We’ve just returned from beautiful Philadelphia where we spent two action-packed days at the 2016 Tourism Academy conference which we were proud to support as a key sponsor and as a presenter with our client Visit Stockton.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BGZb_SXSt2A/
Tourism Academy is an event hosted by our friends at Tempest Interactive Media for forward-thinking travel and tourism professionals. This year over 150 destination marketers from DMOs of all sizes came together to learn, make new connections and spend time with industry friends.
Here are some highlights from the conference that any destination marketer can benefit from, whether you attended or not.
3 Key Takeaways from Tourism Academy 2016:
Content is more than what you create, it’s a way to build community
Brian Matson (@BVMatson) from Two Six Digital gave a talk on how DMOs need to be the authorities and publishers of relevant content. Our take on his presentation:
It’s not enough to just create content. What you really need is to create a culture of sharing, and use content to build a community around your destination.
Create clickable stories like the smart folks at Ypsi Real. They asked their social media followers for their favourite burger spot, got tons of recommendations, and then shared the Top 3 Burger Spots with a click through to follow the restaurants’ Instagram pages. This is a great way to promote the people who are sharing your destination; they love the recognition, and it drives new awareness for your local businesses.
Travel is emotional, and Instagram is a collector of emotions
You may have already heard the news that Instagram crossed its 500 million users mark last week. That number would not be a surprise to Joe Giessler (@thejoehio) from TourismOhio (@ohiogram), who spoke about Building a Successful Instagram Program Without A Budget
Travel is emotional – people experience joy, happiness, anticipation and excitement, as well as a shared experience and social connectivity. But how many destinations are really tapping into that emotion? For starters, use Instagram to build awareness and drive engagement.
Joe shared some great tactics as well, such as using links in your Instagram bio, instead of in your caption. The former drive 132% more click throughs to Ohio.org. He also suggested creating blog content around different themes with pictures pulled from Instagram. (Like our Ten Portland Instagrammers We Love post)
Advertising on Instagram is a good fit for DMOs, but it is a better channel for engagement goals (measured by your likes) than conversion-based goals like click-throughs. Joe found that for Ohio.org, Instagram had a much lower cost-per-like than Facebook, but a much higher cost-per-click
Destination Marketing Organizations are really Destination Media Organizations
This clever phrase was coined by the video panel discussion, where four different DMOs spoke about the power of video for DMOs. They kicked things off with a staggering statistic: by 2017, online video will make up 70% of consumer internet traffic. So what can video do for a DMO?
Video can boost email open rates by up to 19%, increase average time on site by 88%, and increase conversion by 80%.
While people prefer to watch short videos, you can tell an in-depth story about your destination through a series of short clips. Travel Waterloo has aired more than 40 video episodes over the past 13 months, averaging nearly 10,000 views per episode. They spend $700/week on content production and measure video completion rates as well as total views.
Influencer marketing is a buzzword in the travel marketing universe right now, but how do you get started with leveraging the popularity of the biggest influencers within your brand’s social network to amplify your brand message?
Understanding Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is the digital art of having powerful social media users market your brand for you by sharing their authentic perspective of it on their own popular social feeds. A study by McKinsey found that marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than twice the sales of paid advertising.
We chatted with Guy Poreh, the CMO and head of customer success at HYPR — an influencer database and marketplace — to exchange ideas on the $8 billion market. He said that thanks to social media, word of mouth really only requires one mouth now: A trusted influencer with great power and reach gives advice that people will listen to and actively engage with. In fact, 92 percent of people would trust a recommendation from an individual, even if they don’t know them, over a brand (source).
Identifying an Influencer in your brand’s social community
An influencer is a person who engages with their online social media community substantially through retweets, shares, comments, etc. The size and scope of a suitable influencer’s following depends on your destination and its niche. While someone with hundreds of thousands of followers could certainly expose your brand to their followers, if they are not a strong contextual fit, their post may not drive as many actionable leads or engagements as expected (source).
Influencer marketing is already being used by innovative brands in the travel industry, like Visit Fort Worth and Visit Fairfax. Many of them have seen enough success to repeat the tactic and continue to reach out to the influencers of their community.
