Facebook for tourist boards – eight rules

It’s a standard requirement now, as a marketing organisation, any tourist board, DMO or CVB should have a Facebook page. We’ve created quite a few for clients now, to varying degrees of success (probably the most successful being New Mexico’s) and so I’ve had a look at the differentiators affecting this.

I’ve come up with a few rules, they’re not hard and fast guarantees for millions of fans, but they are a good start.

Page, not profile or group

Profiles are for individuals, groups are for causes or personal interaction (like the alumni of a University wanting to stay in touch with each other) and pages are for brands or organisations. As a tourist board is an organisation promoting a destination’s brand, you want a page.

When pages were first introduced to Facebook there was an argument for sticking with a group or a profile page, as they leant themselves more to interaction, and people’s activities as profiles or in groups appeared in their friend’s news feeds – increasing visibility and creating an avenue for viral growth. I’ll talk a bit more about this later, but rest assured it is not the case anymore. Thanks to the changes Facebook has made for it’s many big money advertisers who have pages, they are now by far the best way to promote a brand.

To anyone who thought this point was a given, well there are still several tourist boards who really get this wrong.

Make it official, but not too official

You’re a fan (in real life) of Chelsea Football Club*. So you search Facebook for ‘Chelsea’ and get two pages in the results – ‘Chelsea FC ‘and ‘The Chelsea FC Marketing Department’. Which one are you going to pledge allegiance too?

The same applies to a destination. People don’t love the organisation employed to promote (for example) Barcelona, they love Barcelona – the place. So don’t name your page ‘Barcelona Tourism’, either just name it ‘Barcelona’ (this is going to be better for appearing in searches) or give it a personal touch – like ‘I Love Barcelona’ or ‘The Barcelona Fan Page’.

People like to know a page is official, but there’s a difference between a page run by the tourist board and a page for the tourist board.

New York’s ‘I Love New York’ branding automatically lends itself to this – I wouldn’t be surprised if the tagline’s applicability to social media was considered when it was initially conceived.

Provide some helpful information and unique content

You’re not likely to gain fans without giving them a reason to come to your page, and even if you do manage thousands of fans without it, what would be the point? It would be like sending an email with no content out to a database of thousands.

Visit Germany do this well, they’ve got a flashy landing page with info, links to market specific pages, a brochure, contact info, an online game, video content (in the form of a YouTube tab), a map, events and links out to every other kind of information a traveller might want.

(Incidentally, Visit Germany’s page only has 1,250 fans at time of writing – compare that to this unofficial page – I suspect this is due to them not adhering to rule one.)

Engage, engage, engage

It’s that old adage of social media – engaging. The benefit of having a fan base on Facebook over an email database, is that it’s a two way form of communication.

Encourage your fans to communicate with you – start conversations in the discussions tab, ask them to upload photos and videos and ask questions in your status updates rather than just broadcasting news. You’ll find out what people really like about your destination, what they don’t, and you’ll get some great (and some maybe not so great) multimedia content. You’ll also probably learn a lot of things about your destination that you didn’t already know.

Facebook insights provides you not just with numbers and demographics for your fans, but levels of interaction – there’s a reason for that!

Update regularly

Make sure you engage and update regularly. Not too regularly, you don’t want to spam your fans as they’ll just unsubscribe, but the more chances you give them to interact the more likely your page is to grow, as their friends will see the activity in their news feeds and opt to become fans too.

Link to your page from your website’s home page

This might sound obvious if you’re not a web marketer (and may do even if you are), but many website owners are reluctant to actively direct their precious traffic to an outside site like Facebook, particularly traffic from the home page.

This is the wrong way of thinking about it. Don’t think of your Facebook page as separate to your website, it’s just an extension of your online presence. If anything your Facebook page is a preferable place for your audience to be – can you communicate with the visitors of your website? No. Well, not unless they email or call you, or you’ve got a forum section on your site.

