Somebody emailed me this webcast where Justin Reid from VisitBritain shares their social media strategy, examples, results and learning. Very insightful. Here are my key take-aways.

People don’t make a travel decision on a national tourism board website

Justin said: “Our research told us that the majority of long haul travelers visit a national tourist board after they’ve already made the decision to visit”

VisitBritain’s rightly concluded that in order to target people in the decision making process, they need to engage in other places like third party websites. A content partnership with Yahoo is working very well for them for example.

The future of CRM/eMail Marketing is under threat

Justin said: “Where previously you might have focused a lot of CRM activity we learned that the inbox is no longer a happy place. People want to clear it out as fast as possible. So we now want to focus on finding places where people are in the mindset of making decisions about travel [social media].”

I wondered about the same thing about a year ago in this blog post. As people become overwhelmed with email, they pay less attention to marketing messages, even when they opt-in. This kind of change won’t happen overnight but social media is an environment where people are easier to engage, two-way dialogue is possible and content is easy to share.

Social Media’s network effect has incredible reach

Justin: “10,000 followers is amazing. But we followed the traffic of some of our tweets and each of our tweets reaches a potential audience of about 325,000 people”

Through re-tweets on Twitter, and by tagging and sharing on Facebook, a message can travel far and wide in a very short period of time. And the content itself is much more credible because it’s endorsed by a friend who shared it.

Tourism Australia’s fanpage with over 600,000 fans is a good example. Every message they posts could be read by that many people. And for every person that comments on the post, the post gets published to their friend network, extending reach with the potential to organically grow their fanbase.

And as a side-effect, “Facebook is now the third largest referrer to VisitBritain after Google and Yahoo, and we’re not even seeking to push people to the website.”

Content is far more important than a website

Justin: “Our website is not the most important marketing tool for us, our content is. We’re just as happy if somebody reads our content on Yahoo as on our website.”

VisitBritain is agnostic about where content is being consumed and as a result, more of VisitBritains content is being consumed on third party websites. A partnership with Yahoo produces an exponential amount of views, for free. More videos are viewed than some market websites receive visitors.

Producing or gathering the right content, and pushing it out into place where you add value for the publisher and the consumer, preferably with easy sharing opportunities is much more effective than trying to generate website visitation through advertising alone.

User Generated Content is an easy and cost-effective way to publish content

Justin: “95% of VisitBritain’s photography comes from user generated content” and “when somebody’s photo appears on a national tourism boards site, you can bet on it they will send a link to all their friends to check it out.”

VisitBritain set-up a Flickr group called Love UK and is using it as one of the sources for its photos on VisitBritain.com. And because most people are happy to see their photography used, they will tell everybody about it.. on social media.

Brilliant. This is something I’ve advocated for years but I could never get it going. Well done VisitBritain.

Thanks for sharing Justin!

I’ve covered what we’re doing with Olympic related websites and how we drive interested people to our websites. To make sure the traffic we receive during the games is maximized we’ve worked for a long time on making the website the best it can be. The next few days are dedicated to it these activities.

Purchase cycle (well, the one we use)

HelloBC typically receives a lot of visitors who already know something about BC. In the purchase cycle, they are beyond the awareness stage and are already considering or intending to take a trip. What we’ve learned over the years is that these people are in planning mode and need information first, inspiration second. That’s why content is a huge priority for us (more about content later this week).

During the games, a lot of people will learn about BC for the first time. We call these people the newly aware. People earlier in the cycle need to learn about the destination and be inspired to visit. Everything related to the Olympics will provide a lot of inspiration and when they visit HelloBC, we’d like to continue to inspire and educate the consumer about everything BC has to offer in the process.

In order to meet the needs of the consumer in the early stages of the planning process, we created a new section for the newly aware. This section is different from the rest of the website. It contains large imagery, videos and is created in a way that encourages exploration. It was designed and created by our technology partner T4G in collaboration with Fjord West and the result is also technically interesting because it high interactivity but contains no Flash thanks to T4G’s HTML/CSS/Javascript wizz Larry.

Katrine Mosfjeld from VisitOSLO

Katrine Mosfjeld has been the Manager of the Tourist Information Division at VisitOSLO for 8 years. She manages online and offline information delivery to consumers ranging from Tourism Information Centres, to digital strategies, visitOSLO’s Twitter account and a booking system. She works closely with industry in Oslo and even delivers an eLearning program.

