When we talk to tourism organizations about social media we point out the usual advantages social media provides. The key ones are obviously the opportunity to listen to, talk with and engage visitors – before, while and after they are in a city or region.

This sometimes creates an interesting reaction, usually from the convention side of the business. They phrase it nicer but it comes down to this: “We do not care that much about visitors once they have made the decision to come to our city”. Really? Did I just hear you say that?

Well, not so fast.

Have you had a more detailed look at your budget lately, Mr. VP of Convention Sales? Chances are a good chunk of money is spent on something called a “Visitors Center”. It is a place where visitors can go to get information during their trip – way after they have made their decision to come to your beautiful town.

Probably you will now say that that money is well spent. After all the visitors will have a much better time because they get guided to the right places. And then they can write in one of the books that are lying around at the visitors center and share with everybody how much fun they had. Everybody who reads the book that is.

You see, you do not need a “Visitors Center” – you need a “Twisitors Center”. A way for visitors to get the advice and recommendations they are looking for – no matter where they are. A place to share stories, photos and experiences with millions of people all over the world – before, during and after the trip. Tools like Twitter are cheap, offer great ways to measure success and are what more and more visitors are using to get – and share – their travel information.

So, what are you doing for your Twisitors?

Two destination blogs (re)launched last week that both integrate social media elements in a very nice way:

Travel Oregon Blog

Travel Oregon (full disclosure: we work with them and provide content to them) relaunched their blog last week.

The blog was already considered by many one of the nicest and most successful destinations blog around before the redesign. The new blog is – in my opinion – even more interesting.

Travel Oregon now integrates not only videos (from YouTube, Vimeo etc.) but also Flickr photos into the blog. The “Oregon Snapshots” come from the Travel Oregon Flickr group. The blog footer invites readers to follow Travel Oregon on Twitter, the sidebar now includes a polling module. All great social elements for a blog and best of all – they do not cost a lot. 

If you want to see best practices in action do not miss the RSS feeds offered for the blog – not only are different feeds for the different categories available, the feed page also explains how feeds work and offers good resources. We need more examples like this to drive RSS adoption to where it should be!

Experience Columbus

Experience Columbus launched their blog last week and while they are a little bit later to the party they for sure come in a nice dress. The blog includes several interesting social media elements.

In the sidebar all staff members (18!) who are on Twitter are shown with their Twitter icons.

Also listed are links to the Experience Columbus Facebook page, myspace page and Flickr group. Unique is the integrated delicious feed for websites bookmarked by staff on the social bookmarking site. This can turn into an interesting resource e.g. for journalists who are looking for background info on the city. The only thing I would like to see improved is an easier navigation back to the main ExperienceColumbus page, maybe in the top level navigation. 

While playing around with the main Experience Columbus site I found some great elements other destinations should have a look at. 

The individual listings for hotels, attractions etc. include nicely integrated Google maps. But other destinations offer that as well. What I have not seen anywhere else are events listings that are tied to the individual member listing and therefore tied to the map location. So if I look at the Motorcycle Hall of Fame I can see all events taking place at the Hall of Fame in an extra tab. 

The infrastructure should allow Experience Columbus to very easily do even more as the events data is tied now to geo-data. Example: A Google map that shows all events taking place during a certain time within a certain radius around a specific place: “Let’s see what events are taking place within a mile radius from our hotel for the weekend we will be in Columbus”. Events are also available via a different RSS feeds.

Oh, the possibilities …

At the end of each month we look at the destinations in the US that are using Twitter to engage consumers and publish a ranking of these destinations using Twitter Grader.

And important element Grader does not take into account when calculating it’s score is the number of conversations that is taking place on Twitter. A “conversation” on Twitter can be defined as an exchange of (public) messages between users using the “@” syntax.

So here is the ranking of the top 20 destinations by conversations (this ranking does not include direct messages):

Clearly Philadelphia and Baltimore and far, far ahead of everybody else.

The number of conversations is cumulative, so obviously those destinations that started earlier have an advantage.

I think it will be interesting to see how the number of conversations changes over time as Twitter enters the mainstream more and more. Are you interested in that as well?

The most asked question about social media is: “Why should we be doing this?”. Do a good enough job of answering that question and you will immediately be asked “What is the ROI for this?”. You might be tempted to ask in return about the ROI for the last print ad your organization did or the ROI for taking a customer out on a golf course – but there are better options. Because the impact of social media activities can be measured, can be reported and can be put in relation to the cost involved: the ROI for social media activities can be measured.

At this week’s E-Marketing Insight conference we will present our thoughts on social media measurements, but to start a discussion about this subject we thought we would blog about this and hopefully start a wider debate.

In this post we want to share some of the ways we measure the ROI of social media activities using Twitter as an example.

Twitter is free to use so the only “investment” is the time needed to tweet.

