I don't think that social media is any where close to killing other more traditional forms of communication. People are just discovering a new way to communicate with each other.
Other forms of communication have entered the marketplace over time. Texting (which is also a short and sweet communication avenue) has't stopped people from talking on the phone. While faxing isn't as popular as it once was, every office still has a fax machine that is used regularly. Radio is no longer the way most people get news, but most of us still spend a lot of time listening to it in the car. As communication evolves into new mediums, the total volume of all communication rises instead of all traffic from one medium completely switching to another.
Social media is just adding to the mix of communication avenues and raising the total volume of communication in the world. The Sony video mentions that the amount of information generated in 2010 is more than the sum of the 5000 years previous. This is a trend that will continue and social media is helping to drive it. I still about as much time on the phone as I did 5 years ago, I just happen to spend more time texting and participating in social media. So, my total volume has increased. There will always be a place for print magazines and radio. The saturation of these types might decrease overtime but social media can never replace other more traditional forms of communication. As with everything before, someday a new communications craze will make the social media we find today old news. It will be interesting to see what that new form of communications will be.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Messaging in Social Media
From my experience, messaging in social media needs to be authentic, not overly sales driven and creative. You never know what is going to take off and go viral. Messaging that tends to resonate with people seems to be overwhelmingly creative and positive or terribly negative. There is not much middle ground.
From a business perspective, in order to engage people in the social space, the messaging needs to be quick and simple. Social users tend to consume small bits of information quickly before moving on to the next great thing. Therefore, messaging in the social space needs to be short and sweet. Unique information needs to be communicated efficiently. Clearly, this takes various forms depending upon the platform being used (YouTube videos under 3 minutes, Tweets under 140 characters, quick and clever Facebook Posts, appropriately organized Flickr and Pinterest accounts and blog entries that are only a couple of paragraphs long). The sales message needs to be strategically mixed in but not the general focus of all content. A business wants to become a thought leader or content resource for their specific markets. Once this is established, then a small sales message can be mixed in.
If engagement from fans, followers etc is what the company is going for, then the opportunities for interaction need to also be quick and easily accomplished. Social media by nature teaches people to have a short attention span. Messaging in the social space is completely different from other more traditional communication mediums. For the Colorado Springs CVB, a lot of things are discovered through trial and error. For instance, we have found that "write a caption for this photo" or "fill in the blank" posts on Facebook tend to be more successful than the other types of posts that we have tried. Social media will continue to evolve and we will have to evolve our messaging along with it.
From a business perspective, in order to engage people in the social space, the messaging needs to be quick and simple. Social users tend to consume small bits of information quickly before moving on to the next great thing. Therefore, messaging in the social space needs to be short and sweet. Unique information needs to be communicated efficiently. Clearly, this takes various forms depending upon the platform being used (YouTube videos under 3 minutes, Tweets under 140 characters, quick and clever Facebook Posts, appropriately organized Flickr and Pinterest accounts and blog entries that are only a couple of paragraphs long). The sales message needs to be strategically mixed in but not the general focus of all content. A business wants to become a thought leader or content resource for their specific markets. Once this is established, then a small sales message can be mixed in.
If engagement from fans, followers etc is what the company is going for, then the opportunities for interaction need to also be quick and easily accomplished. Social media by nature teaches people to have a short attention span. Messaging in the social space is completely different from other more traditional communication mediums. For the Colorado Springs CVB, a lot of things are discovered through trial and error. For instance, we have found that "write a caption for this photo" or "fill in the blank" posts on Facebook tend to be more successful than the other types of posts that we have tried. Social media will continue to evolve and we will have to evolve our messaging along with it.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Colorado Springs CVB and Social Media
The Colorado Springs CVB does have a strong presence in social media. Our social media efforts were strategically assigned to our internal public relations person which I think is quite smart. She does a very nice job of balancing our message with a good variety of content across various platforms while maintaining a consistent voice. We have found that playing in the social space is nice to augment the other parts of our marketing mix. As our presence has grown we have found that our website referrals from the various platforms have improved and now make up a significant portion of our web traffic. Some channels like Facebook, YouTube and blogs allow us to push content to "our people" without them having to specifically seek out more content about Colorado Springs.
