Marketing Safari

Who Should Be the Face of Your Company in Social Media?

One of the big worries companies have regarding social media is who should be the face of the company. Should it be the CEO? Should the marketing department run it? Or the PR department?

GM's Fastlane blog decided to use the managers of different departments in the company. Not just from marketing or pr, but also from the production team, the design team, all of the departments. A company is always the sum of its employees so a company does have many faces, even though they try to maintain a single, wrinkle free, cut-out-in-ivory face.

You should look at the face of the company as a mosaic. A face of many faces. Don't try to shut up your employees online. They're all on Facebook, Twitter and thousands of other communities and whether you like it or not, they're all spokespeople for your company.

So this is your job:

1. Make sure ALL your employees know what the face of the company should be. If you can't convince your own employees of what you want the company to represent in the minds of the public, how are you supposed to be able to convince your customers? Or let's rephrase that, how do you expect them to convince your customers of that?

2. Evangelize. Realize that a happy employee spreads good rumors and a good image about your company. Let's say you run a company with 25 employees. Those 25 employees are all but one on Facebook and have on average 250 friends. Their direct reach is therefore over 6000 people. Maybe 3.500 if we take into consideration that many of them know the same people. If you've got 250 employees we might be talking about 35.000 people they reach directly. That's a pretty powerful tribe you've got there. Don't shut it down, evangelize it.

3. Activate your employees by allowing them to be more active in the decision making. They're the people on the ground. Listen to them and integrate them in the company's decision making. That way, they will care for the company in a whole new way, because they feel they and their opinions really matter.

Have a happy employee meeting

Hjörtur

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Volcano Eruption in Iceland and the Tourist Industry #icerupt

Iceland has taken matter into her own hands. And I'm not talking about the nation this time, but the land it self. A volcano eruption started in Eyjafjallajokull just after midnight.

It's still only a minor eruption and is actually located just east of Eyjafjallajokull glacier, which makes it much less dangerous. That's good news for the tourist industry, as this might just become Iceland's new biggest attraction, conveniently located about 150 km east of Reykjavik with a hotel on location (Hotel Skogar)

Iceland's most popular hiking route
The eruption is actually located on a 1 km long crack on Fimmvörðuháls, a popular hiking route between two volcanoes, Eyjafjallajokull and Katla in Myrdalsjokull (jökull means glacier in Icelandic). Katla volcano has three times erupted following an eruption in Eyjafjallajokull, in year 920, 1612 and 1921, and is a much larger and more dangerous volcano. Last time Eyjafjallajokull erupted, it lasted almost two years, from 1821 to 1823, so we might be looking at something "sustainable" that could attract tourists. But even though the eruption won't last long, the hot new lava will be an excellent addition to the experience for hikers and the headlines a good commercial, with the volcanic eruption in Iceland already topping Google trends and being CNN's most read news this morning. 

The biggest danger for the tourism in Iceland during the eruption is the effect it can have on flights to and from Iceland. As it is not an eruption under a glacier it will have minimal effect. But if it moves and starts to erupt beneath either of the glaciers, the smoke becomes more dangerous and the flight ban zone around it will be enlarged.

You can see some fantastic images from Eyjafjallajokull and Fimmvorduhals on Flickr. 

I'll be tweeting updates from the eruption and links to videos, images and news from the Eyjafjallajokull eruption on my twitter account.

Hjörtur

The PhoCusWright Bloggers Summit Thursday March 11th #pcitb

The PhoCusWright bloggers summit was Thursday the 11th at ITB in Berlin. The day started with a "town hall" meeting led my Philip Wolf, president of PhoCusWright, where everyone could participate in discussions about the coming trends in the social media environment. Quick surveys revealed that just about everyone reads Kevin May's blog Tnooz and not a single person in the room admitted to using Google Wave or Google Buzz.

Two workshops were after lunch, the first one titled "Using Social Media to Boost the Bottom Line". Kevin May was the moderator and panelists where Guido the happyhotelier, Yen Lee from Uptake, Detlef Meyer from Heritage Consult and Jonah Sigel from blog.planeteye.com.

Guido said that he never watches the metrics from social media. He just isn't the metric guy. For him it isn't about getting more guests, it's about getting better guests. The hotel rooms sell themselves if people like him, plus, he gets guests to his hotel who agree on what a hotel should offer. The relationship he has with some of his guests is so strong that some of them even have keys to the hotel. Now that's customer relationship management at the top level.