The “return” part or the ROI should be defined as how successful you are in engaging customers through Twitter. Several factors are important and can be measured:

How many times did you Twitter?
Every time you tweet you potentially engage each of your followers. The challenge is that unlike email where you can measure an open rate there are no reliable tools to find out who reads your tweet or not. (Note: there are some tools to measure Twitter “open rates” and we will discuss those in one of our next posts).

How many people follow you?
Obviously the more people follow you, the more people you touch with your Tweets.

How many people follow the people who follow you?
But it is also important who follows you – quality beats quantity. You want people as followers who actively use Twitter and are followed themselves by many other users. Several tools allow you to measure the strength of your network.
(Note: we are measuring the strength of our network but at this point we are not considering this when calculating ROIs or cost per engagement).

How many of your posts are re-tweeted?
Re-tweeted posts engage on a high level. Somebody found your information important enough to share it with their followers. Not only those this take some effort on their part (= higher engagement) but it also gets your message out to people who you do not touch. Re-tweets are one of the highest levels of engagements you can have on Twitter.

How many conversations are you having with followers?
Another high level of engagement are the conversations you are having on Twitter. If you have followers that reply to your posts or ask you questions directly it can result in a high level if engagement.

For our ROI calculation we (roughly) track the time we spend on Twitter and multiply it by an hourly rate. This is our investment.
Example: Time spent twittering per month: 20 hours at an hourly rate of USD 150 = total cost of USD 3,000

To calculate the return we assign values to the different forms of engagement, we call these “engagement units”.

Example for one month:
- Tweets per month: 200
- Average followers in that month: 100
- Tweets x followers = 200 x 100 = 20,000 EU (engagement units)

- Re-tweets: 5
- Value of a re-tweet in engagement units: 1,000
- Re-tweet engagement value for that month: 5 x 1,000 = 5,000

- Conversations: 20
- Value of a conversation: 500
- Total engagement value of conversations: 20 x 500 = 10,000

Total engagement units this month: 35,000 EUs

ROI = 35,000 EU / 3,000 USD = 11.67

Or looking at it another way the CPE (cost per engagement) is 3,000 USD / 35,000 EU = 8.6 cents.

The number itself does not say a lot but repeating this exercise every month allows you to track engagement over time. Furthermore we can now put this number in relation to other vehicles we use for engagement like a website or email newsletter. We suggest using corresponding engagement values for those tools.

Example:
- Email newsletter opened = 1 EU,
- Newsletter forwarded to a friend = 300 EUs,
- Link clicked in the email newsletter = 50 EUs

Cost to produce email newsletter (labor + tools) = 2,500 USD
Engagement created by newsletter = 3,800 reads, 3 forwards, 600 clicks = 34,700 EUs

CPE for the email newsletter: = 2,500 USD / 34,700 EUs = 7.2 cents

And obviously you can do the same thing for a website or a blog using analytics data and assigning corresponding engagement values.

We compare all our forms of engagement on a monthly dashboard. The values we are currently using for the different forms of engagement are not set in stone. We will probably adjust them once we have more data (at the moment we only have 3 months).

Anybody else measuring engagement this way? Thoughts on the values assigned to the different forms of engagement? Analytics overkill or helpful insights?

(Thanks to monkeyc for the photo)

Almost every session at the TIA Marketing Outlook Forum in Portland talked about social media. Luxury, millennial travelers, hotels, attractions, DMOs – it was mentioned in almost all presentations or panel discussions (and there were close to 30). This was not surprising given the fact that the conference deals with marketing trends and few would argue that social media is THE thing happening at the moment.

But another thing was very surprising: there seems to be a quickly widening gap between those that are involved in social media and those who are now trying to get on the train before it pulls out of the station.

When asked what they had the biggest success with in the last 12 months and what they would focus more on in the next 12 months those being already involved in social media said they would do even more. Those who are just getting started or have not even started to dabble in this space said they would focus on various other things.

The session about online marketing / social media for attractions was very interesting in that regard as well. While the presenters showed great examples for pretty sophisticated social media campaigns, the Q&A session revealed that many in the audience where feeling overwhelmed and close to panic. And who would not feel for them?

Imagine being a destination, attraction, hotel or organization that has no experience whatsoever in social media. No Facebook account, no photos on Flickr, no blog, no Twitter account. And at the same time you competitors have already thousands of followers, fans or subscribers. But even worse: they have already made their mistakes and (hopefully) learned from them. You still have this ahead of you while your “social” competitors are setting new benchmarks.

At Marketing Outlook Forum I saw a “social gap”. On the one side those who are already using social media to their advantage, on the other side those who look in awe and try to figure out a way into the game. The problem is that in social media there are no shortcuts. It takes time to build meaningful engagement. The longer you wait, the bigger this social gap will get.

Are you seeing this social gap too? Are there any good examples of organizations that started late and yet were quickly very successful? What should those do that are just getting started?

(Thanks to mwichary for the photo).

Expedia had their earnings conference call for the 3rd quarter of 2008 call on Monday and provided some very interesting insights.