Like mentioned in the materials for this week, social media can definitely be a double edged sword. But, it's definitely a space that we have to be in. Recently, as I have mentioned in previous posts, we launched a new brand platform for Colorado Springs. Immediately the local social media crowd was vicious in its critique of the creative execution of the logo. I was honestly stunned by level of venom focused against a logo, some turning into personal attacks. (I guess this is one of those marketing scars that you mentioned at the beginning of this course). One very active local blogger organized an anti-logo Facebook page and went out to the mainstream media. Our local independent paper started a redesign contest. Our mayor pulled his support for the entire branding project, not just the logo. Of course, whatever bleeds leads in media and we hunkered down for the onslaught. Eventually 700 people joined the Facebook page (not very many out of a city of 600,000), but they were a very loud group. So, we decided to meet with the most vocal a few days later in person. Instead of becoming defensive, we endeavored to listen to them and come up with a viable solution to address the concerns that were raised. We are currently in the process of redoing the logo. But, this is an example of the power of social media. If we had launched a new brand 3 or more years ago, we wouldn't have encountered this issue. I think the lesson learned here is that it is best to meet the concerns and criticism head on and engage people in a professional way. Ignoring the social media crowd isn't going to make it any better.
On a positive note, usually our job at the CVB is to market to out of town travelers. Normally this group is friendly to Colorado Springs and isn't aware of some of our local political issues. This is where social media gets fun for us. Social media allows us to be creative in how we communicate to the traveling public. Last summer, I had the crazy idea to try and do 55 Colorado Springs region attractions in 5 days. We decided this would be our 2011 social campaign. I was joined by our PR manager and our CEO's daughter who was on vacation from college on this epic adventure. On less than a shoestring budget (literally $500 which pretty much covered our lunches and gas) and with lots of great support from our attractions, we did it! We tweeted and posted to Facebook and Flickr as we went. We also took video shots on a $200 flip camera along the way. The engagement from our current fans was great and we even got recognized on the street on Day 4. By the time we finally edited our videos together it was late in September, so we decided to hold the videos until this year to better coincide with our travel planning season. We finally launched the videos a couple of weeks ago through all social channels and also in more traditional marketing avenues like email and our annual Visitor Guide. The point of "55 in 5" is to show that there is so much to do here that you need to stay a bit longer on vacation or come back for another trip. The campaign also gave us the opportunity to highlight some of our smaller attractions that often do not get as much love. Since the launch 2 weeks ago, we have grown our Facebook fans by 30% and have had over 6,000 views of the videos on YouTube. We are also beginning to get some organic search engine traffic around 55 in 5 keywords, our attractions community feels great that they have all been highlighted and local political officials have complimented our organization's efforts. Social is the central piece of this campaign but it is translating over into other pieces of our marketing efforts. So far, I would consider the campaign a success. We are currently brainstorming for our next social media campaign. 55 in 5 will be tough to beat.
Here is the intro from our 55 Colorado Springs Attractions in 5 Days Adventure! The rest of the videos can be found at http://www.youtube.com/visitcos
Like mentioned in the materials for this week, social media can definitely be a double edged sword. But, it's definitely a space that we have to be in. Recently, as I have mentioned in previous posts, we launched a new brand platform for Colorado Springs. Immediately the local social media crowd was vicious in its critique of the creative execution of the logo. I was honestly stunned by level of venom focused against a logo, some turning into personal attacks. (I guess this is one of those marketing scars that you mentioned at the beginning of this course). One very active local blogger organized an anti-logo Facebook page and went out to the mainstream media. Our local independent paper started a redesign contest. Our mayor pulled his support for the entire branding project, not just the logo. Of course, whatever bleeds leads in media and we hunkered down for the onslaught. Eventually 700 people joined the Facebook page (not very many out of a city of 600,000), but they were a very loud group. So, we decided to meet with the most vocal a few days later in person. Instead of becoming defensive, we endeavored to listen to them and come up with a viable solution to address the concerns that were raised. We are currently in the process of redoing the logo. But, this is an example of the power of social media. If we had launched a new brand 3 or more years ago, we wouldn't have encountered this issue. I think the lesson learned here is that it is best to meet the concerns and criticism head on and engage people in a professional way. Ignoring the social media crowd isn't going to make it any better.