Yen Lee of UpTake said they used the blog for two main purposes. One is to improve the content which is good for both users and search engines, and the second is to aquire more customers. "We spend a lot of money on social media even though we can't proof the ROI. It just feels like the right thing to do." sain Yen. While search is still crucial for the traffic and conversion, social media has now become the primary channel for traffic for UpTake. The other panelists agreed to that but Sigal reminded people that though social media had become the primary channel, they still had number 2, 3 and 4 which should not be neglected.

Kevin posted a few twtpolls during the panel discussions which was a smart thing to do, though I found the options incomplete and limiting.

The topic of the second workshop was "Brand Management, Fighting Fires and Finding Fans through social media". On the panel were Sam Daams from Travellerspoint, Robert K Cole from rockcheetah.com , Claude Benard from hotelitour.com and Uwe Frers from escapio.

Kevin May posted a poll for the audience during the panel, asking what were the most successful social media channels for improving brand recognition.

The crowd voted for blogs, but Uwe Frers argued that commenting on blogs was much more powerful than blogging  yourself. Robert K Cole said it was like an ecosystem, the blog is good for creating content but you need to feed it to your twitter and Facebook channels and engage your customers.

Many still fear social media because of the negative effect it can have on your reputation. It's important to have a social media disaster plan. Fast response to crisis is crucial.

It's a principal policy never to edit or delete a negative review, said Sam Daams of Travellerspoint. Just react. "I don't think bad recommendations decline conversion rate" Uwe Frerer added. "The question is just which hotel gets the revenue"

The panelists in both the workshops seemed to agree on most things, which maybe made the discussion less interesting that they otherwise would be. You need oposite poles or some wild card into the panel to fire up some lively debates. People could at least see what direction to take in their social media efforts.

Hjörtur

PhoCusWright@ITBberlin 2010 Recap of day 1

Opportunities in Chaos
The PhoCusWright conference started Wednesday with Philip Wolf's introduction where he was focusing on the opportunities in CHAOS, an approach I like. While the chaos and recession the hotel industry is going through it also forces us to rethink what we are doing, look for new opportunities and eventually become better at what we do. Being adaptive is crucial to survival.

The investors on the travel investor panel with Gene Quinn was disappointing, as they mostly said they were looking for something save and profitable when times are tough. Not quite in the spirit of Philip Wolf's talk just before. Not much support there for innovators in traveling.

 

Changes in search for the travel industry
Krista Pappas from Bing was my favorite speaker at the conference with a clear message and something new for me, the Bing visual travel search. So far it's only available in the States, but we all look forward to the day it reaches other parts of the world. Krista started with 5 lessons for the travel industry that are never repeated to often, supported by a few famous cases:

* Be authentic (the million dollar website - can't be repeated)

* Relentless measurement and optimization (TripAdvisor)

* Be social (Starbucks)

* Be opportunistic and responsive (Aston Kutcher's million followers on Twitter)

* Ads are content (Burger King's dump a Facebook friend for a burger)

 

Javier Gonzalez-Soria from Google Travel in Spain was a bit more reluctant to share inside information from Google. When asked if they were planning on following the same path as Bing in vertical search, he said that Google would never start competing with its customers. He pointed out that YouTube had now become the second most popular search engine in the world, which is a reminder to all to check your optimization on that front.

Rick Seany from Farecompare.com had some very interesting numbers about conversion:

* You increase your conversion by 2-4% if you cut loading time by 1/2 a second.

* Ajax pages convert 10-20% better to checkout then other types of pages

* The best time to book a cheap plane ticket is at 3pm on a Tuesday. This is actually based on a research of 5 years of data.

Rick also stated that rich content pages (bloated pages) would be penalized by Google within few months. What matters is having a fast page, and content of value. Value counts, not quantity, and value is precisely what Google is trying to deliver. So my advice is don't start cutting down your content richest pages, as long as they provide value and convert. Just do what ever you can to make them fast, effective and user friendly.

 

Where's the growth?
David Roche, president of  Expedia's Hotels.com and Venere.com shared a few perspective from his side of the industry, but despite last year being the worst in the history of the hotel industry, online hotel bookings experienced significant growth. The reason is simple. The consumer is always price sensitie, but never as much as in a recession. And the consumer knows where to shop for the best hotel prices.