It’s easier to execute an influencer marketing campaign than you may think. Here is an eight-step guide on how to run your own campaign.
How to Develop an Influencer Marketing Plan for Your Brand
1 | Determine Your Goal and How You are Going to Track it
Decide what you are trying to achieve before you select an influencer with the right skill sets and interests to help you.
Are you trying to gather more social proof? Choose an influencer who posts a lot and posts often. If you are trying to increase your destination’s footfall, then choose an influencer who is open to giving a strong call to action to his/her followers to come and experience it for themselves.
For example, our client Visit Fort Worth ran an influencer marketing campaign with the goal of promoting the destination to an extended audience that they had not yet reached. In the campaign, they allowed one local influencer per week to “takeover” the Fort Worth Instagram account by providing one photo and caption per day.
The goal of the campaign was to leverage the influencers by promoting Fort Worth to their followers. This allowed the destination to get its story out there to as many new people as possible who were not connected to the Fort Worth social accounts before.
Fort Worth repurposed the content and published the takeover on their official blog, accompanied by 5 questions that the influencers answered about themselves.
2 | Establish Influencer Criteria
Decide ahead of time how you are going to select your influencers. Here are some criteria to consider:
Number of followers
Follower demographic
Number of likes or comments
Location
Profile aesthetic or style
The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has hosted influencer marketing events called #emptyROM, modelled after a similar one put on by the MET in New York. They invited ten lucky Instagrammers to enter the museum before it opened to the public and take pictures to share on their personal feeds. The museum then featured them in its official blog and print magazine.
The ROM searched for influencers with lots of followers who take beautiful and artistic photos for this campaign.
Alternatively, Visit Fort Worth identified a few individuals who consistently produced beautiful, unique photos of Fort Worth through CrowdRiff and reached out to them to offer a chance to be a part of the campaign.
3 | Determine How You Will Reward Your Influencers
Influencer marketing lets you run a campaign with a unique, targeted audience that often costs a fraction of an ordinary paid social media campaign on Facebook or Twitter. Often, social media figures will be active online regardless of the reward involved because it’s what they love to do.
“There’s no money that changes hands; it’s just a cool experience and the photographers are usually pretty happy with letting us share their photography as long as we credit them.” – Ryan Dodge, ROM Digital Engagement Coordinator.
Fort Worth’s Interactive Producer Jake Sillavan agrees, noting that conducting such an event is worth the effort because, “You are making an advocate for your brand once influencers get excited that you’re featuring their work”.
4 | Reach Out and Get Commitment
After you have a shortlist of influencers you want to work with, reach out to them on the social network that they are most active on and establish contact. Then, privately, invite them to take part in your campaign.
The ROM first announced the concept of their campaign on social media and invited their followers to apply. Then they put together a simple Google Form asking for applicants’ Instagram, Twitter, website and a short 50 word explanation of why they wanted to participate so that they could vet them.
You can send out an application form for your campaign like the ROM or handpick users who interact with your destination on social frequently. Remember to keep it friendly and professional. Start small for your first test run then experiment with more participants once you get the hang of it.
5 | Benchmark Your Stats
Refer back to the goal you set at the beginning of this process and keep in mind what metrics you are trying to improve. Take note of your current stats — i.e. inquiries, social to web traffic, Instagram followers or likes — so that you can measure success after the campaign more easily.
6 | Execute the campaign
Keep your finger on the pulse and remain invested. Make sure your brand engages with all the posts that the influencer shares and also with people who interact back with them. This can be done by commenting, liking, sharing and following your influencers and the people in their network.
7 | Recap the campaign (optional)
This is a great way to stay involved with your influencers and their followers to keep your destination in customers’ minds after the campaign ends. A great example of this is the #emptyROM feature on the ROM’s blog. Even after the event ended, participants kept sending in their photos that continued to be published on the museum’s blog page to keep generating interest.
Click the image to read an #emptyROM blog post.
8 | Evaluate the campaign
Take a look at the before and after stats you recorded to see how they measure against your goal. What was the impact of the campaign? Make notes of what worked and what could use improvement. Don’t be afraid to try something different or a variation of the same campaign next time to make it even better — it will be unique each time with the selection of new participants, which is the beauty of influencer marketing!
