds of travel bloggers and more are starting new pages every day. Be strategic: it’s better to be pro-active and invite bloggers. Think about your objectives and use them to find bloggers that will best meet them. Even as requests come in from bloggers, have a checklist ready to quickly assess what you’re going to do with them.
We use 9 criteria we use when we select bloggers for blog trips we help clients with. It’s worth taking the time to find the right ones.
3) Don’t just focus on web traffic when selecting
My biggest pet peeve is the obsession with reach. It’s old-school thinking, ie “better to get my message to 10,000 people who don’t care, than 1,000 who do”. Web traffic is not completely irrelevant, of course, but it’s only one criteria out of nine.
Web traffic can also be misleading. For example, a blogger could get 20,000 visitors a month to their blog. But maybe 80% of those visitors are going to three past posts that rank high in Google because of good SEO. They’ll never see the content about your destination. More important is repeat visitation; these are people who are loyal readers.
4) Rethink your measures of success
If the objective isn’t to get a message in front of as many people as possible, what is it then?
A traditional travel writer will produce a piece and the DMO will measure the Ad Equivalency (which is B.S.). Bloggers can do a lot more. A lot of the campaigns we’ve done go way beyond the traditional way of working with travel media. I wrote a whole piece about this recently.
5) Build lasting relationships
This is social media. It’s meant to be social. Most bloggers like to meet people and make friends around the world. A lot of bloggers also like to meet other bloggers. If you or your socially savvy staff build relationships with bloggers, it’s better for everybody. And don’t limit it there. Connect bloggers with local influencers, especially if they operate in niches. Somebody passionate about skiing will probably stay in touch with somebody else who’s passionate about it.
If you have a good relationship with a blogger, they will also likely a) produce more content b) retweet your content when relevant c) come back for another visit d) refer other bloggers e) bring old content back to the front over time.
From personal experience I know Valencia is doing this really well.
6) Think outside the box; bloggers can offer much more value than a few posts
This is related to #4. A lot of bloggers are very talented content professionals. Many are looking for opportunities to fund their travels as well. Need destination photography? Make it social. Hire one of the awesome photography bloggers to do the shoot. They will do great work and share it with their own community as well. Why hire a writer or photographer who produces content in the dark?
In this case, you would pay the blogger – not for posting in their own channels but to produce content for your channels. Be transparent about it, though. And don’t make specific demands or have expectations about the content they post in their own channels.
7) WIFI everywhere, all the time
This one is very tactical and got applause in my session and it pains me this is still not a standard feature of every blog trip: bloggers Tweet, Vine, Instagram and blog in real time. Disconnecting them from the internet means this won’t happen. Such a missed opportunity. Some blog trips don’t even have good Wifi in the hotels.
8) Personalize and build in free time
Every blogger is different and most have a passion for travel and a background in writing. They’re used to being independent and the good ones know what their audience likes. Tailoring the trip to the individual is logical but a lot of DMOs resort to the “destination top 10” for everybody. They don’t spend the time researching each blogger and their interest.
Free time is also very important. Bloggers like to do their own thing or take time to produce content. Some of the best feedback we received from our “Flanders is a Festival” project is the itineraries Flanders created. They were extremely short. Most of the trip was at the blogger’s discretion. They received (personalized) tips and ideas and a person to contact in case they did want a host. They loved it. We also gave them a portable WIFI hotspot.
Robyn wrote a great piece about TBEX on the Think! blog as well and here’s the full deck from my presentation.
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Marketing, social media, Travel & Tourism
5 Lessons learned for bloggers when working with destinations
06.20.13 | Permalink | 4 Comments
Speaking at TBEX (photo: @jaimehorwitz)
A few weeks ago I presented two sessions at TBEX in Toronto. It was a very flattering experience. The room was packed both days, and I received a lot of great feedback from attendees, bloggers, DMOs and tourism businesses. My day 2 presentation became a featured presentation on Slideshare. It was a good week!
On day 1, I shared the lessons we’ve learned at Think! working with bloggers and destinations. At the end, I gave tips for destinations and bloggers that I will now share in two posts.
I’ll start with tips for bloggers.
(These tips are based on your ability to connect with DMOs and the tourism industry. I would never pretend to know how to be a successful travel blogger – that’s your territory. But I do learn a lot by watching how my 2-year-old daughter runs her travel blog travellingwithparents.com.)
1) FIND YOUR NICHE!