When asked about airfares and alternative income, he said that when it came to income, Expedia was a hotel company. That's were the margin is.

CEO Matthew Goldberg from Lonely Planet explained their strategy and predictions for the future. According to Goldberg the big themes of 2010 will be social media, mobile platforms and contextual commerce, and plan to harness it all. Currently 75% of their revenue comes from traditional guidebooks but Goldberg expects this to change to 65% in the future. Not because it will decrease, but because digital publications will grow that much faster. Goldberg was not willing to sign off a technology that's been around for 500 years that easily. Besides, paper guidebooks never run out of batteries.

The most important thing to LP's strategy, according to Goldberg, is to be authentic. Their role is to help people get the most out of their travel and they will continue to do that, even though it means aggregating third party content - and that party being a competitor.

 

We got a few short talks as well, like Gregor van der Made, founder of re-ticket .com, Joost Schreve from Everytrail.com and Jean Louis Richard from MASSIVEGOOD.com.

Overall, an interesting day with some of the most influential people in the travel industry. Norm Rose from PhoCusWright gave an enthusiastic talk about the possibilities mobile phones, or mobile devices, are bringing to the travel market. The crowd wasn't as enthusiastic, maybe still just seeing one big jungle and waiting for someone to lead the way for the travel industry into the world of mobile technology. It's great to see the open approach PhoCusWright has to all the opportunities that are out there.

If you remember something I'm forgetting or remember something differently, please share in the comments below.

Hjörtur

Nation branding: Icesave, the referendum and the brand Iceland

It's been an interesting weekend in Iceland, with the first referendum since Iceland got independence from Denmark in 1944. After heated discussions about the importance, or non-importance of the referendum, and what the people of the world will think of Iceland after all of this Icesave talk, I'm now leaving all that behind heading for new adventures. I'm sitting on a plane with a fantastic view over snow capped mountains, frozen lakes and deep narrow fjords of Norway, heading to the PhocusWright conference at ITB Berlin. But lets wrap up first.

Icesave is a dispute between Iceland on the one hand and UK and the Netherlands on the other about Iceland paying back the money those countries used to bail out depositors in their countries because of the bankruptcy of an Icelandic bank operating there. I'm not going to tire you with arguments about what would be just, Iceland to pay or not, and under what conditions.  My focus is on the effect this case has on the brand Iceland.

When the Icelandic president vetoed the law confirming an agreement that those countries had made, it made headlines all around Europe. It was a very unusual act by the president but over 56.000 people, about 23% of registered voters, had signed a petition to the president to do so because they felt Iceland was being forced into a deal it could never withhold, a debt prison where every man, woman and child in the country was being forced to pay back 12.000 Euros per person to UK and NL, plus interest. The veto meant that the law should be put up for a vote by the Icelandic nation.

The referendum was last saturday and the question was simple: should the law confirming the agreement be accepted or denied. The message was clear, 93,2% voted for NO, 1,8% voted for yes and the rest were blank votes, mainly protesting that there was a referendum when a better deal was already in the making. This again got media attention in Europe and the US. Both when the president vetoed the law and after the referendum, the articles and the media coverage was mixed, some saying Iceland would be outcasted because she would not pay, while others said it was the right thing to do because Iceland was getting unfair treatment forced to pay back the debts of a private company abroad - and that anyone could be next.

All the criticism Iceland got abroad, has got many people here in Iceland worried about the brand Iceland. They are worried that it is now ruined. That is based on the incorrect assumption that negative publicity always has a negative effect on a brand. We should all know that those who always try to please everyone usually don't get much respect and usually have an unclear image as they are likely to change their behaviour to please someone else. On the other hand, those who are true to their believes and opinions and are consistent in their behaviour tend to strengthen their brand and image, whether they are pleasing people or not.

Icelanders have been proud of being hard-working, independent and stubborn people who are willing to go along way to protect their newly gained independence and interests. Proud of being the nation that has never had an army of its own but still conquered Britain in three wars in the last century. The veto and the result of the referendum is consistent with the image Iceland earned last century and is only strengthening that. That is a good thing for the Icelandic brand.