Besides, what goes around comes around. If someone lands on your home page, instantly clicks out to your Facebook page and becomes a fan, they’re more likely to come back to your website another time when they see you post something interesting. I’ve seen several clients’ Google Analytics show Facebook among their top referrals.

Don’t let your PR/marketing agency do it all

This might sound like we want to shirk out of doing all the work, but that’s not the intention (honest!). Your agency might set you up a beautiful page, monitor everything said on it, advise what kind of content should go up and promote it like nobody’s business, but ideally the content should come from the horse’s mouth. Particularly if you’re in the destination you’re promoting and your agency are elsewhere.

People get put off if they think they’re not getting the genuine inside track, and you’ll probably get some very knowledgeable fans who’ll pick up on any information which isn’t 100% correct. So even if it is your agency is doing the updates, and they have great product knowledge, it’s preferable for the content to come from you.

Don’t localise

Again this sounds obvious, but some of the basic edicts of tourism marketing get forgotten when it comes to social media. As a tourism organisation, your first job is to convince people to come to your destination. Not to provide an information service to residents. So don’t update your page with information that is only going to be of interest to locals.

I’ve seen tourist board Facebook page status updates informing their fans which buses are in operation in the destination. Is this going to entice anyone to visit? No.

It’s inevitable that you’ll get fans who are residents of your destination – they can be really helpful, often answering queries from potential visitors and doing your job for you – but always remember they are not your intended audience. Before you post anything, first think ‘is this going to be of interest to a potential visitor?’ If the answer is no, then don’t post.

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Anyone got any more guidelines for tourist boards on Facebook?

What’s your favourite tourist board Facebook page? Who gets all (or most) of this right? Who gets it wrong, and why?

*Disclosure: I am.

Why we shouldn’t bother with blog trips

Firstly, I should probably admit that the headline to this post may be a little attention grabbing (hey, if journalists can do it, so can I) but, barring one or two exceptions it is what I think.

The blogger ideal

The conversation around sponsored blog trips is starting to look a little circular. My post earlier in the year included a fairly open invite to bloggers for assistance with trips. We didn’t get much of a return, and I went onto question whether this might be because bloggers were self-conscious about their own influence. Jeremy Head posted on the subject recently, with another open trip invite to bloggers from a tour operator, which seems (by the comments) to have been met with a similar reaction. There also seems to be increased consternation from some bloggers, who feel that to accept a trip and subsequently publish positive content would be an affront to their credibility.

I used to think this reaction sounded a bit self-important, after all the national newspaper’s travel writers have been accepting trips for years and no one (OK, almost no one) has questioned their credibility. But now I think this is to misunderstand the nature of the blog, the blog as an ideal is the independent voice – the individual who speaks from a perspective that others share. Which is why you have blogs standing up for travel consumer rights, blogs about travel tech, blogs about green travel, blogs about luxury travel – blogs about everything. That’s the appeal, the bloggers and their audience have such enthusiasm for their specific subject that really, a “sponsored” post does seem to taint the ideal.

Blogger influence

So why do we want to send bloggers on trips so badly in the first place?

A lot of blogs, as great as they may be, aren’t that influential on their own. We’re used to the format of ’send journalist, journalist comes back, writes lovely piece, piece is published in print and online, article prompts consumers to buy holiday and link boosts website up a few places in search rankings’. But even the most influential blogs hardly stand up to the national newspapers in reader numbers, even in terms of SEO value a link on a national newspaper’s website is going to be worth far more than on any blog.

A blog’s influence is generally measured in terms of their influence on other blogs, rather than traffic, which by and large is how any other kind of website’s influence is measured.

The ideal blog trip outcome

So really, a successful outcome from sending one blogger on a press trip would not just be a positive post or two on their own blog, but content that was so spectacularly interesting/funny/useful that it resulted in link backs and knock on posts from a whole variety of other blogs and a surge of interest from social media, trending on Twitter and front page of Digg etc etc.

How likely is that? Not very. The only way it could feasibly happen is if there is some fortuitous unlikely/special event while the blogger was on their trip, or if they take some really fantastic photos, or record and edit some great video footage.