When it comes to influencer marketing, we encourage you to be innovative – as artists of social media, influencers appreciate creativity and will be more likely to take part in your campaign if it is fresh, exciting and rewarding.
The opportunities to spread your destination’s story are truly endless with influencer marketing as long as you do it right.
#emptyROM’s Ryan encourages everyone to give it a try, concluding that, “Everything is a little scary when it’s new, but once you start doing it more often you get into a groove and you realize what works for you and your community, then it’s really awesome!”
Ready to find your brand’s influencers and get collaborating? We’d love to help! With CrowdRiff’s visual marketing platform, it is easier than ever to identify the right influencers, reach out to them, execute the campaign, collect the unique content and repurpose it across all of your marketing efforts.
Our experience with over 80 leading DMOs has given us rich insights we’d love to share with you. To learn more, let’s chat.
For years, CrowdRiff has revolutionized the way companies discover, secure rights to, and utilize user-generated photos shared on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce we’ve teamed up with Google Cloud Vision to create our most powerful release yet: the world’s smartest end-to-end visual content platform.
Here’s how CrowdRiff + Google Cloud Vision are transforming the way you approach visual engagement:
This is the first ever platform that organizes all of your visual assets (from your professional photos to all user-generated images on social media) in one beautifully searchable place that your team can access from anywhere.
Upload thousands of photos at once, and Google Cloud Vision’s image recognition and classification features will identify the objects in each photo, tagging them all in seconds flat. It can recognize anything from flowers, food and animals to local landmarks.
Pair that with CrowdRiff’s existing aggregator – which finds, categorizes, and manages your rights to great user-created photos – and you’ve got the most extraordinary visual content engine on the planet.
In one fell swoop, our platform harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to exponentially increase your Visual Influence potential:
Upload all your photos (in minutes)
Automatically tag them using Google Cloud Vision’s algorithm (in seconds)
Make them all available to search, instantly
Share them with your audience and colleagues all over the world
See? We told you it was cool.
Why can CrowdRiff + Google Cloud Vision change everything for your business?
We can think of about 100 reasons. But here are our top 4:
1 | We give you the tools to master your Visual Authority.
Visual content is 40x more likely to get shared (source), and receives 94% more views than content without an image attached (source). So, if you’re not making the most of your visual assets, you’re not maximizing your Visual Influence Potential — leaving money and leads on the table.
Mastering your approach to visual engagement (in your in-house communications and presentations, advertisements, social media posts, galleries on your website, etc.) isn’t just the best way to guarantee ROI for photography and social media management. You must master visual engagement to remain a leader in your industry.
2 | Our search function helps you find the perfect photo, every time.
Unless you’re going in and manually adding tags to your current photos, finding the exact image you need can be a massive challenge. (Unless you can remember that “IMG_2343” from the company picnic was just the shot you wanted.)
In our platform, Google Cloud Vision uses artificial intelligence to scan every photo you upload, and detect its contents in seconds. Our existing technology also tags the best user-generated photos on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, to make them searchable, too.
That’s what makes this platform so unusual: it keeps every image you need in one place that you and your entire company can access from anywhere.
3 | We’ll save you precious time and energy – so you can get back to doing what matters.
Manually categorizing and tagging photos the old fashioned way can take hours or days! With CrowdRiff + Google Cloud Vision, it doesn’t matter if you’re uploading 10 or 10,000 photos: we’ll have them uploaded and beautifully organized in minutes.
That means you and your people are free to do more cool stuff, like find the perfect backdrop image for that presentation. Or slip some awesome just-tagged Instagram photos into your website. Or putting an inspiring quote on that pro photo that will rack up retweets like nobody’s business.
4 | This platform = ultimate creative freedom.
Having access to all of your photos at all times helps your website and content stay fresh, and you have space to test out ideas that elevate your brand to its highest visual potential.
We’re also working to integrate this awesome new platform with all the tools you use every day — like WordPress, Drupal, Tempest, etc. With this kind of technology behind us, there’s really no limit to what we can make together.
Why did we create this? We heard what our clients needed, and built it to scale.
We noticed that at any given time, thousands of our clients’ professional and promotional images were scattered in different places — in folders, shared drives, digital asset managers, smartphones, Dropbox, etc.