Most questions on the call revolved around the weakening economy and what Expedia is doing as a reaction. Expedia is a truly global travel company and because they are in the online space they can see trends much faster. So I think there is a lot to learn from Expedia for everybody in travel and tourism.

Expedia sees softness in almost all global markets and across all product lines (air, car, hotel) as well as the media side (e.g. Tripadvisor). Expedia also expects 2009 to be a very difficult year in travel on a global level

What is Expedia doing?

1. Be more efficient in marketing
Apparently Expedia felt that paid search was getting more and more expensive for some keywords so they moved more in to the long tail of SEM. Meaning that they do more keywords that individually have a lot less traffic and are therefore cheaper. Of course this makes managing paid search a lot more complex and requires a lot more sophisticated tools to run campaigns.

Expedia will do more targeted emails (as they lead to up to 30% better conversion rates) as well as more data mining to deliver more relevant offers and content.

What does it mean for you?
Are you seeing the same trend of keywords getting more expensive? Do you have the tools to do more long tail search? Do you have your email database set up to handle targeted emails? How do you segment customers so you can have a relevant call to action for each segment? What is your call to action for the different segments? Are you offering differentiated, relevant content or is your content “one size fits all”?

2. Improve conversion ratios
Expedia apparently has been successful with lowering or dropping fees and they will continue to use these tools in a softer economy to drive transaction volume. They will also push their loyalty programs more and reward their most loyal customers.

What does it mean for you?
Very interesting to see a business that sells a commodity (online transaction) focus more on repeat customers and customer loyalty. Do you know who your repeat customers are (e.g. who visits your destination every year)? How are you talking to and rewarding these customers? Once you have identified who these consumers are, marketing to them is a lot cheaper than chasing new customers.

3. Get better supply
Expedia feels that as occupancy has dropped already significantly, average daily rates (ADRs) for hotels will now start to drop. This should lead to great offers for consumers, which should help Expedia do more transactions.

What does it mean for you?
This was a very interesting point. The hotel industry over the last weeks (e.g. at TIA Marketing Outlook Forum in Portland) has said over and over again that it does not want to repeat the mistake it made after 9/11 when hotels dropped rates significantly and then could not raise them again. Expedia says rates will drop and I think they are right. Hotels will not have the willpower to watch occupancy drop further and not play with rates.
So let’s assume hotel rates will drop. This will create problems for those organizations that sell hotels online as a “side business” (like some DMOs) as well as organizations (like DMOs) that have income that is based on room tax. Lower hotel rates = less commission and lower tax revenues.

4. Grow non-transaction revenue
Expedia plans to grow ad revenues on its sites to offset drops in transaction revenue. The challenge is to find the right mix, so that ads do not drive potential transaction revenue off the site. Expedia also plans to sell more high margin products like insurance and co-branded credit cards.

What does it mean for you?
Obviously a company like Expedia is set up perfectly to offset a drop in transactional revenue with other sources like advertising. But how are you monetizing the eyeballs you are getting? Are you selling ads? Do you have value-ad components you can monetize? How will you offset possible budget cuts with new revenue streams?

5. Lower costs
And finally the company plans to lower cost in the fulfillment area any by making shifts within the marketing budget. Expedia explained in the call the higher return on investment for spending money on SEO and getting more natural search than spending money on paid search, especially as the price for popular keywords has gone up.

So what does it mean for you?
Expedia did say that they currently do not plan to lay off staff or cut marketing expenses. They however plan to spend their money more wisely, utilize the investments they made in the past like setting up more sophisticated keywords or segmenting their email databases. The most important insight (although not a new one): in general money is better spend on SEO than SEM.

Summary:
- The slowdown in the economy will continue to affect travel worldwide
- Do not cut your marketing budgets but spend them smarter
- Consumers react to relevant messages so you need to be highly targeted
- Think about new sources of revenue, especially if you depend on room taxes
- You should do a lot of experiments on a smaller scale to quickly learn what works and then apply the learnings to your overall business

Another month has come to an end – time to publish our updated list of destinations that are using Twitter (or at least have registered an account). The list of DMOs / CVBs on Twitter we could find has grown to 76 (in the US). (Click here for the last list)

BaltimoreMD is still the number 1 destination on Twitter, they are on track to be the first destination with over 1,000 followers by the end of November.

A surprise Nr. 2 is newcomer VisitChicago (full disclosure: we work with them on GoSeeChicago.com). They started using Twitter less than a month ago and have now already over 500 followers. Very, very impressive.

Destinations are ranked using TwitterGrader which ranks Twitter accounts from 100% to 0%. A score of 95% means that the account ranks higher than 95% of all Twitter accounts that have been graded by the tool.

Here is the whole list, please let us know who we are missing:

VermontTourism is not twittering publicly, therefore Twittergrader could not calculate a score for them.

We will start publishing some more detailed analysis for the Top 20 destination-twitterers like growth rates, tweet rates etc. as well as more best practices over the next days. Stay tuned!

For our next report we will add Twitter accounts for DMO microsites (like Philadelphia’s uwishunu). Who else are we missing?