Ireland Means Business

We recently worked with Tourism Ireland’s business tourism division to promote the meetings, incentives, conferences and events market in Ireland.

Tourism Ireland had set up an offers site, irelandmeansbusiness.com as part of it’s business tourism website irelandinspires.co.uk, which provides deals for corporate events buyers and meeting planners looking to visit Ireland. They had yet to find an effective way to market the website.

We worked with Tourism Ireland to develop an Ireland Means Business blog at blog.irelandmeansbusiness.com to provide quality content that would encourage people to visit the site and engage in conversation about Ireland’s business tourism product.

In order to do this we created a branded Ireland Means Business Twitter (@Ireland_MICE), Facebook Page, LinkedIn group and YouTube channel.

We started blogging straight away, covering topics as diverse as Guinness’ 250th Anniversary to sustainability in corporate events in Ireland. We also went to Dublin to interview some of the most influential individuals in the industry in order to create a series of six videos, which were subsequently uploaded to youtube.com/IrelandMeansBusiness. We released these videos on a weekly basis via the blog, linking from all the other social media outlets.

We also built our Twitter follower base to over 565 by engaging with other Twitter users interested in the subjects of events and business travel, often using the hashtag #eventprofs.

The traffic to the blog increased by 262% in our first month of work, and a further 404% in the subsequent month. The videos have currently accrued a total of 691 views.

Ireland Means Business, part one:

Ireland Means Business, part two:

Dermod Dwyer, Chairman, Convention Centre Dublin:

Cailin Keaney, Sales and Marketing Manager, Aviva Stadium:

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.

How to approach online PR

I saw this video today, a really good explanation of how to approach online PR. I think it shows just why PRs need not be afraid of entering the online world – it’s just like any other social situation really, and PRs are the most sociable of creatures! Have a watch -

Online PR is all about Community from RealWire on Vimeo.

Effectively evaluating online PR and social media

Part of the debate surrounding my last post was the point that PR still needs ROI, whether it is online, social or traditional media. But considering that the old methods of evaluation need to be overhauled to incorporate new media, it seems as if it is only too easy to evaluate ineffectively.

I ended the last post with an open invite to bloggers to discuss potential FAM trips with us. Response has been fairly underwhelming, and I have a feeling among the reasons for this is that bloggers are worried they are not going to give us the ROI we are expecting. Some bloggers we have asked have been reticent to give out their web stats or subscriber figures.

However, there seem to be some other online outlets who feel the opposite – it seems quite easy at the moment to be covert or misleading about your user figures. In traditional media, ABC and NRS are there to audit circulation figures, ABC Electronic audit some of the major online outlets but the service is only really helpful for checking newspapers’ websites.

Recently we’ve been approached to assist with trips for online outlets that on the face of it, have seemed very worthy. One site in particular approached us, so we checked our media database (as we would for any media request) which told us the site received a very respectable 600,000 monthly unique users. Just to be thorough, we checked the site on Hubspot’s great website grader, which as part of it’s grading system brings back an Alexa traffic rank. This website rated considerably worse than mccluskeyinternational.co.uk, and I don’t mind admitting, we don’t receive anywhere near 600,000 monthly unique users.

So, where has this figure come from? I emailed our media database providers asking how website user figures are gathered. They quickly called me back and explained that the figures are updated constantly and always up to date. “That’s not the point”, I said, “how do you get hold of them?”

They call the publishers of the website and ask. So the publisher is taken at their word.

Which means this website has probably been misleading about their user figures. It’s not really a surprise – it’s common knowledge that plenty of print publications talk up their circulation figures,  so it is not a shock to find that a similar practice exists with websites. Two things this does show though, are -

• That bloggers and web editors need to be at least vaguely honest about your user figures
• That we as PRs need to be especially vigilant about evaluation in this changing landscape

Evaluation needs to happen at the beginning of any online PR campaign, just as it would with traditional PR. Facebook pages give detailed analytics for free, and there are many ways of evaluating Twitter (actually, Hubspot’s Twitter grader is also great) and there are ways of assessing websites/blogs even if you can’t get access to audited user figures.

Part of this evaluation is research, evaluation is qualitative as well as quantative and the right outlet should hit the right market as well as the right numbers. This tweet from Kevin May (and this reply from Matt Parsons) show that this isn’t always happening. As Mark Hodson will tell you poorly researched pitches from PRs are nothing new, but I think it may be happening even more often now due to a lack of understanding of online and social media.

It’s very easy to just ‘do social media‘ but we need it to be more than a token gesture – it needs to be a well evaluated, researched, targetted campaign that gives the client an return on investment. Just like any traditional campaign.

So PRs, have you been approached by some unworthy websites talking up their figures?

Bloggers have you been hesitant in approaching PRs for assistance because you are worried they won’t see ROI?

Blogging journalists (or anyone else), do you think there’s been an upsurge in badly researched pitches? Or ‘token’ social media campaigns?

No naming and shaming here, we just want to hear if anyone has learnt anything from these experiences.

Social media can give media FAM trips added value

We helped organise a trip for TTG writer Paul Revel to Budapest at the weekend. Knowing Paul is a keen blogger and Twitterer, before he set off we asked him whether he would be Tweeting whilst away, and whether he would be using any of the trip for blog material.

Apparently he does plan to, and thanks to Twitter we already know he enjoyed Budapest, as do all his followers.

The travel trade media are all flocking to blogs and twitter, understanding it as another method to communicate to their audience (as well as building their own personal brand as journalists no doubt!). Just as the media are quickly learning they have to be involved in new media, so do the travel industry organisations these journalists are covering.

A journalist’s Twitter or blog is not only another way to communicate with them, but also can offer added PR value.

UPDATE: Paul has now posted about business travel to Budapest on his blog here. Thanks Paul!

The Power of Facebook

I sent an update last night to all fans of our New Mexico page on Facebook, saying how great it was that we have got 3,000 new fans in just a week, and asking how long it would take us to get to 10,000.

In less than one day, 236 people ‘liked’ this and a further 79 wrote comments! Pretty amazing really. The comments are really powerful and demostrate an almost universal love for the state!

Needless to say we’re almost at 10,000 – we’ll be there easily by Monday.

See for yourself here!

Veruca Salt: Still Demanding

Fans of Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory will love www.stilldemanding.com, a site created by Virgin Holidays. Virgin has enlisted Julie Dawn Cole, who played the original Veruca Salt, and sent her off to South Africa to make some videos.

It’s an innovative idea and we think it works really well. Although we might have suggested some additional activity around it – some podcasts, a Facebook page, put all the videos on YouTube…

Just as a footnote, while searching around for links to write this post I came across an article by Hank Williams (not this Hank Williams) who argues that by behaving just like dear Veruca, we are all responsible for the torrid state of the economy.

Ah well. Watch the videos on Virgin’s site and they might just cheer you up.