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
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