On a positive note, usually our job at the CVB is to market to out of town travelers. Normally this group is friendly to Colorado Springs and isn't aware of some of our local political issues. This is where social media gets fun for us. Social media allows us to be creative in how we communicate to the traveling public. Last summer, I had the crazy idea to try and do 55 Colorado Springs region attractions in 5 days. We decided this would be our 2011 social campaign. I was joined by our PR manager and our CEO's daughter who was on vacation from college on this epic adventure. On less than a shoestring budget (literally $500 which pretty much covered our lunches and gas) and with lots of great support from our attractions, we did it! We tweeted and posted to Facebook and Flickr as we went. We also took video shots on a $200 flip camera along the way. The engagement from our current fans was great and we even got recognized on the street on Day 4. By the time we finally edited our videos together it was late in September, so we decided to hold the videos until this year to better coincide with our travel planning season. We finally launched the videos a couple of weeks ago through all social channels and also in more traditional marketing avenues like email and our annual Visitor Guide. The point of "55 in 5" is to show that there is so much to do here that you need to stay a bit longer on vacation or come back for another trip. The campaign also gave us the opportunity to highlight some of our smaller attractions that often do not get as much love. Since the launch 2 weeks ago, we have grown our Facebook fans by 30% and have had over 6,000 views of the videos on YouTube. We are also beginning to get some organic search engine traffic around 55 in 5 keywords, our attractions community feels great that they have all been highlighted and local political officials have complimented our organization's efforts. Social is the central piece of this campaign but it is translating over into other pieces of our marketing efforts. So far, I would consider the campaign a success. We are currently brainstorming for our next social media campaign. 55 in 5 will be tough to beat.
Here is the intro from our 55 Colorado Springs Attractions in 5 Days Adventure! The rest of the videos can be found at http://www.youtube.com/visitcos
Week 12 Goals
This week's focus on every day is day one will be interesting in light of the power of social media in the marketing and business landscape. I will read the assigned article as well as watch the two videos associated with this lesson.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Practical Issues of Implementing CLV
I think from a practical standpoint, the most prevalent issue of implementing a CLV system is that it requires significant upfront investment to get the system in place. Often older systems are outdated, have incomplete information and are not layed out in a format that is easily accessed, exportable or translated to the new system. Cleaning the data in order to ready it for a move can be very costly and time consuming.
At work, we recently went through a CLV switch which was incredibly painful. While in theory, the amount of information that we were trying to condense into single records for each consumer we had in our system what a great idea, they actual switch was riddled with many obstacles. The first problem is that the database system that we were sold was not meant for destination marketing companies but rather for sales companies. We had to bend the system to do things it wasn't built for. In our case, the switch took 6 months and actually caused us to encounter every marketer's worst nightmare, we started to drop orders and conversions because the interface between our website and the database system was complicated that every Visitor Guide order or enewsletter sign up was not going into the system for fulfillment. So, we had numerous people calling, saying they had ordered a guide, but had not yet received it and I had no record of it in the system. AHHH!!! We made the conversion that we worked so hard to get and then weren't fulfilling it. To make matters worse, the vendor didn't believe we had a problem. The root of the problem was that the CLV system was so complicated on the back end to get it to work that the simple "catch and throw" action (receive a visitor guide order, put it in the mail) that should be easily accomplished was not. Eventually, we retrieved all of our old data and switched back to our older system which was reliable.
One of the other problems with CLV is that now that you have collected all of this great information, what do you do with it. To tailor individual communications and come up with the content and time to market on a mass customization level also takes significant levels of investment. With a marketing staff of 2, we find it very difficult to keep all of the other balls in the air while really utilizing our database to its full potential. I guess this is one of those times where there is always room for improvement. With a new agency and database solution this year, we are hoping to make significant strides in this area.
At work, we recently went through a CLV switch which was incredibly painful. While in theory, the amount of information that we were trying to condense into single records for each consumer we had in our system what a great idea, they actual switch was riddled with many obstacles. The first problem is that the database system that we were sold was not meant for destination marketing companies but rather for sales companies. We had to bend the system to do things it wasn't built for. In our case, the switch took 6 months and actually caused us to encounter every marketer's worst nightmare, we started to drop orders and conversions because the interface between our website and the database system was complicated that every Visitor Guide order or enewsletter sign up was not going into the system for fulfillment. So, we had numerous people calling, saying they had ordered a guide, but had not yet received it and I had no record of it in the system. AHHH!!! We made the conversion that we worked so hard to get and then weren't fulfilling it. To make matters worse, the vendor didn't believe we had a problem. The root of the problem was that the CLV system was so complicated on the back end to get it to work that the simple "catch and throw" action (receive a visitor guide order, put it in the mail) that should be easily accomplished was not. Eventually, we retrieved all of our old data and switched back to our older system which was reliable.