If you are a general travel blogger, it’s hard to stand out and create a group of loyal readers. By serving a niche, you have a better chance of reaching people who find your content relevant and passionately care about it. Somebody who loves to ski is more likely to read a ski travel blog. It’s also going to be valuable to people in the ski industry, since you talk to the people they want to talk to. But in order to be taken seriously, you need to able to speak credibly to the community.
Bonus tip: Your story matters too
During the speed dating sessions at TBEX, we talked with more than a hundred bloggers and very few could describe what the story is that they are telling or what niche they serve. Some bloggers “write for themselves” and that’s ok of course. But think about your angle. Is there a thread that runs through your site? How do your posts connect as a whole? “Looking for off-the-beaten-path experiences” or wanting to “emerge myself in the culture” is simply too standard an explanation. Jürgen and Mike’s for91days blog, however is not. It’s a story that’s easy to understand. So is the 365 days of dining in Richmond campaign blog that we helped out with.
2) BUILD A COMMUNITY
A lot of destinations still focus on web traffic as a their primary metric when it comes to selecting bloggers. It’s definitely important, but for us it’s only one out of nine criteria. Bloggers are influencers, and the degree of influence you have over your audience is what matters more. Why? Because we would like you to inspire people to come visit the place you’re writing about. Bloggers who have built a base of loyal readers and who cultivate an engaged social media community are more likely to have a higher degree of influence.
It’s easier to build a community around a niche, because people who share an interest are more likely to engage with each other (see #1). But you can also build a community based on your personality, skill or other quality you have. Whatever the case, you have to connect. It’s called social media for a reason.
3) BE CLEAR ABOUT YOUR APPROACH AND OBJECTIVES
There’s no right or wrong approach about how you travel or how you publish your content, but most destinations approach a blog trip like a traditional press trip. This often leads to a frustrated experience if you don’t like that format. When you’re approached by (or reach out to) a destination, make sure you’re very clear about your standard approach.
Do you prefer not to be hosted? Make sure the organization contacting you knows this. Is the only reason you want to visit, is because of a specific national park? Make sure they know as well. Otherwise you might be frustrated when your host has an action-packed itinerary filled with zoos, museums, restaurant after restaurant and other things you’re not interested in, while allowing you 30 minutes in park you came for in the first place.
Being clear about what you want and like might affect the outcome of whether you will be invited or not. But in the end, it’s better for both you and the destination to discover early if your expectations don’t align.
4) UNDERSTAND THE DESTINATION’S OBJECTIVES AND EXPECTATIONS
Before you commit to a blog trip, make sure you understand what the destination would like as a result. How do they define success? Do they have specific expectations about publishing? Do they expect you to write about specific things? Don’t forget that it’s an investment for them and it’s important to ask these questions up front so you can decide if you can or want to meet them.
We’re not big fans of defining specific publishing requirements. We’d rather let the destination speak for itself and have the blogger decide what and how much is appropriate for their audience. That’s why it’s important that the destination does its homework and invites the right bloggers. When discussing trips with writers, we’ll give bloggers an idea of what we and the client have in mind, including explaining why we’d like to invite them. For example: “we want a ski blogger to experience this new ski resort because we believe your audience would really like to know about it. We’ll leave it up to the you to decide how to best tell that story.”
But more often than not, we’ll think outside the box. We’ll include bloggers as part of a bigger campaign. Because they’re great content producers, storytellers and often live without too many constraints.
5) STAY HUMBLE
I’ve seen some travel writers working for big publications show up for a media trip with a suitcase and massive egos. They can be demanding, unreasonable and obnoxious. What I like about working with bloggers is that their passion is truly for travel and creating great content. That’s what’s got you started and that’s what motivates most of you. You’re all unique and some/most of you are real characters… but the far majority of you are insanely nice people. Please don’t lose that when you become more successful.
Tomorrow: 8 lessons learned for DMOs when working with bloggers
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Management, Marketing, social media
9 criteria for selecting travel bloggers
01.29.13 | Permalink | 11 CommentsThis post was first published as a guest post on the TBEX blog.
Blogger gathering at TBEX in Girona, SpainAt the moment, blog trips and bloggers hosted by a Destination Marketing Organisation (DMO) are still a bit of a novelty. DMOs don’t yet completely realize the value bloggers and bring but I expect an explosion in the near future when DMOs understand the value while travel bloggers realise the benefits a blog trip can offer and new travel bloggers want to join the club.
DMOs need a way to sort through all these requests. We’re not big fans of a one-size-fits-all approach to measure the value of bloggers but instead we like to match bloggers based on a DMO’s specific marketing goals. We also recommend that our clients take a pro-active approach to bloggers by inviting the ones with the best fit instead of a reactive one by waiting for requests to come in.