I met Katrine in Amsterdam at the ENTER conference last year where I was really impressed with the tremendous success of their Advergaming strategy. When I started to play the game I immediately understood the success. It’s super addictive! She just released a second version and I thought I’d catch up with her.

You’ve been executing an advergaming strategy with the Holmenkollen Ski Jump. What gave your team the idea to use an advergaming strategy?

I wish I could say it was my idea, but it wasn’t. The supplier, an Oslo based little firm called Agens, got the idea and first contacted our colleagues at VisitNorway to see if they were interested. They were, and the Manager, Hans Petter Aalmo, invited us at VisitOSLO to discuss the idea and potential. This was back in the summer of 2006. As you can imagine, this was pretty new 3,5 years ago and the project group was not sure if it was going to work. But we liked the idea and we had a good feeling about it. So we decided to try something brand new… The stakes were high, but then the gain is good as well if you succeed right?

When did it first launch and what were the objectives?

We launched it December 21, 2006. You can still play it online. We decided to measure our success in numbers of games played (profiling the ski jump, Oslo and Norway each time) and visitors to the sponsor websites. But we never even dreamt about the results we got. Or all the other stuff that happened…

What were the results and what was all the other stuff that happened?

The numbers we got were incredible! And they are still growing every single day. At the moment, 138,800,000 games have been played, which means 277,600,000 jumps because every game has 2 jumps . It has also generated more than 3,000,000 visits to our websites. How great is this??! Neither VisitOSLO or VisitNorway has ever done anything more efficient when it comes to marketing and results. And the other things that happened, but never thought of while planning…

• lots of media attention for the game, I’ve counted more than 20 articles
• we won a prize for the best game on a Norwegian gaming site 123spill.no
• 2 different Facebook groups created by fans
• some 40-50 people have been recording themselves and uploaded their videos on YouTube, like this one. Make sure to check out the related videos
• There have been blogs written about the game as a phenomena, and the Norwegian Ski Jumping team has blogged that this is what they do when they don’t work out or compete in the real stuff
• lots of tweets on Twitter
• the widget has been installed on many websites and blogs
• we’re even included in the ETC eMarketing book

You just launched a new version. What’s new and how are things going so far?
It’s a pretty tough act to follow because the first game was so successful! But we’re building a new skijump in Oslo, the new fantastic Holmenkollen Ski Jump, designed by JDS Arcitechts and wanted the game to reflect the new ski jump and brand. We launched it December 16th 2009 and you can play it here. It has been played 9,6 million times on the website already, with great viral effects in Facebook-posts, tweets, etc!

We also launched a Facebook app where you can play against your Facebook friends to see who’s the better jumper . It has been played approximately 1 million times on Facebook since we launched December 21st. An advanced version of an iPhone app has been sold over 2000 times since December 24th.

The game has been tweeted a gazillion times, received TV coverage on the news, sports, papers, blogs, Facebook and YouTube… It has generated 66,500 visitors to the sponsor websites.

The results look very good so far, especially considering it was launched only a few weeks ago. We expect it to deliver results for many years; the old game is more than 3 years old, and still delivers. Yesterday there were 342,000 games played in the OLD game Pretty efficient, eh?

What advise would you give to destination marketers who’re thinking about advergaming?

We’ve experienced that it is extremely efficient – but it has to be a good idea, and done professionally. We also think that our success partly comes because it is fairly addictive . It is a bit difficult to play, but not too difficult. You quickly understand some of the things that makes you better, so you want to try again. And it doesn’t feel to commercial – even if its marketing, you feel that it’s a game, and it is a game. Only it has some messages attached, and provides some links when the interest is created

Thank you very much for sharing your insights Katrine and congratulations with the success of the game.

You can follow Katrine on Twitter. Curious about the game? You can watch the video below but you really should play it.

Traditionally, DMO stands for Destination Marketing Organization. But would consumers and industry be better served if the ‘M’ stood for Management instead?

Consider my destination brand definition from a few posts back.