Why not DIY?

So if it is the content itself that makes the trip a success, rather than where it is initially placed, why do you need the blogger in the first place? Why not create your own fantastic content, something interesting enough that blogs will want to publish it? We’ve made video content that’s subsequently been placed all over the web, and there was no blogger or journalist involved in making it.

Engagement

I’ve already talked a bit about the blogger ideal, but another element of it I’d like to mention is engagement. Where traditional media broadcasts, new media (by which I mean blogs and the social web) engages – it’s about listening as well as talking. Hence blog comment sections, trackbacks and social networking etc.

So asking a blogger to go on a trip and then broadcast your positive message afterwards is another affront to the blogging ideal.

Instead, why not engage with the blogosphere? And what better way to do that than (again): do it yourself! Start your own blog. If you’ve got a message you want to speak to people about, get yourself down to wordpress.com or .org (other blogging platforms are available) and set yourself up a blog. Read some other blogs on your subject, comment on them, write your own reaction posts, link back and get involved. We are currently getting a blog up and running for Tourism Ireland’s business tourism division – the aim being to talk about Ireland’s business tourism developments and create a place where other people want to talk about it too.

Group blog trips

I said there would be exceptions…

If your ideal outcome is several posts across several blogs then a group blog trip could work. I have seen one or two decent examples of this, as a group trip it generates conversation across the blogs as group trips naturally generate a sense of relationship through experiencing something together (if you’ve ever been on a media or trade group FAM trip you’ll know what I’m talking about). By sending bloggers together you can naturally expect them to engage with each other.

Personally I still see this as crossing the ‘independent voice’ ideal, it’s a bit too introspective – just because the bloggers are engaging each other doesn’t mean they’re engaging their readers.

The means as the end

The other way blog trips can work is by reversing the process, and making the run up to the trip the focus.

My favourite example of this is Quark Expeditions’ Blog Your Way to Antarctica. Quark launched a website inviting bloggers to ‘win’ a trip to Antarctica (a trip Quark run, and consumers can buy) and blog about their experiences. Though of course the subsequent blog was never going to be the focus. To win, the bloggers had to achieve the highest number of votes on the site, and in order to do that they had to use their influence – on their blogs, Twitter, Facebook, whatever outlets they could. Quark received hundreds of entries, and all those entries duly linked back to the website requesting their readers and friends vote for them – resulting in thousands of juicy SEO-valuable links, and untold amounts of traffic. All to the website, where a booking engine for the trip itself was very prominent. It’s a bit ‘best job’, but slightly more focussed, as the aim was at bloggers rather than the general public.

The fact that both interest in both Ben Southall and BYWTA winner Luís Monteiro has significantly declined since they won their respective competitions just goes to show that the invite was the focus, not the subsequent blog – the means was the end.

The end

Of course we can only have so many ‘best job’ or ‘blog your way to’ campaigns before it all looks a bit copy cat – particularly where social media is concerned, as as soon as anything starts to look corporate or unoriginal people will criticise and switch off. So I think sticking to engaging is the better and safer route, unless you really do have an original idea for making the means the end. I also think that if the internet really is ruining travel journalism, and that anyone who writes online will eventually be writing for marketing purposes, then why shouldn’t marketers be doing that themselves already?

So bloggers, have you, or would you, ever use content that you’d received from a PR or marketing source? Providing it was of a high quality, and interesting/funny/useful enough.

PRs/marketers, have you arranged blog trips that you would consider truly successful? If so, how and why?

Travel PR has changed #3: video news releases (VNRs)

It has long been important for travel PRs to secure TV coverage on behalf of its clients. I wrote way back in 2007 about how BBC Holiday and Wish You Were Here gave way to ‘Feelgood Factual’ programmes like Coast and Britain’s Favourite View. I also wrote about how celebrity-led travel programmes are really the only way you can get any decent-length coverage on the main TV channels.