We have a good relationship with dozens of bloggers and a database with hundreds more. We have 9 criteria to select bloggers for blog trips and other campaigns, which are outlined in detail below. When developing social media strategies we recommend that our DMO clients also use these criteria to manage individual blogger requests.
1) Value to the blogger
I mention this one first, because if there’s no value for the blogger then there’s no use in working together. A blog trip or campaign needs to be a win/win situation. We’ve learned that it’s important that the DMO and blogger know each other’s expectations. Sometimes a blog trip might not work out for a variety of reasons. And that’s okay. But it’s better to set out the realities and expectations on both sides ahead of time.
2) Reach; the size of the audience
This is an important metric, but not as important as you might think – at least, not to us. We would rather work with a blogger who has a smaller audience and a higher influence. A blogger with 2,000 Twitter followers may be of more value than one with 50,000 if those 2,000 people are passionate, engaged and are likely to be influenced by the person they follow.
We use tools like Compete.com, Quantcast and Alexa to get an indication, or ask the blogger for data. We will also look at Twitter followers, Facebook likes, and other statistics. For bloggers, it’s a good idea to have this info handy as DMOs will ask for this.
3) Audience demographics
This criteria includes things like what language you blog in and what countries your readers are from, their age, education, income, etc. We’re not that interested in where the blogger comes from because their audience might come from a completely different place.
We will use Quantcast and sometimes other tools for this, although a lot of blogs don’t have enough traffic for these tools to provide valuable metrics. We sometimes ask bloggers, but we have had to make assumptions at times.
4) Influence in a niche
This one is more important to us than reach. We’re looking for people who are an authority in a subject matter. That’s the power of the Internet – there’s a community for every passion. It’s safe to assume that a wine blogger has an audience interested in wine. If we’re working with a destination that is seeking to leverage its wine products or experiences, we will pick a wine blogger with a small audience over a general travel blogger with a larger audience in most cases.
In order to determine influence, we look at things including comments on a blog (volume and types of comments) and how the blogger interacts with her/his audience. Why? It’s that personal connection that makes a blogger unique and influential. And we will also look at repeat visitation to the blog. This is an indicator of how loyal an audience is and therefore the influence the blogger has.
What we sometimes observe is that bloggers with a large audience lose the personal connection with their readers. Their blog becomes more like a traditional publication online. That’s to be expected and not necessarily a bad thing, it just changes the types of initiatives we will invite them for, and the approach we take. They may be better suited for a traditional press trip.
5) Connection to other influencers
This one is closely related to #4. Blogging is social. We believe that a blog trip or a blog campaign’s value doesn’t just come from the value as a result of the produced content, but also from the personal connections created. A blogger with a lot of connections to other influencers is more desirable as that means there’s a better chance that their messages are then amplified or retweeted by other influences. A good relationship with one blogger can also lead to a referral to another. We often ask other bloggers for suggestions about other writers.
6) Quality and style of writing, photography and/or video
This one speaks for itself. We prefer blogs with quality content. And sometimes one blogger’s style fits better with a particular destination brand than another. And it doesn’t mean that we look for moderate bloggers only, by the way. We seek honesty and transparency, otherwise a message won’t be credible. The blogger at TBEX who writes critical posts just to make PR people uncomfortable would probably not be invited, though (see #9). Often, quality trumps reach and influence.
7) Speed of communication
We don’t have a specific preference. It varies from initiative to initiative. Most of the time, a blog trip is designed to create a lot of social content right away, and speed is important. Other times, it won’t matter too much if it takes a few weeks for us to see a post (months is pushing it). The longer it takes, the more the details and energy are lost. Plus, the copy ends up looking more like it belongs in a traditional publication.
8) Use of technology and tools
Does the blogger tweet, Instagram, or post to fan pages during the trip? This is obviously helpful.
And it also varies. If we’re working on a campaign where we want a lot of content in the moment, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are important. In some cases, they’re not.
Sometimes we look for quality, influence, and reach for a specific tool or network. We invited a big Instagrammer to Flanders, for example. The Costa Brava even hosted an Instagram trip.
9) Personality
Is this blogger easy to work with?
We will happily sacrifice reach or influence for a nice person when we’re hosting a group of bloggers. Personality type tells us something about the bloggers’ relationship with their readers, and that’s important in social media. Other factors including professionalism and attentiveness are equally important. If it takes weeks for somebody to reply to an email, or if they don’t follow practical instructions we get worried. We often check references as well by calling another DMO the blogger has worked with.
We have good results using our criteria above. In the future we hope to build out our database so we can be a good matchmaker between bloggers and the tourism industry that delivers benefits for both.