1. The sum of experiences of a traveler during a trip (but not all experiences are equal)
2. The sum of all stories somebody has hears about a destination (but not all sources are equally credible)

It’s clear that the visitor experience is the best form of destination branding. It will generate great memories people will relive, lead to repeat visitation and word of mouth referrals.

And when you read Ana Pollock’s Reputation, Reputation, Reputation post you will understand how actions by others can dramatically effect a destination brand.

Some will argue that all of the above is part of marketing. But semantics aside, changing the ‘M’ in DMO to Management would broaden the traditional focus and increase the scope into things that also matter.

I’m not talking about a visitor centre or a training program. I’m talking about generating a vision for the destination, looking at all aspects of the destination experience and working with extended groups of stakeholders to truly manage and deliver an end-to-end world class experience.

And when you satisfy your visitors, wouldn’t a destination be a better place to live for its residents as well?

Perhaps the most annoying thing you can tell me is that some DMO is re-branding their destination.

A destination brand is:

1. The sum of experiences of a traveler during a trip (but not all experiences are equal)
2. The sum of all stories somebody has hears about a destination (but not all sources are equally credible)

That’s it.

To re-brand a destination, you need to change the stories people tell when they get home. In order to do that you need to change the experiences travelers have. Changing your story doesn’t mean anything if yours is different from the real one.

I’m working on an idea I’ve had for a long time with the working title “Disneyworld as the perfect DMO”. Here’s a piece of knowledge from Disney every DMO or travel business can copy-and-paste and hang on their walls.

Mickey’s 10 Commandments

1. Know your audience – Don’t bore people, talk down to them or lose them by assuming that they know what you know.
2. Wear your guest’s shoes – Insist that designers, staff and your board members experience your facility as visitors as often as possible.
3. Organize the flow of people and ideas – Use good story telling techniques, tell good stories not lectures, lay out your exhibit with a clear logic.
4. Create a weenie – Lead visitors from one area to another by creating visual magnets and giving visitors rewards for making the journey
5. Communicate with visual literacy – Make good use of all the non-verbal ways of communication – color, shape, form, texture.
6. Avoid overload – Resist the temptation to tell too much, to have too many objects, don’t force people to swallow more than they can digest, try to stimulate and provide guidance to those who want more.
7. Tell one story at a time – If you have a lot of information divide it into distinct, logical, organized stories, people can absorb and retain information more clearly if the path to the next concept is clear and logical.
8. Avoid contradiction – Clear institutional identity helps give you the competitive edge. Public needs to know who you are and what differentiates you from other institutions they may have seen.
9. For every ounce of treatment , provide a ton of fun – How do you woo people from all other temptations? Give people plenty of opportunity to enjoy themselves by emphasizing ways that let people participate in the experience and by making your environment rich and appealing to all senses.
10. Keep it up – Never underestimate the importance of cleanliness and routine maintenance, people expect to get a good show every time, people will comment more on broken and dirty stuff.

Martin Sklar, Walt Disney Imagineering, Education vs. Entertainment: Competing for audiences, AAM Annual meeting, 1987

The future of DMO websites needs real time and social content. Yesterday, our Torch Relay Field Reporter program is a good example of a step towards real time content. And I use social in a broad sense. It means collaboration with people who have a personal or commercial interest in assisting potential travelers to visit a destination.

In our case, our province is a collection of regions, cities and communities; most with their own DMO. Last year our regions took a bold step and decided to use their region on HelloBC as their website. Instead of both spending time and money on development, content, SEO, SEM, etc, we’re now collaborating and HelloBC is better for it.

Most DMO’s are also using Twitter now. Twitter is a great way to connect our website visitors with local experts and give them real time information about regions and communities. So we’re starting to add the local DMO twitter feeds to the relevant pages of HelloBC.

Parksville Twitter feed on HelloBC

Another step towards a more social and real time website.

With websites such as Tripadvisor, WAYN, Google Maps, Facebook, etc., do DMO/NTO/CVB’s need websites at all 10 years from now? Brand new director Armands Slokenbergs from the Latvian Tourism Development Agency asked for a show of hands and nobody raised even a finger. After 3 days of presentations and discussions it’s hard to ignore the fact that we need to go where the consumer is, instead convincing the consumer to come to us.

