Apparently, “that which does not kill us only makes us stronger”, so in a time when budgets are tightening and consumer confidence is declining an unprecedented emphasis is placed on creativity and differentiation.

And a few brands are raising to the occasion and using their, shall we say assets, to gain attention in new, authentic and honest ways.  Whether or not you would deem these strategies effective or complete flops they are at the very least unexpected.

25 years and still red hot

The story and brand attributes of Virgin Atlantic are widely known, and that is precisely why this ad, celebrating what at times seemed like an impossible milestone, is so effective.  See for yourself:

Anniversary commercial

However, you do not have to take my word for it, Richard Branson, explains his airline’s success:

Who’d have thought 25 years ago that Virgin Atlantic would be the leading airline player it is today?

Now, we use 38 aircraft to fly six million people a year to 30 destinations around the world.

Our 9,000 staff have built an airline that, after 25 years, is still red hot; an airline that focuses on being the best, not the biggest, and injects customer service and innovation into its daily philosophy.

By emphasizing the same brand attributes that have engaged and intrigued audiences for 25 years, Virgin Atlantic created a spot that is both authentic and entertaining to consumers.

Philadelphia: a good sport with a sense of humor

All things considered it could have / should have been a really tough week for the great people of Philadelphia.

First of all their beloved Eagles lost to the Arizona Cardinals, which is rough enough, but to make matters worse their twitter account (@visitphilly) was forced to use a Cardinals logo as their avatar for the week.

This costume change was part of a friendly wager they engaged in with our friends at the Arizona Office of Tourism (@ArizonaTourism) prior to the game.  While this could have been a convenient time to take a Twitter time-out the account has been active all week, dressed as the Arizona mascot.

Then while minding their own business the City of Brotherly Love was the butt of some of political humorist, Jon Stewart’s jokes.

The original blog post is witty and well written; so there is no need for me to rewrite it for you, find all the details here.

Once again the city responded in stride, willing to let it go, but not before they got a couple of their own good-hearted digs out against Stewart. “Well, Jon, we’re used to this kind of thing and we know how to respond: Philadelphia, the city that bleeps you back.”

Proving that having a sense of humor and sharing your personality especially in the world of social media can only serve to boost your brand and inspire your enthusiasts to rally behind you.

No visitors, no problem

Ontario Tourism has created a contest that Algoma hopes will put it on the map.

The Great Ontario Outdoors Adventure of a Lifetime contest will hand out a week-long adventure for four through Algoma’s wilderness and along Lake Superior’s northeast shore.

And the big winner will be the area’s tourism industry, says the executive director of Ontario’s Algoma Country.

It is the lack of visitors, serene surroundings and available excursions that make Algoma the perfect location for this adventure seeker’s dream vacation. While it is yet to been seen if this promotion will be enough to put Algoma on the map, as they hope, the honesty regarding their tourism is refreshing.

Additionally, Ontario has turned what most deem as a negative, a lack of visitors, into the centerpiece of their promotion.  In the current economic climate there is no better time than the present to position negatives as positives.

Rather than try to recreate the wheel with your marketing efforts try using attributes, situations or even perceived weaknesses that your brand currently possesses and repackage them in new ways in order to gain attention and build authenticity.

What do you think, are there other great examples that we missed?  Please let us know.

Thank you to MPR529, Rubenstein and mike_miley for photos.

Tourism Queensland yesterday launched a big user-generated-content campaign: the Australian version of “Island Idol”. Visitors are invited to submit a casting video on www.islandreefjob.com and apply for the job of Island Caretaker in the Great Barrier Reef:

The Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef is a newly created position. There are a few minor tasks that need to be taken care of, but the most important duty is to report back to Tourism Queensland (and the world) and let us know what’s taking place on the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

The promotion was launched on a very nice (but flash heavy) microsite and supported by a very clever PR campaign.

Videos are submitted to the site but hosted on YouTube. About 30 videos have been submitted so far. Tourism Queensland will select 10 candidates and the public can select one wildcard candiate. All will be flown to Queensland where the final selection will be made. And one lucky winner will get to live in the Barrier Reef for 6 months and be paid to go sailing, snorkeling etc. and blog about it. Oh, the salary: A$150,000 for six months.