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Marketing, social media, Travel & Tourism
How can destinations measure the value of travel bloggers?
01.23.13 | Permalink | 4 CommentsI wrote this post as a guest post on the TBEX blog.
#blogtripF1
Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) have hosted influencers for a long time. It used to be the exclusive territory of travel journalists. They were courted, invited and hosted in order to generate awareness and consideration for a destination.
In order to measure this PR most DMOs used the “Advertising Value Equivalency” (AVE). You take the size of the produced piece, use the equivalent cost of running an ad of the same size in the publication, apply a multiplying factor because editorial is more credible and there’s your equivalent value of “free” advertising.
Most people in the PR industry agree that AVE is significantly flawed. But for years, it’s all we had. It was simple and easy to calculate – and at least it was consistent, something we could monitor over time, and benchmark against the competition. At least that was something.
There’s no such direct measure for blogger-based campaigns at the moment. Keith (Velvet Escape) and Melvin (Traveldudes) presented a first draft of a method calculating the value of a blog at a TBEX session in Girona. It was loosely based on AVE and an attempt to quantify the value of a post in dollars.
I applaud the attempt because at least it will provide DMOs with some guidance and offer benchmarking possibilities. But I’m not a fan of trying to use an old-media method that’s already shaky at best and applying it to a new world model in order find a social media equivalent for it. It assumes a specific blogger will provide equal value to all destinations and that’s simply not true.
There are a multitude of travel blogs out there, and with careful research, we can unearth a blog and a writer who has the best fit with a specific destination and its objectives. Often we end up bringing bloggers who have a specific skill or niche. And when we bring a group of bloggers together, the composition of that group, the mesh of personalities, matters.
It’s not just the size of a blogger’s audience that’s important, but the likelihood of delivering a relevant, credible, and authentic message to their network. Passion speaks volumes. We need to believe that their message will influence a reader’s travel decisions.
At Think! we love working with bloggers because they are, generally speaking, very passionate and excellent creators of content. We work with dozens of DMOs around the world, helping them arrange blog trips, and we involve bloggers in many of our campaigns. We tie the way we measure a campaign involving bloggers to the specific marketing objectives.
We research, identify, and approach the right bloggers for the campaign, assist with the trip planning, and provide consultancy to clients on how to make these travel (or cultural) writers feel most engaged or valued.
For example:
- In Belgium we worked with Tourism Flanders to identify, contact, and send 100 travel and music bloggers to festivals all summer long, with the objective of generating awareness for Flanders as a prominent festival destination in Europe.
- In Richmond, British Columbia, we helped find a food blogger who would eat and blog about a different Richmond restaurant every day for a year with the objective to position Richmond in the centre of the foodie community.
- In New South Wales, Australia, we organised a month-long bus trip of bloggers including a photographer and videographer with the objective of showcasing the destination and creating content in a more social way.
Through our work we know many bloggers and we hope we have developed a good reputation amongst them. Because we have these relationship it makes it easier and easier to find the right bloggers for our projects.
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Internet, Marketing, social media, Travel & Tourism
Graph Search is something people might just love
In 2010 I wrote that Tripadvisor’s integration of Facebook connect offered a glimpse into the future. Well the future is here.
Graph Search, announced yesterday by Facebook, is a new way of searching. It’s using taking your social graph and the content shared on Facebook as the basis of relevancy. Graph Search will allow you to search for things based on your personal network of friends, your ‘friends-of-friends’ or Facebook users in general.
You can soon search on Facebook for “restaurants in San Francisco liked by people who live in San Francisco”.
Or “restaurants in San Francisco my friends like”.
Or “restaurants in San Francisco liked by my friends who live in San Francisco.”
Or “Restaurants in San Francisco liked by my friends from India”
The possibilities are endless.
The travel decision process is going to be massively influenced when Facebook users adopt this kind of functionality. Because travel product is a heavy used item on Facebook. People check in, share photos and like places they’ve been all the time.
A whole new world of discovery and travel inspiration might open up. Imagine searching for “Places people check-in who like scuba diving”
Or “Cities people check-in who like art”
Or “festivals people like who like Greenday”
Or “pictures from my friends in Berlin”
Yesterday I also read a nice post by a Techcrunch writer about a recent frustrating trip to the new MySpace. This part caught my attention and made me think.