I was fortunate to have the opportunity to present some of my ideas and join about 50 online marketers from 25 European National Tourism Organizations for 3 days during their annual eBusiness Academy. The theme of the conversations was focussed on working with 3rd party websites to provide content and in the case of social networks, join the conversation. Isabel Mosk from Holland noted that “instead of asking to ‘please buy Holland’, we should be asking ‘how can Holland help you’”.

And the message from consumers is clear. You don’t help anybody traditional advertising but by adding value through relationships. Slokenbergs’ limited budget is focussed on encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations (bravo!). He shared some really cool research and one the conclusions was that the best opportunities for word-of-mouth is the though positive interactions between local people and their traditions. A great example is encouraging the celebration of your “Name Day” in Latvia; a local tradition that’s celebrated by everybody.
WAYN and Tripadvisor showed case studies of DMO campaigns. The WAYN campaign with South Africa was particulary impressive. A contest to win a trip (of course) resulted in 20,000 additions to South Africa’s consumer database at a very reasonable cost. The added bennefit was the community engagement who selected the winner and will probably be living vicaruasly through the (Canadian) winner when she goes on her trip soon.

To go where the consumers are is working well for some NTO’s. VisitBritain receives 18.5M visitors to its consumer websites and an equal number of visitors via syndication partners. Other NTO’s are doing interesting things well including Slovenia who works with local search angines and portals. Many syndicate to Google Maps and have developed widgets.

Joobili co-founder Jared Salter shared some interesting thoughts. Not every destination is a top 5 destination year-round. But many destinations are the best destination at least one day a year during a really cool festival. Joobili satisfies the for consumers need who plan a trip based on what the best place to visit is for a particular date or dates. Great way to provide a sense of urgency as well.
Google’s Andrew Pozniak tried really hard to convince us that Google has no intentions to enter the travel vertical but we all know they already have. Not through a big bang, but slowly though Google Maps, Streetview, Place Pages, YouTube and secret Android activities.

Isabel tweeted that we all might work for Google soon. But hey, if anybody is taking over from us, I hope it’s Google.

The role of our website is a favourite topic among senior management at Tourism BC and has been for a long time. PhoCusWright’s Destination Marketing: Understanding the Role and Inpact on Destination Marketers flared up another round last summer. I’ll spare you those details but here are some of my thoughts.
PhoCusWright rightfully notes that almost every DMO is different they way they’re structured, funded and organized but that key issues and challenges are very similar. I’ve been talking to my peers around the world for 10 years now and that’s definely true.
And it’s becoming more challenging all the time. Online innovation continues are a rapid pace while a DMO website is now at the heart of all marketing activities. My perspective a user centered one. If you don’t meet your website user’s goals, there’s no hope you’ll ever meet any of your organizational or stakeholder objectives, because your visitors won’t stick around.
One place to start is to figure out where a person’s place is in the planning (or purchase) cycle. Find out if somebody:

1. knows about the destination but is not considering a trip yet
2. is considering a trip but doesn’t have concrete plans yet
3. has decided to visit but hasn’t booked yet
4. has booked and it filling in the details
5. is in the middle of the trip, continuing planning

The answer to the question posed above could radically change the approach you should take. If most people are in the first group, they’re looking for a reason to visit. They need to be inspired. Big imagery, videos that connect on an emotional level and experiential stories work really well in this phase. Most DMO websites serve consumers in this phase very well.
But if somebody is in the third group, the role of the website is not to lose the sale. They’re already inspired and motivated. Most DMO websites don’t do very well here. When somebody visits a DMO website in this phase, it probably means there’s just a few nagging questions and they need answers. Details. How long does it take to drive there? How expensive is everything? Is the museum open on Mondays? Is there enough to do for the whole family? Forget the emotional video and big images. The website can look like Craigslist. They just want detailed information (they could also be looking for a deal by the way, but that’s another poll to run).
PhoCusWright has polled consumers and their report includes valuable information about where consumers say they visit DMO websites in the process. We’ve polled our website visitors about this for a while now and our numbers are a bit different from PhoCusWright’s. This leads me to believe that it might vary based on the destination.
It’s super easy to find out where your visitors are in the process. Poll them. Find out. And use it internally as you discuss the role of your website. And get the PhoCusWight report, it’s worth the money.