It’s clear that this is still the case by the way, with John Sergeant and Alexander Armstrong battling it out. As with the Griff Rhys Jones and Paul Merton series, it turns out these programmes are prone to stereotypes and storylines too obscure to be worth targeting. And that goes for challenge-based celeb travel programmes too.

So it’s important to either instigate your own series, or make sure that you’re tailoring your client’s news to broadcast.

One way of doing this is by producing your own Video News Release (VNR) footage. A broadcaster can use some or all of the footage to produce their own tailored report on an event or story. They can re-edit the footage, add voiceovers, music, or additional footage including pieces to camera.

Here are a few examples for our client Tourism New South Wales:

1. We produced a Video News Release to maximise UK media coverage of the Vivid Sydney festival. The Video News Release included a 3:00 minute A-Roll package voiced by a reporter and a 10 minute B-Roll that included the best sound bites and cutaways from two filming days. The VNR and Vivid Sydney achieved excellent coverage, specifically in the online fields. Having the video made a huge difference and enabled the websites to take the content and highlight Vivid. Coverage value totaled £1,378,334. Examples of the coverage can be seen here on the BBC, MSN and ITN.

2. Six thousand people in Australia tucked in to an unusual breakfast sitting on the world-famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. The bridge, which on weekdays is packed with commuters on their way to work, was closed to traffic and its eight lanes covered with grass for a picnic, as part of a Sydney food festival.

VNR footage was commissioned, and can be seen in full here. An example of the coverage can be seen here.

Now – VNRs are not new in themselves, but we have certainly been using them much more over the past 12 months with a number of our clients. There is an added cost, but once the potential benefits are made clear to the client, there is a compelling case to find the extra budget.

Another example of this is our recent work for Jamaica and the recent launch of a British Airways service to Montego Bay. We shot the following footage – primarily to be sent to TV networks in Jamaica.

Here it is up on the TTG website.

And here is another example of actual VNR footage from an event we recently held to launch Jamaica’s Jazz & Blues Festival – this footage was sent out to UK and Jamaican media.

We really enjoy working with video, and it is something we will be doing more of as time goes on. The benefits are clear, and as more channels are introduced, and newspapers turn into broadcasters through their websites, it is an area that will grow and grow.

WTM London 2009: Video Report

At World Travel Market this year we spoke to some key people in the industry about their experiences of the show and their predictions for travel in 2010.

See the footage here:

Travel PR has changed #2: search engine optimisation (SEO)

Following our first ‘travel PR has changed‘ post, there was a small uproar about it’s fairly blatant motivation: SEO. The merits of the post have been discussed, but the way we see it is, it was an experiment, and though its credibility is debatable, there needs to be room for experimentation in blog posts otherwise nobody learns. For that reason, all criticism was welcomed, and we hope everyone involved at least found the subsequent debate interesting.

Regardless of all that though, the post seems to have gone some way to achieving it’s aim, and one particular comment caught my attention -  Alex Bainbridge asked on Twitter, whether travel PR now = SEO?

My immediate answer was yes, of course travel PR now means SEO!

The first and most obvious crossover between SEO and PR is link building. We’ve been getting our clients links on authoritative sites like Times Online and BBC.co.uk for years – now we are just learning the importance of these links,  what kind of links work best for traffic and what kinds work best for SEO, so we can improve the quality and quantity of them. Many SEO specialists’ weakest area is link building, as doing it well depends on building relationships  – something which is a natural skill of a PR. So all that’s changed in this respect is we have to learn how to use this skill for SEO.

SEO is further applicable in PR though. As the media is swiftly moving online, so are we. As James wrote in the original post, it used to be enough to fax a release to your standard media list. I wasn’t in travel PR quite that long ago, but this has changed even in the relatively short time I have been. When I started you would email your release to your targetted media list. Now that is not enough – and emailing it to some influential bloggers doesn’t make you a cutting edge PR either.

All releases now need to go online, in HTML, with keywords and format considered for SEO, so anyone and everyone can find them and the content spreads – be it through bloggers, journalists or straight to consumers.