Wait, how does Myspace know I would like these?Is everyone seeing the same ones? Did Justin pick them out for me? Are my friends listening to these guys? I have no context here. I don’t understand why they’re recommended. I decide to move on.and
I mean really, I logged in with Facebook – would it have killed you to look through my “likes” for a bit of personalization here?A Techcrunch writer is obviously ahead of the curve. But what’s happening here is that people are starting to expect websites to personalize based on their previous behaviour and what they or their friends like on Facebook.
I remember being freaked out when Amazon recommended me books based on my previous purchases. Or when a laptop bag followed me around the internet thanks to remarketing. But that’s a long time ago. I don’t get freaked out anymore. We’ve gotten used to it. We even like it. We get mad when we see ads that aren’t relevant. And Facebook’s Graph Search might just deliver exactly the functionality at the right time. And travel and tourism marketing will never be the same. You better get ready.
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Marketing, social media
Two Facebook pages best practices
North To Alaska
First there’s the ‘North to Alaska’ page. I know this page well because it’s managed by Think!’s Dustin. And he’s killing it!
It’s the only page I know on Facebook where the ‘people talking’ almost always outnumbers the number of ‘likes’ with hardly running any ads. Besides sharing mind blowing photos, Dusty is also doing everything right to engage the community. Drawing engagement from fans, involving them in answering questions and recognizing fans for great contributions. The page has build a community of very passionate people who love the Alaska highway. The almost 5,000 fans reach tens-of-thousands because of the great community management.
<sales>
Dusty also conducts our populair social media audits. He will review your page, tell you what you do well, where you can improve and how. Just drop us a note for info.
</sales>
Applebee’s
Applebee’s? The restaurant chain? Yes, that Applebee’s.
Now the postings on the page itself is not bad, but it’s not great either.
It’s the way they handle what people post on their page. A few months ago some teenagers started ‘trolling’ the page. An ‘Applebee’s Reply Guy’ was created and has turned trolls into fans. Click on ‘See All’ where it says ‘Recent Posts by Others on Applebee’s’ and learn from how they respond to good comments, bad comments and how they use wit and humour when appropriate.
I was made aware of this page at #Somet12. Think!’s Mikala wrote a great post about it.
Update Feb 4, 2013. Apparently the Applebee’s Reply Guy lost his way (or did they change agency).
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Experience Design, Internet, Management, Marketing, social media, Travel & Tourism
3 things to think about in 2013
Happy New Year everybody! Here are three things off the top of my head that are important things to consider for 2013. Do you have any more?
1) PUT SOCIAL AT THE CORE
I think it’s pretty clear by now that social media has a major impact on the travel decision making process. If your tourism business or DMO hasn’t realized this yet you better catch up. You should be at level 3 or higher by now.
Most marketers think of social media as an add-on to a traditional campaign, or at least start with traditional thinking. It’s time to flip it around. Start with a social idea and support it with traditional methods. Or do traditional things in a social way. For example, we recently worked with a DMO who let it’s Facebook community vote on what photos would be published in it’s visitor guide.
2) START USING SERVICE DESIGN
Mitigating a mediocre experience with brilliant marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. The experience IS your marketing and the stories your visitors tell each other is what it’s all about. You have two choices. First choice is to join the race to the bottom and keep offering specials, discounts and special offers. The second one is to create remarkable experiences people love and want to be part of, regardless of what it costs.
If your choice is the latter, you need to start thinking about service design. When you’re an operator you need to start thinking about the end-to-end experience you offer your guest. When you are a DMO you need to think about the end-to-end destination experience. Service design is gaining a lot of momentum in Europe, especially in Austria where destinations are starting to take an active role in the design of the destination experience.
3) MOBILE: THINK DEVICE PLUS CONTEXT
I was on a panel at a conference in Barcelona recently and somebody asked about mobile. Before I could even think about it I said “it’s not about mobile, it’s about device + context”. I probably heard it somewhere before but I have never really thought about it like that. But it’s true. Whether you build a desktop site, a mobile site, an adaptive site or an app, it’s not the device that’s important. It’s the context of use.
When you search google maps, it takes into account your device, where you are and what date and time it is. That’s the context of your usage and the information you get back takes that into account. You need to so the same thing. A consumer accessing your content at home is looking for very different things than a consumer walking down the street in your destination.
Now here’s the kicker. Often that means people use another website than yours. Somebody walking down the street looking for a restaurant is going to use Google Maps, Yelp or Tripadvisor, not a DMO website. Even a consumer planning as trip might never even make in onto your website (hello travel bloggers). Your content online strategy needs to include content on third party websites. From inspiration to transaction. Just like we used to do it in the 90s with travel guides and tour operator brochures.
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William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog
William Bakker is Chief Strategist at Destination Think!. These are my personal thoughts.