Now, we’re taking photos out of the “shoebox”, “stash-’em-anywhere” chaos and putting everything – from photos of your last company party, to pro product shots, to photos your buyers are sharing on social media – in one spot your entire team can access. No sweat. And more influence potential.
Did you know: only 27% of marketers have a process in place to aggregate, organize, and manage the visual assets being used across their marketing teams? (source)
That means CrowdRiff + Google Cloud Vision will put you ahead of the curve before you even begin.
We’ll make it easier than ever for you to become the visual influencer in your industry, unleash your creativity, and increase conversions, impact, and customer engagement.
Does CrowdRiff + Google Cloud Vision sound right for your company? Get in touch.
This platform is perfect for any industry that values visual communication: travel, fashion, sports, entertainment, marketing/PR agencies, etc.
This partnership is established on one core principle, give destinations direct access to new technologies that make their lives easier. A major focus of this partnership will be how destinations can leverage visual influence to build authority around their brand. Destinations like Visit Stockton, Visit Saint Paul, and Visit Vacaville are just a few who are already pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with Tempest and CrowdRiff.
Tempest’s expertise in the digital space, combined with CrowdRiff’s robust visual influence platform, promises to take destination marketing to the next level.
This is just the beginning for Tempest and CrowdRiff. The full scope of this partnership and how you can directly benefit from it will be unveiled at the Tourism Academy conference. We hope to see you there!
The Royal Ontario Museum’s (ROM) most popular selfie spot is its 65 million year old Tyrannosaurus Rex. To provide a more enriching experience for its visitors, the ROM has decided to make the T. rex come alive using augmented reality.
The ROM constantly seeks opportunities to increase visitor engagement. In an effort to go above and beyond the average social media campaign, the museum has incorporated the use of augmented reality into its newest initiative.
In an institution where living, breathing exhibits are limited, the ROM has utilized the use of video and computer graphics to bring the ancient and mystifying fossilized T. rex to life. The result is a terrifyingly realistic opportunity to go head-to-head with one of the world’s most dangerous predators, and more importantly, an engaging social strategy.
Augmented Reality Makes the ROM More Social
Guests are immediately invited to try the experience upon entering the second-floor exhibit. A monitor, powered by KioskPro, displaying all past encounters with the augmented version of the ROM’s popular T. rex challenges new visitors to try the experience out for themselves.
Visitors are prompted towards two iPads, which serve as the platform for the experience. The iPads display the fossilized T. rex on screen in real time through its camera. After hitting the start button, a superimposed version of the vicious dinosaur suddenly appears on the screen.
The user is also encouraged to explore interesting facts about the late Cretaceous period carnivore; everything from its diet to how on earth it was able to use its small arms is addressed in a series of pop-up bubbles that appear around the body part in question. Once the user has had his/or her fill of dino facts they are prompted to stand in front of the iPad’s camera to pose with the T. rex (a floor marker has been strategically placed so the user doesn’t miss their mark).
Test For Success
The ROM’s impressive use of augmented reality in their new social initiative has been largely successful. The encouragement of visitors to email their images to themselves is an excellent lead generation tactic.
About 10% of the approximately 10,000 users who have thus far engaged with the display have agreed to subscribe to the museum’s monthly newsletter. Beyond simply increasing visitor subscriptions, the campaign allows the ROM to improve the quality of photos being displayed on their social media galleries, and it has also allowed them to drum up more effective visitor engagement.
After the photos are shared on visitor’s social channels, Lexie, the ROM’s social media manager, approves which pictures will go live on the monitor in the exhibit through CrowdRiff. She also moderates which images will be shared on a CrowdRiff powered gallery on the ROM’s website.
Additionally, Lexie engages with the owner of the photos by sending comments and fun facts which are pre-written within the T. rex conversation group inside CrowdRiff. These exchanges have received positive feedback.
The use of augmented reality and photo sharing in the dinosaur exhibit is largely experiential. The campaign has been closely monitored by the ROM’s social media team to evaluate its use in future exhibitions.