We have experimented with an online press room, and seen some great results – most of our releases have been Google indexed within an hour or two and received hundreds of views. We’ve yet to launch a permanent format for this but it is coming soon.

Did you realise travel PR now = SEO? Do you agree that PRs are in an advantageous position to master SEO?

PRs, do you know your way around Google Analytics yet? Do you know your anchor text from your page title? Your deep links from your keywords?

WTM London 2009: what we’ve learned

So another World Travel Market comes to an end, and WTM 2009 has been a whirlwind show for McCluskey International. We’ve been filming with videographer Emma Brumpton, interviewing stand holders, tour operators and media on their experiences of the show and the industry in general this year – the edits will be up here soon, so watch this space.

Other than that, we’ve been meeting people, announcing competitions, attending events, organising events, Tweeting, photographing, arranging interviews, accidentally appearing in the background of client video interviews… James even found time to practice his golf swing! Busy, busy, busy.

We thought that there was maybe (just maybe) slightly less people there than last year. Many of the stands were a little more subdued than years previous (though notably not in the Middle East!), but with a few people absent, there were others who were new to the show. Events including the Social Media for Marketers Seminar, Travel Blog Camp and the Travel Tweet Up as well as the seemingly growing travel technology section are undeniably attracting new blood to WTM – you only needed to watch the WTM twitter stream for a minute to understand the profligation of social media at the show this year.  The growth is very exciting, and aside from the pleasure of having new people to speak to, we’ve relished learning how we can harness this growth to promote our client’s messages.

This is another indicator of how travel PR has changed. Only a couple of years ago WTM for the travel PR meant writing releases, arranging interviews, setting up photo opportunities, attending and arranging events. We’ve done all this and so much more at WTM 2009.

Did you meet anyone new at the show this year? Did you find yourself doing anything new? What were your thoughts overall? And anyone who was a newcomer to WTM in 2009 – what did you think? What were your objectives, and did you achieve them?

Travel PR has Changed #1: Comments & Forums

It used to be the case that we would write a press release, send it out and that would be it. We would hope it generated some coverage, which would be picked up by the press cuttings agency. But once we’d sent out the release, we would essentially move on to the next task or story for the client.

Now, we can’t just leave it at that, it’s important to monitor any coverage in real time – as it will sometimes generate comments. These comments could be positive or negative, and could thus impact on the nature of the coverage. Should a PR agency be allowed to / expected to comment in defence of / to explain something on behalf of a client?

I recently attended a seminar organised by the Tourism Society and Travmedia – speakers included Steve Keenan from Times Online, Lyn Hughes from Wanderlust and Charlotte Walsh from TTGlive. I asked if PRs should be getting involved in comments, forums and ‘communities’.

The answer was a resounding ‘yes’. As long as we stated upfront who we were and what our client was, we would be very welcome. It would be a valid part of the conversation to offer a ‘company line’ or an answer to a question, or to point out any inaccuracies.

I’ll be honest – this is not something we have done much of at all. But we’ll be doing more of it in future – certainly on Times Online, Wanderlust and TTG anyway. I’d be interested to hear from any readers what they think. Should PRs get involved in consumer discussions, or is it an unwelcome step too far?

There’s clearly scope for the South Africa Tourist Board or a relevant tour operator to comment with some useful information on this forum post. But there are some more challenging ones – for example this article on Times Online – loads of airlines mentioned, some positive, some negative – should airline PRs be getting involved here? If so, how?

Travel PR has changed

Travel PR has changed. When I started my career in travel PR at the tender age of 21, for each client we faxed (yes, remember fax?!) out one press release per month – no matter whether it was newsworthy or not, that was the quota. We arranged for journalists to visit hotels. We followed the features lists from the trade magazines.

And that was it. We collected the coverage at the end of the month, wrote a report and sent it to the clients, who seemed pretty happy.

Looking back on it now, it seems pretty hard to believe. There is so much more to travel PR nowadays. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting about the ways in which travel PR has evolved, and highlighting some of the new strategies we’ve developed.

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