In 2009 there was a 5.5% decrease in tourism in Europe. In Iceland the government cut the marketing budget for Iceland as a destination by 20%. Additional to that, Iceland got a lot of negative publicity because of the collapse of the banking sector and grim economic prospects. One could expect this to have a devastating effect on the tourist industry in Iceland. But guess what. Iceland had an increase in tourism in 2009 despite all this. Now,  popularity as a tourist destination is NOT the same as a nation brand, though some correlation can be expected. It would be interesting to see what effect all this has on Iceland in Anholt's Nation Brand Index, but my guess is that participation in that research is one of the post that have been cut down. There are three main factors that can be pointed out to explain the increase in tourism in Iceland:

1. Good negative publicity

2. Fall of the Icelandic krona making the country more affordable for foreigners

3. Better use of the marketing budget, shifting focus more to the core markets, cutting down the less efficient marketing channels and the overhead

This of course doesn't mean that ALL negative publicity is positive. But it is a reminder that negative publicity isn't neccesseraly negative for your brand. It can be a reinforcement of it. Besides, the smaller your brand is, the less you have to lose and more you have to gain. Just think Borat. Before Borat noone knew anything about Kazakhstan. Now people know at least that there is a country named Kazakhstan they know nothing about. That's the first step.

The lights on my left are shaped like Copenhagen. That's good. It's getting dark and the trolls are probobaly about to wake up in the Norwegian mountains. Better be out of their way.

See you at ITB Berlin
Hjörtur

Around the World in 80 Commercials - Belgium

 This one has become a classic. First aired in Dutch, and later in French, it has now got global attention with millions of views on YouTube. And fully deserves it.

Condom ads seem to be very popular for some weird reason. Maybe it just proves that what people tend to feel awkward and shy about has a great potential for a humorous approach.

Hjörtur

ps. Remember some fantastic local or foreign commercials? Please share them with us :)

Social Media Marketing Tips for Travel Companies

[This is a guest post by Stacey Cavanagh. Stacey is from the UK and works in online marketing for Tecmark: SEO London]

Travel is one industry that absolutely epitomises the way that the Internet has changed how we sell to our customers and market to potential customers. Gone are the days of booking holidays in a travel agency in your nearest town. In fact, according to Nielsen/Netratings stats, 55% of holidays are now booked online and another 17% are researched online and then booked by phone. With such a high proportion of the market turning to the web, can any travel company afford not to market online?

Absolutely not.

Social media marketing is just one area of digital marketing but its unprecedented growth and a number of success stories have tempted more and more businesses into Twitter, Facebook and the world of blogging. As anyone who’s tried their hand at social media marketing will tell you, it’s not as simple as just signing up for an account. Here are a few handy hints to get you started however.

Attracting Twitter Followers

While it’s fair to say that some people will follow you on Twitter just because they know your brand name, there are unlikely to be enough of these (unless, perhaps, you’re Google), to build up the large following that you’d like. The main thing to consider when it comes to attracting followers who will stick around is what they get from following you. A fine example here is Virgin Trains, a huge company but one who offers personal customer service through Twitter! You can Tweet to @virgintrains to bring up comments, complaints or even random thoughts and you will get a response too! This is a huge benefit from people and saves customers from waiting in a telephone queue. It’s certainly a good reason for people to follow you. Another option is to make certain promotional codes and discounts available to Twitter followers, again offering a benefit to people following you.

Blogging

A blog is an excellent way to keep your site alive with new content frequently and an even better way to communicate with your customers or potential customers. However, when it comes to business blogging, too many companies fall into the trap of making the blog only about the company. Sorry to say it, but the fact that your secretary’s son’s next door neighbour’s Grandma’s best friend just had a birthday party really is scraping the barrel for blogworthy topics. So extend the blog beyond your company and staff. Certainly, if there’s a big change, new product or development or a promotion within the business, blog it. But open up to industry wide news too. For travel in particular this means you can blog on certain destinations, travel trends etc. Make it a great source of travel related information, therefore giving people a reason to come back and read more!

Networking within your Niche

Find bloggers who write on travel related topic and begin networking. Established blogs often have a regular readership of people interested in that niche, so who are in turn interested in what you do! Offer to share your expertise with these blogger in the form of content for their site. Share your knowledge and importantly, set yourself up as an authority within your area. If you know your stuff and you share your knowledge enough, over time you can establish yourself as the person to ask if someone needs to know something travel related. This is a priceless attribute for marketing.

 

The hints covered here really only just scratch the surface of the potential for online marketing through social media. The key thing to remember is that the biggest investment is in the form of time rather than money with social media and there’s huge importance placed on being personable. Don’t hide too much behind a logo and branding!

You can follow Stacey on Twitter.