I noticed the following post from the New Zealand fanpage on my news feed just now:

Simple, effective, engaging… 200 comments in 27 minutes (and going up fast still).

Great work NZ.

Paul Clark, Chris Wheeler and me (photo: Geoff Moore)

The Torch Relay is a great event to connect people with the games across the country. A perfect vehicle to extend the exposure beyond Vancouver and showcase all of British Columbia around the world.

But like pretty much anything else related to games, access is tough when you’re not a sponsor or accredited media. About a year ago we worked out a partnership with Coca-Cola to cover every day of the Torch Relay in BC, and key cities across Canada through an extended partnership with the Canadian Tourism Commission. That gave us the access we needed.

One of our star Field Reporters Chris Wheeler was up for the challenge and on October 30 last year he started the 106 day journey. With the support from Jose and Mike in our Tourism BC office, and Paul Clark and our regional offices on the road, he created 25 videos in BC and 11 in the rest of Canada. The formula was to use the Torch Relay as a continuing plot-line and highlight specific experiences in the area or community the flame visited that day. You follow the flame, and also see what makes the area great.

The videos are a great success for all partners; awesome stories, tens of thousands of views (almost 300,000 as of Feb 14), great response from the local communities and some great learning for the future. Check out the YouTube channel or our fancy HelloBC Torch Relay page.

The 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games are starting today! It’s been a crazy few years and I’ve learned a lot. It’s been a good ride and a good time to share some of our activities and learning.  Let’s start at the beginning.

Our marketing objective to leverage is to turn games interest into destination interest and action. Our online strategies are:

1. Maximize exposure
2. Drive to our consumer websites
3. Use the website to put BC on the ‘must visit’ list
4. Capture consumer data for future database marketing and increase fans and followers

Over the next two weeks, I’ll share how we’ve executed against these strategies. Stay tuned.

Word-of-mouth is the core of tourism marketing. Remarkable tourism product and experiences drive word-of-mouth. No amount of advertising can build credible awareness or brand like word-of-mouth.

While in Riga for the ETC eBusiness academy, I came across a few great examples of remarkable experiences that I’ve told to at least 50 people. Plus the people in my social networks have seen videos and photos. Many of these people asked follow-up questions. What are the people like? Is it expensive? Where is it?

I had dinner in 4 or 5 restaurants while I was there. They were all good. But I don’t remember their names. Except one: Hospitalis, a soviet style hospital themed restaurant. The video I took of my Austrian friend Martin below will explain why.

My new friend Maija from Riga invited me and Martin to “go flying”. No idea what she was talking about but how can you say no to that? About 20 minutes outside Riga was the Aerodium. Hovering 10 meters over a huge ventilator was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. I would fly back the 12 hours just to do that again.

I’ve talked to people. I’ve posted photos and videos on Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. I am the media and the message for Latvia Tourism. I wonder how many of the people I’ve connected with have  heard of Riga before? And I wonder how many have Googled either Riga, Latvia, Hospitalis of Aerodrome. Will you?

So here’s the view outside our tent/cabin this morning. Absolutely amazing. Unfortunately tourism is still impacted from the election trouble last year so we’re virtually alone in a fairly large camp. I’m not complaining.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what the opportunity is exactly for a Destination Marketing Organization like Tourism BC. Here’s where I’m at. I welcome your input.
Twitter is social, so it’s up to an individual to choose to follow somebody. To a bit of understanding about what would motivate somebody to follow a DMO, I posted a short survey on Twitter. I didn’t get near enough responses to give it statistically valid results (n<100) but its something (feel free to fill it out and re-tweet).

My hypothesis that there’s a difference between what people expect from a local or a far away tourism board seems to be true. Locals are interested in current information while long haul visitors look for ideas, deals and help in trip planning. Makes sense, people’s needs depend on the level of knowledge about a destination.
My open question “Anything else you want to share about what a Tourist Board can do for you via Twitter?” resulted in some interesting insight (appended in the rest of by entry in italics below). They’re in line with some ideas I have:
Twitter as a customer service centre
how about a “virtual” Visitor Information Centre/counsellor where visitors could ask questions about what to do, etc.
Comcast’s Frank Eliason is universally hailed for his ComcastCares account where Comcast customers can ask questions or get help with service problems. Many DMO’s already sun visitor centres and/or call centres. Twitter is another channel for communication.
I wonder how this would scale though as Twitter grows. Creating a network of Twitterers in a destination, each as an expert for a particular area or sector is one option. It doesn’t have to be a DMO representative answering the question, there are plenty of local experts out there. Building the network and distributing questions is the role of the DMO.
Pro-actively sharing information
insider info about the place like favourite bar for a martini, celebrities visiting, bits of history
Sends you on a “5 second holiday” each day with breathtaking photos.
This falls more into the broadcasting category and that means you need to be careful because it’s easy for people to perceive your message as spam and unfollow you as a result. But as the survey above show, there’s appetite for this information. So how to go about it?
Twitter is about information sharing. But quality, quantity, frequency and communication style are important. I’ve been active on Twitter for almost two year and here are my observations.
Add links. Pointing to quality information is key to Twitter. Don’t just link to your own website. Be diverse. By using a URL shorterner with reporting features like budURL or Cl.igs, you can measure the quality of your tweets by the number of clicks it receives.
Frequency. Don’t post one tweet after another but space your informational tweets. You can use a tool like Tweetlater to schedule tweets. I use it for my ‘Good Morning’ tweets to cool BC photos. People are creatures of habit and people will look remember similar pieces of information at a regular time of the day.
Communication style. Just like all social media, the communication style needs to be conversational and authentic. No marketing talk; this message is from a person on behalf of a company. Companies can’t talk.
The quality of information needs to be good. This is very subjective of course, and learning through trail and error is probably your best bet. Measuring re-tweets (what’s retweet) is another good way of measuring the quality of your information.
Find a personal connection
Ask me questions and engage me.
An important realizations came to me last week when Meg from Finger Lake sent me the following message:

@wilhelmus we have a winery named after you in the Finger Lakes! http://w ww.wilhelmusestate….

Twitter is about personal communication. Broadcasting general information is hit an miss for people. But if you make a personal connection, either through a gimmick (like my name) or an interest, the communication becomes a lot more meaningful. Again, scaling is tough. We receive millions of visitors to our website. There’s no way we can develop a personal relationship with every person on Twitter. But our network of tourism partners certainly can. The operator ultimately delivers the experience after all.
Use the Twitter community
Take suggestions – ask us what the best cafe is in Revelstoke or great family camping etc.
Twitter is a community. People build their their network by following and being followed by other people. As a DMO, you need to work just as hard at your network as other people. When you create a thriving network, the network is the marketer, not the DMO. As a DMO, you can activate this by engaging the network as suggested above. Your network needs to include a diversity of ‘local experts’ that you can use to assist and connect with people.
This is where Twitter excels. It’s how David Armano raised thousands of dollars for a friend in need. It’s how Twitter is rapidly becoming a channel for live witness news.
Conclusion
Twitter can be a valuable tool for DMO’s by providing information and support for travelers and potential travelers. It’s important to understand Twitter is a social channel and not a broadcast channel. The personal and one-on-one communication style of Twitter is hard to scale. That’s why it’s important to build a network of people from your industry and past travelers and passionate residents you can activate.
Build your network and start engaging people. Use re-tweets to find the right person to assist and inform potential travelers. You can also use search and alerts to find people with questions that relate to your destination or related tourism experiences.

One thing I observed with some (most) of the Phocuswright innovators is that a lot of the products demo-ed are (still) conceived and created by engineers. Engineers are brilliantly smart. But most suffer from the “because we can” syndrome. FAIL.
Good products are simple and useful. If you don’t meet these criteria, you will fail guaranteed. Meet them, and you have a shot. They are your minimum requirements.
Take Twitter. Turns out Twitter us useful to millions of people. Twitter is also extremely simple. Post and follow. That’s pretty much it.
Twitter could add categories, replies, forwards, tags, google maps and much, much more. Twitter could allow its users to add pictures, voice messages, video. But they have resisted. Because it would stop being simple. And that’s a big reason why Twitter is successful.
Take Kayak. Kayak is also useful. Kayak is also extremely simple in it’s essence. From->to->dates->search and you’re done. The result page focuses on the core task; find the best flight. Features are optional after the core task is completed. These features are useful in itself, but don’t stop the core task from being simple.
I suggest to all the innovators to hire a product manager who understands this, focuses on the core task that’s being satisfied, and strips everything else.

The chicks from the Online Revealed conference would like your opinion about the topics for their next conference. Tourism businesses, please take some time and fill out the survey:

I’ve always wanted to post while sitting on a panel. Done.

In my last post in this series I wrote about encouraging your customer to share their experiences online. Now lets take that concept one step further. You can participate in the online discussion. Some call it “joining the conversation”. By joining, you can make new people aware of your business, but also learn a great deal about your target audience. You might even get a new idea about how to make your business more remarkable.
This is really part of #3 Monitor and Respect Tripadvisor. But I consider Tripadvisor a must-do, while this is a nice-to-do. I understand that the operational side of running a business takes up time enough already so you’ll have to monitor if your efforts are paying off. Maybe there’s a creative way. Use a family or a staff member. Starwood Hotels has somebody employed to answer questions on Flyertalk, a frequent traveler community.
An important aspect of engaging in online communities is that you can’t use traditional marketing tactics. In most cases it’s completely inappropriate to advertise your business. And in Europe, there’s talk about making it illegal. Here’s an bad example from the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum:

This sound like a group who are looking for some people to travel with. No, it’s not.

It’s very easy to destroy your reputation and credibility. Don’t be tempted but play by the rules. The risks of getting caught and getting a bad name are too big.
It’s a very delicate line. The best thing to do is to be genuinely helpful. The opportunity you have is to be seen as an expert. An experts of the area where you live, and the secor you represent. If you run a eco touring company in Parksville for example, become the eco expert of the Parksville area in a relevant online community. If you’re helpful, people might seek your services over others as a reward. If you do say something that’s related to your business, stay in context of the conversation and offer full disclosure. The best thing to do is add your website URL in a signature and let people decide for themselves. Here’s a good example:

So find the right community for you and join in. It’s fun, you’ll learn a lot, and hopefully drive some customers your way.