It’s simple. Just set-up an RSS feed in Technorati for the search results of your product or brand and join the conversation where appropriate. I’ve seen plenty of examples where even CEO’s are monitoring blogs and posting comments.
Examples:
My prediction is that all big travel brands will have a dedicated Social Network PR person on staff soon. But when you join the conversation, do in a transparent way, or you’ll end up being called on it just like Beatrice from Mobissimo.
Chris Clarke interviewed me on the Canada-e-Connect blog. If you’re visiting from this blog and are interested in more information, check out these posts:
Karin Schmollgruber from the Fastenyourseatbelts blog also interviewed me a while ago.
Part of our marketing philosophy is to ask people to do something in our communications, usually with the website as the call to action. It is therefore extremely important to create effective landing pages where people can follow through. A percentage point increase in task completion can make a huge difference in the overall results of a campaign.
A landing page needs to follow through on a call to action, should be relevant to the message, re-enforce it, be credible, desirable and usable. Some of this you can test easily, others not so much within the time and budget available. I’ve stated once in a meeting that I prefer a blank landing page over a aesthetically pleasing landing page if it produced better results. OK, I was a little fictitious but the point is that what matters are results, not personal opinion or preference.
Multi-variance (or A/B) testing is something we have employed for a while now with good results. Try two or more different options to a design, measure the results and roll out the one with the best results. Then use that design as the starting point for further iteration. If you have the traffic, and the right (agile) people and processes, this can be very effective. What you end up with is a design that very much driven by analytics, not personal opinion.
Last spring we used Google’s Website Optimizer to automate the process with great results. Joel, Eric and the rest of the team did a great job and Google wrote up a case study and published it on their website.
It’s been a few months since we implemented the first phase of our User Generated Content strategy. I thought this would be a good time to share some results.
Since we integrated HelloBCBlogs.com into our HelloBC.com website in March, we’ve seen a rapid increase in traffic to our blog entries. In July, we received almost 200,000 blog pageviews. The blog entries help us in our SEO efforts; 5% of our organic Search Engine traffic lands on a blog entry. We also have over 1,000 subscribers to our RSS feed.
The entries from travelers is showing a steady climb and we’re approaching the 300 mark. We were aiming for quality first; tips and information people can do something with. All entries are tagged with a community and an activity. This allows us to present relevant blog content alongside our official information. Between our staff, visitor centres and traveler entries, we cover almost 100 communities in BC and over 80 activities so far, for a total of 350 community/destination combinations. That makes for a great diversity of content, so it’s working out very well.
From a User Experience perspective, the blogs are fantastic. The average pageviews for a blog visitor is 4 times that of an average visitor. Qualitative research conducted in some key markets proved that our unique strategy to position blog entries alongside our official information on the same page is working beautifully. It adds a layer of credibility and insider information consumers really appreciate. Our traffic patterns confirm this as well, many visitors will move back and forth between official information and blogs.
We see room for improvement. We’d like to see more consumer interaction with our blogs for example. People don’t leave many comments, but a fair number of people rate the entries. We have some ideas to further evolve the blogs with the goal to grow it into an online community. I’ll share some more details when I can in the future.
See also my previous post about our User Generated Content strategy.
Are you passionate/obsessed with the internet? Do you think about the user first in any online deliverable? Do you always want to make things better? Do you know how to use analytics to drive results? Do you know Search Engine Marketing? Are you agile and do you believe that team=product? Then we want to talk to you! Check out this job posting for our online marketing specialist.
I’m in Seoul to meet our Asian teams about the future of our Japanese, Korean and Taiwanese websites. It’s my first time in Seoul and it’s a very cool city to visit.
I’ve always wanted to have a sign waiting for me on arrival!
Holly started taking pictures during our hour long hour taxi ride to the hotel.
We’ve only been here a few hours, we walked around the hip shopping area. Complete crazyness. Every store has a young and hip person with a speakers trying to get people into the store.
Tomoko from our Japanese office and Christine from Taiwain firing up their cell phones to explain to me how they can text, using 50+ characters on 12 keys. I get it now.
And of course I had to drink our Korean project beer Hite.
Karin Schmollgruber provides great insights into travel and eBusiness. She also has great interviews. I found her interview with Ian Rumgay from Tripadvisor very interesting.
Karin interviewed me last week about our Blogging and User Generated Content efforts. It’s now published on her website.
We’re receiving some great User Generated Content on HelloBC since the launch of our Great Finds release. This entry about some Grizzlies in Quesnel is awesome. Can you imagine driving along and coming across a mother Grizzley and two cubs.
Two weeks ago I was invited to speak at the BC Tourism Industry Conference. Jens Thraenhart from the Canadian Tourism Commission was kind enough to invite me and Alicia Whalen from a Couple of Chicks E-Marketing Consulting to join him for an eMarketing session to show how the CTC and Tourism BC collaborate in the online space, what our roles are in the purchase cycle and what businesses can do themselves to be successful.
Jens kicked off by presenting a strategic overview of the eTourism landscape and the CTC’s eMarketing efforts to sell consumer on Canada. Next, I took the audience through our eBusiness Technology and eMarketing efforts where we take the consumer down to the product level. Alicia then gave some great hand-on tips on how tourism operators can improve their individual websites.
I thought the session went well and I received some great positive reactions. Below is a Google Video of my presentation with audio. Jens also wrote about the event on his blog.
A few months ago, we launched our Kokanee release (the code names for our website releases are named after beer brands). The most significant improvement on the end user side is the inclusion of our new HelloBC Listing Program. This gives consumers the ability to find tourism products on our websites. Businesses can list their products through our TourismBC.net website.
The listing program offers a lot of flexible ways to provide information to consumers. It allows for the many different types of businesses to build in in a way that makes sense for the product they offer. The one thing I’d like to highlight here is the concept of how we use experience locations on our interactive maps.
Most tourism related websites offer maps just like the one below. The location of the business is highlighted. The user can zoom-in, zoom-out, move, etc. One thing we display I haven’t seen before is the location of the closest airport (as indicated by the tourism business). This is a requirement that comes straight out of our research. BC is a large place and the location of a tourism product related to the nearest airport is important.
We have a lot of smart people at Tourism BC who have been working in the tourism industry, or working with tourism businesses for a long time. One of the things that was identified is that the location of a companies office is not necessarily where the experience takes place. To accommodate that, we created the concept of an experience location. Here are some examples of how tourism businesses are using this concept.
Below is an example of a cruise company. Besides the office location, it also shows the cruise destinations. Very useful for a consumer looking to cruise to a specific location, regardless of the port of departure.
And here’s another great example. These are all the locations of a bus tour. Consumers can hop on at any of these locations. So the location of the office is irrelevant. This business chooses not to display it on the map.
By collecting this kind of geo-location information, we have the ability to do some very cool things in the future. We can plot the location of cruise destination from all companies on one map, for example. The creative juices are already flowing.