One of the other problems with CLV is that now that you have collected all of this great information, what do you do with it. To tailor individual communications and come up with the content and time to market on a mass customization level also takes significant levels of investment. With a marketing staff of 2, we find it very difficult to keep all of the other balls in the air while really utilizing our database to its full potential. I guess this is one of those times where there is always room for improvement. With a new agency and database solution this year, we are hoping to make significant strides in this area.
Monday, February 13, 2012
CLV and the Tourism Industry
Many companies in the tourism industry use CLV to help them manage their profitability and target the right customers at the right times. As mentioned in previous posts, convention and visitor bureaus are a bit of a different animal. We don't make any transactions at all. Other than ordering a visitor guide or making a booking through a third-party system, we don't actually deliver the final service to a customer. We are simply the marketing arm of the local government. This means that we don't control any pricing, product or customer service aspects of spending a vacation in Colorado Springs. Instead our main function is to inspire people to travel here.
That being said, we do try to use some loose estimates provided by the state of Colorado to predict the average length of stay and average spend for different types of customers who visit us. These values combined with industry standard formulas, mostly provided by the national trade organization, help us to predict the value of different large groups or events that come into town and how much economic impact they have brought to our city over several years. Based on these numbers, we are able to strategically choose which large scale projects and events to pursue with our limited funds. Essentially we are very picky when deciding which customers to invest in. Some are definitely more valuable than others. One unique part of the meeting travel business is that most large meetings rotate from destination to destination from year to year. The national trade association provides a large database where most CVBs cooperate together and share economic impact information from past meetings and events that they have hosted. Information includes actual size of the group, where they stayed, length of stay and other pertinent information. It's almost like an industry wide CLV system. CVBs are very aware of what groups are more valuable than others. This information system is invaluable as our sales team decides which meetings to pursue. It is definitely true that sometimes "the juice is not worth the squeeze."
As far as leisure travel goes, we routinely cleanse our database of names and email addresses to cull out those list members who are no longer responding to our marketing efforts. While emails are relatively inexpensive at around 2 cents per email, when you have hundreds of thousands of email addresses the expense to mail to the entire list can be quite large. Our current database system allows me to track behaviors over time (number of visitor guide orders, bookings, interest based email opt-ins, etc) for each individual email address and is very helpful in targeting and focusing our marketing to reach the appropriate people at the right time. Or deciding to drop that contact from future communications all together.
While I don't use CLV as heavily as I would if I actually had a tangible product to deliver to a customer, we still find ways to utilize the technology to be more efficient with our marketing and advertising dollars.
That being said, we do try to use some loose estimates provided by the state of Colorado to predict the average length of stay and average spend for different types of customers who visit us. These values combined with industry standard formulas, mostly provided by the national trade organization, help us to predict the value of different large groups or events that come into town and how much economic impact they have brought to our city over several years. Based on these numbers, we are able to strategically choose which large scale projects and events to pursue with our limited funds. Essentially we are very picky when deciding which customers to invest in. Some are definitely more valuable than others. One unique part of the meeting travel business is that most large meetings rotate from destination to destination from year to year. The national trade association provides a large database where most CVBs cooperate together and share economic impact information from past meetings and events that they have hosted. Information includes actual size of the group, where they stayed, length of stay and other pertinent information. It's almost like an industry wide CLV system. CVBs are very aware of what groups are more valuable than others. This information system is invaluable as our sales team decides which meetings to pursue. It is definitely true that sometimes "the juice is not worth the squeeze."
As far as leisure travel goes, we routinely cleanse our database of names and email addresses to cull out those list members who are no longer responding to our marketing efforts. While emails are relatively inexpensive at around 2 cents per email, when you have hundreds of thousands of email addresses the expense to mail to the entire list can be quite large. Our current database system allows me to track behaviors over time (number of visitor guide orders, bookings, interest based email opt-ins, etc) for each individual email address and is very helpful in targeting and focusing our marketing to reach the appropriate people at the right time. Or deciding to drop that contact from future communications all together.
While I don't use CLV as heavily as I would if I actually had a tangible product to deliver to a customer, we still find ways to utilize the technology to be more efficient with our marketing and advertising dollars.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)