CRASH COURSE –Social Media – Digging Deeper … beyond Awareness Building

At this session at the Adventure Travel World Summit in Scotland 2010; we had the opportunity to meet Scot Adams president of Birchbark (http://www.birchbarkmedia.com/) and Kathy Dragon founder and CEO of Travel Dragon (http://traveldragon.com/). For more information on the speakers, click on the link. (http://www.adventuretravel.biz/connect/summit/summit-agenda/2010-featured-content/speakers/)

Scot Adam president of Birchbark Media, a marketing and PR agency, has been helping to market and develop outdoor tourism businesses for over a decade. His passion for outdoor experiences and entrepreneurial determination has allowed him to excel his field. He is the main speaker in the presentation and takes us through the whole process.

The course begins by presenting the idea of the fast growing potential of social media. Some of the key figures include;

•  Facebook figures:

o   2004 – 1 Million users.

o   2009 – 350 Million users.

o   2010 – 500 Million users.

• Twitter: Over 50 Million twits a day.
• Youtube: has more than 24 hours of video uploaded per minute.
• Google: shows 20% daily new keywords.

What hasn’t change is the need to have a strategic reason for doing social media.

• Still need to sell a value, what it is, what you give and how do you differentiate from the competition.
• Need to be transparent, authentic, human (Relationship, be yourself)
• Give and don’t sell!
• Listen and ask and do not tell.

Kathy Dragon puts out what’s growing interest on social media at the moment.

·         Trip advisor – trip friend: Initiative with Facebook worth to have a look. It combines the recommendation of trip advisor with Facebook friends so that the opinions from trip advisor can be selected from your Facebook friends. Now the opinions in which you rely can be only from people who you know and therefore reducing the possible bad publicity from competitors or opinions from people unknown.

• Google Images: is growing quickly and with new features, important to carefully tag and name all our pictures so that it can be indexed by the search engine.
• Facebook “Like” new feed optimization, algorithm

o   Feeds

o   Places

o   Groupon

• Presentation on the Hub –

o   Edde Rank Algorith

o   When posting, wait for interactions, wait until people connect, different people interacting is better,

o   Post diverse, fotos, links, questions, do not post constantly!

• Facebook Places

o   Is going to take over Foursquare and Gowala

• Google image: improving search overhaul, put URL always (traffic to your website)
• RSS feed.
• Social media is beginning to be used as a guide, especially twitter is very linked with events and can be a very informative tool for up to date information.

Scott continues with his presentation with; why do you need Social media?

• Maintaining relationships with clients.
• Forming new relations.
• Brand Building.
• Promotion.
• Managing disasters.

Promotions have become measurable. Use promos as dig or stumbleuoponit.org. Facebook can use wildfire for promotion, 2 people travel trip, group deal. Use Facebook and video promotion are some of the ideas proposed during the session.

Offering

• Collect data.
• Engage fans (gifts).
• Facebook adds, free, try it (69$ led to 400,000 interactions).
• Creative offer, look in the hub post link.

Measure

The main tools include Facebook, twitter, YouTube, Flickr but we have to look where our customer are. Do a Google search blog, twitter, Facebook and look a t the left panel in Google that has a lot of features. www.google.com/Insights/search (Keywords)
Look for influencers or anyone who is sharing your content. Add this website add icons for like, tweet and share to our website. Use shorter link (short URL). YouTube, also there is Vimeo for higher quality or flick tv.
How many followers are re-tweeting, we need to look for quality not quantity. Engagement – How often people engaging. Business page on Facebook. Youtube statistics on when are people leaving. Twitter analytics tools very interesting. 
 

Conversion.

How to measure

Just ask where you arrive in the web-page to the customer, good feedback to trace the most effective mean for each company.

Free tools include; Social metrics addict.

Group Exercise.

We are a Backpacker Company that is present in Facebook and twitter.

Goals:

1. How to inform social media
2. Find people that like it
3. Establish the influencers

Design a strategy for new or existing products, how to attract people.

• Get the buzz
• Who are the influencers (Adprosumers)
• Make content (select the right people. Market analysis
• What is different about us!
• Viral Video- post video of what we offer different to the competition.
• Flip video and the camera!
• Look for ADPROSUMERS
• Look for LEADERS

Assignment: We are putting a new product on the market (tent) and we want to use social media marketing.

• Contest on youtube, video.
• Who is your consumer, how do they use social media, target wright people through the wright means.
• Use other platforms, coordinate,
• Story telling: When my backpacker saved my live – come and shoot our video.
• Instead of video write a story which will be later put as a video.
• Outside magazine credibility.
• Take it to a concert, event (I.e. take the tent to try it) where you can record different experiences.

Include information about destination or product in videos:

• Re-tweet, re-feed it.
• Identify.
• Gives prices.
• Advocacy.
• Encourage people (From each group).
• Post on their blog.
• Include information of sector in the blog.
• Always respond in company language.
• Mistakes or errors, do not debate, be transparent honest.
• RSS feeds.

As a conclusion we need to remember that these are tools are not a strategy, so we need to define it before we embark on social media.