As the ROM begins gearing up for the widely anticipated Chihuly Exhibition, which is set to open in June 2016 and is guaranteed to be a very photo driven show, we are likely to see similar interactive social campaigns being utilized. Until then, we definitely encourage you to check out the T. rex Alive experience. Even camera shy visitors will get a kick out of watching toddlers and adults alike feigning fear in front of the ROM’s most popular tenant.
The ROM is a global innovator when it comes to museums using social media effectively. Check out our customer story with the ROM to see how CrowdRiff plays a part in their success.
CrowdRiff is a proud sponsor of the DMA West Tech Summit this year, held in Anaheim from March 16th to 18th.
One of the best things about being a part of the travel industry is all the great conferences around the world that you can travel to. Our clients highly prioritize attending some key travel conferences throughout the year, and DMA West Tech Summit is one of them.
We wanted to lend the power of our platform to the conference and will be powering DMA West’s social wall during the conference. Just share your photo on Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #DMAWestTechSummit to see your photos on the DMA West homepage and get involved in the conversation.
This year, we are not only sponsoring the conference but we are also taking some key clients and friends to see the Rangers vs Ducks hockey game! Just imagine a private box, food, drink and good company. Go Ducks!
We are also offering to buy you a free Starbucks coffee if you book a demo with us at the conference. Make sure you book your demo and grab one of the limited Starbucks gift cards that we have on offer!
Looking forward to seeing you at #DMAWestTechSummit. Keep your eye out for Team CrowdRiff and make sure you say “Hi” to them to claim your gift card.
2016 is finally here, and we couldn’t be more excited! We’ve been working hard on some groundbreaking new features and powerful integrations that’ll change the way you manage content, and we can’t wait to share them with you! We’re also looking forward to growing our team so we can keep upping the ante on content marketing and better serve our incredible partners.
2016’s already picking up speed, so before 2015 disappears in the rearview mirror, let’s take a minute to reflect on a truly special year.
14,687,829
Photos collected in our partner’s collections
CrowdRiff brought you the best of your community in one simple collection. This meant not missing a single moment shared around your brand.
122,482
Likes sent to fans and followers
Sometimes all it takes is a little pat on the back to tell your followers that they are appreciated. Our partners sent many tiny signals of love to their fans and followers to keep them engaged.
65,239
Conversations started
Through personalized replies and comments, we helped brands to take community management to the next level.
53,795
Humans reached
Your community is more than a set of hashtags, it is the people that matter. Through likes and comments, we enabled our partners to interact with the people behind the online personas.
Digital Rights
Authentic marketing visuals, as real as they get
We introduced Digital Rights Management because people love having their content featured, and the easier the permissions process is, the more likely they’ll be to keep feeding you great marketing material.
Supercharging Advertisements
Real-time socially powered ads
We took your selfies and turned them into dynamic ads that reached millions! (With your permission, of course.) Who needs an endorsement by Beyonce when yours is far more valuable?
Catalysts
Let your content go to work for you
You wanted a way to encourage users to explore opportunities in the moment, and generate click-through to your high-value pages. So we created Catalysts to allow you to enrich visual content with messaging & CTAs that immediately converts a user.
Your community isn’t one-dimensional, so why should your reporting be?
We unlocked social insights with uninhibited search to blow your boss away with never seen before data. Combine usernames, locations, networks, keywords and hashtags to make every piece of analytics pinpoint-accurate.
We were sponsors at two of the largest travel and destination marketing conferences in North America. We learnt a lot, made a lot of new friends, and can’t wait to do it again this year!
We doubled in size and added more muscle to our tech, customer success, marketing and sales teams. We are more ready than ever to serve you better.
We Got a Makeover
Our home on the internet got a major renovation
To make your stay even more comfortable, we gave our home on the internet a big makeover. Check out our Product page, or peruse the Blog to see what’s new. Most importantly, see if you can spot yourself on our Clients page because, without you, none of this would have been possible.
Thank you for an incredible year! We are fully committed to making 2016 even better for you.
One of our clients who we get the most questions about when it comes to destination marketing undoubtedly is Visit Franklin.
Questions like, how did they get their website to look like that? Who took the photos on their homepage? How did they grow their social following? Can you tell us what their strategy is?
Josh Collins, the mastermind behind marketing at Visit Franklin did a fantastic podcast recently in which he spills the beans about his marketing strategy.