A few weeks ago I posted about our call for video field reporters. I also promised more details. Here we go.
Our video strategy is multi-faceted based on the opportunities that are currently available. Some are traditional and some are new. But they’ll all work together in a framework.
Let’s first examine the types of tourism related videos out there.

First, there’s the destination video. Emotional music, breathtaking scenery, friendly people, incredible experiences. The intent is to create a strong emotional connection with somebody. The content include all the core brand attributes and the target audience enjoying them. These videos are often used at consumer and/or tradeshows and most destinations have put these videos on their websites and video networks such as YouTube.

Destination Marketing Organization’s TV commercials are often a mini version of the destination video. Sometimes, they include a touch of humour or clever creative, like this video from Utah. But they always include all the core brand tributes again. Watch the Utah commercial and you know what they market and who they market to. Often there’s a call to action to visit a website, a fulfillment piece (guide) or a price point (often through a trade partner).

Then there are the travel host videos, as you will find on travel shows on TV. A host visits a destination and documents some of his or her experience in an informal documentary style. Usually all the “must sees” are covered. Sometimes, if it’s a special interest show, a specific experience is covered.

New on the scene are DMO created documentaries. These highlight a specific iconic experience of a destination. Often, there’s also a host involved and it’s informative and specific to an iconic experience.

And there are the user generated videos of course. Nothing is more credible than real experiences from real people. The amazing video above was the winner of the best user generated video at the eTourism awards last year.
Each type of video has a specific purpose. From creating awareness through creating an emotional connection, to real and authentic experiences that makes somebody think “I can be part of this story”. We’re currently in the process of creating a new destination video, TV commercials and documentaries. We’re also encouraging consumers to share their videos with us on our blog section.
But what’s interesting is that we believe there’s room for an additional category, a variation of the travel host, with a user generated content feel. We call these “field reporter” videos. Last year we experimented with this concept.

The video above is one of our ski host video. The intent of the video was to create an authentic video but still hit on the core brand message. The result was positive. Chris did a great job and consumers responded positvice, but our key learning was that we created something that felt a bit off. It didn’t feel authentic, and it wasn’t a slick documentary either.
Together for our agency (Cossette Communication Group) we re-defined the video host concept and renamed it to “field reporters”. The idea was to hire 6 people who with good personalities who can handle a video camera. We would send them out into all corners of BC and document their experiences. In order to make it authentic, they have to find somebody and ask for a recommendation. After the recommendation, they need to follow through and document their experience. Nothing planned, nothing staged. They had to be host, camera person and editor. We did add our logo at the beginning of each video to be transparent that we asked these people to create these videos.
And that’s what we’ve done over the last month. We found 7 very talented individuals and send each one to each of our 6 tourism regions, and one on a circle tour on his motorbike. We did give each a list of “iconic” tourism products so they had an idea what was going on in the area. They all made 5-7 videos each. We will use these videos on HelloBC to complement our existing content.
Below is a sample.

Here’s Chris climbing the Squamish Chief.

Ivan visited Bella Coola, and found a first nation person to take him to old Petroglyphs.

Kelli visited the Thompson Okanagan and hiked the Kettle Valley trail.

Mike visited the Kootenay Rockies and was told to visit Fort Steele and the Bull River Guest Ranch near Cranbrook.

Ami was told to take a train ride from Prince Rupert to Prince George through Northern British Columbia.

And Gary rode the Coast Cariboo Circle Tour his motor bike.
We’re also encouraging our staff, communities and industry to create their own videos. It’s easy enough to do. All you need is a video camera and some video editing software.

Some have already taken us up on the challenge. Clint from our Norther BC region create the video above.

And here’s our online team member Mikala’s visit to a farmers market
By posting these videos on our blog, hopefully we’ll even inspire some BC residents and our travelers to give our their tips and insider information. The intent is to get many video’s capturing the diverse range of tourism experiences throughout the province. We will still use the destination video and professionally produced documentaries to get people excited, and the videos created by field reporters, industry, communities, staff and user will capture the details.
To watch all field reporter videos, keep an eye on Tourism BC’s YouTube channel and our Field Reporter playlist. Our field reporters are still editing some of their videos, so more will be added soon.