We’ve summarized the best parts from the podcast for you here.
Josh was featured in The SocialLab Podcast weekly podcast which discusses the latest social media trends and marketing strategies hosted by Bob Hutchins, Jarrid Wilson, and the Buzzplant team.
You can listen to the podcast HERE and pay extra attention to the 22nd-minute mark where CrowdRiff got a mention from Josh!
The story starts off with Jarrid describing his first interaction with the Visit Franklin brand just after he moved to Franklin, Tennessee and tells us exactly how that interaction delighted him!
“My wife and I were brand new to the area, maybe a week living in Franklin, and we went down to this place called The Factory… and as we’re walking around and taking pictures, we’re Tweeting, we’re Instagramming just ’cause we’re excited to be in the Franklin area. We love it.“And I walked by this coffee shop that wasn’t yet finished being built out called Honest Coffee Roasters and I took a picture and said, ‘Man, The Factory is awesome. I’m excited about this new coffee shop.’
“I tagged them and I posted it on Twitter and Instagram and about 5 to 10 mins later I got a notification that Visit Franklin had actually Tweeted back at me and said, ‘Hey! Thanks for visiting The Factory. We’re glad you love living here. Also, check out our website. We featured your Instagram photo on the front page.’
“So, immediately, I go, well let me check out their website if this is real or some automated thing and I check it out. Surely enough, the photo I had just taken of Honest Coffee Roasters was front page of this Visit Franklin website. So I’m going, this is too cool!
“I viewed that as the representation of Franklin. The people of Franklin love that my wife and I live here and they loved our photography! The people of Franklin decided to put our Instagram photo on their website. So immediately there is this connection of like wow, the people here really care about people visiting Franklin.
“I just thought that was such a great example of an organization or a visitors bureau using social media to connect with people on a deeper level and not just spit out content to them.”
The Destination Marketing Strategy Behind Visit Franklin
One of the key questions in the podcast was how can a brand like Visit Franklin get past the technology and impersonal aspect of it and engage people with the feelings, thoughts, and emotions of a town like Franklin? How do you translate something like that online?
Josh answered by saying that your goal as a marketer should be to treat people like human beings even when your interaction with them is online only.
“Your goal as a marketer should be to treat people like human beings.” -Josh Collins @sixsteps268
Social Media and Digital Marketing often loses its sense of authenticity. Josh stresses the fact that it is important to be a human brand, and this is at the core of Visit Franklin’s strategy.
A photo posted by Franklin Tennessee (@visitfranklintn) on
Visit Franklin strives to be a digital representation of the actual experience that people can have in the town of Franklin. This has always been the brand’s primary goal. Another key strategy that Josh implemented at Franklin was to become a Listening First brand. Through listening, the brand started to learn more about who they are, who their audience is and this informed what they needed to do to connect and engage in very authentic ways.
Listen First
Josh shared his thoughts on how CrowdRiff had helped him to listen to his brand online and to what was being said about by real people. He points out,
He points out, “The current reality is that people are online and they are talking about you whether you want them to or not. The opportunity is whether you want to engage.”
Visit Franklin tried to figure out how can they get involved in that conversation and how they could be invited into the conversation.
Through a tool like CrowdRiff, they can see how people were talking about Franklin and it was through CrowdRiff that they found Jarrid’s photo about The Factory.
In the podcast Josh says, “It’s so interesting how a piece of technology breathed life into the DNA of Visit Franklin and enabled us to scale the way we connect and engage. And through those, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had interactions just like you Jarrid, over and over and over again. People walk away and they’re like, ‘Man, I can’t believe that! I love Franklin. I took a photo, I Tweeted it and next thing I know, somebody is responding to me and talking to me!”
“It’s so interesting how a piece of technology breathed life into the DNA of Visit Franklin…” Josh Collins @sixsteps268
Every Mention, Pay Attention
Josh paints a picture for us and asks us to think about it this way. If you were to walk down the street and someone said “Hi!”, would you ignore it and keep walking? No, you wouldn’t because that would be rude. Then why would you ignore it when a person interacts with your brand online?
Be congruent with how you are as a destination, and with how the people in your town are and make sure your brand acts and responds in the same way online.
This means reaching out to people and paying attention to every mention, retweet, favorite and like.
“If your online brand doesn’t mirror your actual brand, people know that.” – Josh Collins @sixsteps268
Where Does Your Brand Come Alive?
If you are still struggling to define the personality of your destination, ask yourself these questions.
Where do you see your organization come alive? Does it come alive when you’re helping people, or when restoring your community, or helping visitors to experience your town in the best way?
When you uncover where you come alive, it will show you what a strategy would be like to engage people online.
Franklin has a lot to offer to various demographics including a rich historic background. These varied demographics are represented in multiple personas.
Instead of getting caught up in trying to please each individual persona separately, Josh recommends focusing on doing the things that would please all the personas.
Regardless of the demographic or persona, everyone longs for a sense of belonging.
Everyone longs for a place where they can feel like they are seen, heard and known. Through this, they feel loved and ultimately, this is what they are longing for.
Through a smart destination marketing strategy, a personable social strategy and personal engagements, you can give your visitors that feeling.
A photo posted by Franklin Tennessee (@visitfranklintn) on
Through that feeling you create in them, you will connect with people on a base level than profiling them solely based on their demographic.
Everybody Wants To Belong
As Josh mentioned before, everybody wants to be picked. Everybody wants to belong.
To be able to have these meaningful exchanges is one of the most fun parts of what Josh and his team do.
These kinds of human exchanges have catapulted growth for Visit Franklin and continues to pay dividends.
Not to mention that Visit Franklin has become a trailblazer in destination marketing and influencing how destinations are marketing themselves now, from Social Media to content marketing.
If you’re on the destination marketing conference circuit as a DMO or CVB, you’ve likely heard of SoMeT, put on by Destination Think! It’s one of the premiere conferences for destination marketers who want to learn from world-class leaders and innovate within their industry. It’s chock-full of inspirational ideas to fill your tool chest with, and if you haven’t been before, we’d highly recommend it.
This year, we participated not only as delegates, but also as a sponsor. We had a lot of opportunities to speak with our travel partners and newly made friends, and realized that it can be overwhelming going home with so many notes, no matter how valuable they are.
We put our heads together and decided to summarize some actionable takeaways to give back to the amazing DMO community.
Be proud of what makes your destination unique, and don’t shy away from it.
In their keynote presentation, Cleveland shared that before they started their campaign, just over 30% of Cleveland residents said they would recommend the city as a destination to travel to. Something they could have easily hid from, and kept marketing their parks, nightlife, or sporting events, but that’s not Cleveland’s style.
Instead of being shy about of it, they embraced it. Their motto became: We never followed the crowd, never listened to the jokes, and for that, you’re welcome. They focused on what made them unique, what made them Cleveland.
They created #ThisisCLEand locals/visitors embraced it, already boasting over 200,000 posts on Instagram.
The results? A recent poll found that 54% of residents would recommend Cleveland as a destination… the proof is in the pudding!
So, what does it mean for you?
Be different. Be unique. Show off your personality.
2. Define Your DNA
Find your strength, and build a DNA around it.
It’s easy to say that your destination has something for everyone, as we’d never want to lose a potential traveller. However, it’s those who make the tough decision to focus on their destination’s strengths, and define their DNA that see the greatest results.
We saw this with Dublin, Ohio who made it clear that Irish is in fact, an attitude. Being Irish is weaved into every aspect of their marketing, and is what draws new travellers to the destination.
When you visit, every experience is unmistakably Irish, from the Irish egg rolls (we’d be interested in trying one!) to the St. Patty’s day parade.
This is their DNA, and even though they’re not based in Ireland, it works!
Ask yourself, “what would the world miss if my destination disappeared?”
Once you have the answer to that, you have the building block of your DNA.
3. Prove Your Social ROI
The one language every executive speaks is ROI.
This is all great, but when the board asks “what’s the ROI on your social campaign?”, what do you do? Well, what a lot of us do, talk impressions, reach, and engagement. As William from Think! mentioned, executives don’t always speak social.
So how do we embrace our cliches, define our DNA, and make social the core of that strategy? You outfit yourself with as many tools to prove the ROI on social.
Because, let’s face it, you won’t get very far, if you don’t have executive buy-in.
Here are some strategies that we’ve seen work.
Relating Social to Word of Mouth Marketing
Social media is Word of Mouth Marketing on steroids.
The one to one conversations that travelers use to share their experiences are the most powerful way to get new travel consideration.
With social, those conversations happen every second, and are shared with every person in their network. Remind executives that by supercharging social, those conversations will reach more people, translating to more heads in beds.
A destination's brand is the sum of all shared stories from that place (from residents & visitors) #SoMeT15US#tourism#travel
Social is where people go to talk about their experience with your destination, and if you’re not there, you’re missing out.
Talking Efficiency
Because of this one to many nature of Social Media, it is one of the most efficient forms of media.
The beauty of social media is that you can keep a consistent message across all your channels with very little effort. What can be used on Facebook, can be quickly repurposed for Instagram and Twitter. Add on tools that integrate across all your channels, and you’ll have recipe for success in no time.
Remind your executives that in leveraging social for your marketing, you can save time and money, reduce duplicated work, and reach a greater audience.
Making Everything Measurable
Social media is measurable, full stop.
You can’t hide from the glanced over print ads or the tuned out radio ads here, it’s all visible. You’ll also have actionable insight into what works and what doesn’t for your destination.
Learn from your audience’s response, adapt quickly and you’ll see more click throughs and action taken on your brand.
"Your CEO can't convince everyone else if you can't convince your CEO first" – make your case well, be prepared @gogreatlakesbay#SoMeT15US
CrowdRiff participated in Startup Open House this year, being in great company as the best startups in Canada opened their doors to the community.
As we are recruiting for open positions at the moment, we thought it would be a great idea to show people what #lifeatcrowdriff is really like and get involved in the vibrant startup community of the city.
How We Prepared For Startup Open House
The sign up process on the event website was relatively easy and free, thanks to the sponsors of the event. The organizers were very helpful and even though we signed up late, we received a detailed promotion pack with posters and stickers ready for printing and a lot of other press and promotions material.
We didn’t really know who or what to expect and were pleasantly surprised when we received a guest right on the dot at 4pm. Visitors slowly trickled in and joined us on the couch for some beers, coffee and conversation.
They were invited to take a photo in our studio and share it on their social channels with the hashtag #lifeatcrowdriff. This was our chance to show off our product in action! As soon as we moderated the photos, they would get custom conversation starters like:
“You look great in our office ? Thanks for dropping by for #soh2015! See you next year!”
This move generated a few awesome photos for us and gave a chance to delight our visitors and build a connection with them on our social channels.
Startup Open House was a big success and we’d like to give the organizers a hearty Thank You for putting on this great event for the Canadian Startup Community.
We look forward to opening our doors to everyone again next year!
It’s hard to swing an iPad in a boardroom and not hit somebody talking about “making content more visual”. At this point, we all know that photos drive engagement, and that social media is an abundant supply of great content. With a never-ending flow of photos and a mandate to push real-time content, embeddable galleries have become a de facto necessity. Unfortunately, many of the solutions being offered are clunky and incongruous, hurting user experience and negating the performance advantage of social photos. We’re users too, and with an opportunity to make the Web a prettier place, we built our own embeddable photo galleries.
Social media may make it easy to spread the word, but much like peanut butter, spread too thin it may not satisfy your hungry audience. These days, cooking up a batch of great photos and expecting people to line up at your window sill just isn’t enough, no matter how scrumptious your content. Seeing social content as a lattice-crust pie on a checkerboard tablecloth may have a heartening nostalgia, but if you want to move product, it should be more like hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party: fully prepared, well-presented and never out of arm’s reach. Continue reading “How to Boost Social Participation by 4.6x with On-site Activation”
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, and a video is a series of pictures, does the addition of video support mean your galleries are worth as much as War and Peace*? Perhaps not, but we’re pretty excited about it. Bringing in video posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, Lens is now home to more moving pictures than an art gallery in an earthquake. It’s a simple feature, but it adds a new dimension to CrowdRiff galleries. Continue reading “Lights, Camera, Engagement! CrowdRiff Adds Video Support”