Another destination that launched a video contest today was Discover LA. For the launch of the new “That’s so LA” campaign consumers are asked to submit a video (or a photo) for a chance to win one of 5 LA weekends and $1,000 in cash. Videos are uploaded on the site and also hosted on DiscoverLA.com. Very few videos have been submitted but some of the ones that have been uploaded look like they might infringe on copyright for music used in the background (but then – I am not a lawyer.)

And the third destination to launch a YouTube video contest is CapeTown Tourism. The contest does not indicate whether it is the work of the official Capetown Tourism organization or somebody else. Users can submit a video to win 2 tickets on a cruise that departs on Feb 14th. Winners for the contest will be announced just 2 weeks before on Feb 2nd. Does not give the winner a lot of time to pack …

Overall thoughts:

The Tourism Queensland campaign is not cheap but beautifully executed. Great idea, great website, great YouTube integration, great PR. They will get their money’s worth, even with the high cost involved. By hosting the videos on YouTube Tourism Queensland minimizes the risk of copyright infringement plus benefits from the power of YouTube – the YouTube channel for the contest was the 4th most watched channel in Australia today. By hosting the videos themselves Discover LA misses out on the viral opportunities YouTube offers.

But YouTube alone is not the way to go as the Capetown contest shows. I challenge you to find the information about the rules and the prize on the site. Without a microsite to support it is hard to run a video contest on YouTube.

The biggest challenge for video contest is the high hurdle for engaging people. If you do not get a lot of people really excited about the idea and/or about the prize you will not get a lot of videos.

So don’t do a video contest it if you can not do it right.

Anybody wants to guess how many videos will be uploaded on
- Feb 2nd when the Capetown Tourism contest closes
- Feb 22nd (or earlier if more than 30,000 applications are received) for the Queensland contest
- June 1st, when the Discover LA contest closes?

Your thoughts on video contests in general?

Using our monthly statistic about destinations on Twitter we thought it would be interesting to analyze the number of followers and number of posts in more detail.
One school of thought on Twitter is that if you write tweets are people find interesting and helpful, your number of followers will grow. So lots of time should be spend on creating good content.
But reality is different. Try to build a following this way and unless something else happens (e.g. media talking about your Twitter efforts) it will take a long, long time to get to a larger number of followers.

Quite a few destinations therefore conduct follow-unfollow campaigns to grow the number of their friends.

But this is also time-consuming and has to be done right as Twitter will shut down accounts that have a big imbalance between followers and being-followed.

We use the followers/updates rating as a metric that we track each month for the accounts we manage. It tells us how successful we are in creating good content and in growing our following. We only looked at destinations that were on our list on Dec. 31st and had posted more than 10 updates.

Comparing these ratios between different accounts is not as meaningful when you look at them only as a snapshot and not as development over time.

Here is how to read this: WilliamsportPA twittered 10 times and got 219 followers. GoRockford on the other hand twittered 264 times and had on 12/31 only 71 followers. The ExpCol account that is fed by an RSS sent 1863 updates and had 705 followers. Paadventure has more followers and got there with only 221 updates.
(Full disclosure: we are working with TravelPortland – Nr. 34 on the list – on developing and implementing their social media strategy which includes Twitter activities)

So the learning form this? You need to spend time on tweets and on growing your number of followers. And you need to develop metrics to measure the efficiency of your twitter efforts over time.

What are your thoughts on this?

When we were doing a social media workshop for Convention & Visitor bureaus in Michigan last year we had one participant who was very doubtful that Twitter would be useful for him. We discussed the various ways Twitter can be a useful tool. Besides using it to listening to customers and talking to them we pointed out that Twitter can also be a great tool to talk to media and politicians. Why? Because if you want to pitch a story to a newspaper or talk to your congressman via “traditional” channels, you face a lot of competition. If you use Twitter, you are – at the moment – one of very few using this medium. Hence you have a much better chance of being heard.

At our workshop we quickly did a search for Michigan politicians on Twitter (this was before Twittersearch was castrated) and wouldn’t you know it – the head of the Ways & Means committee for the Michigan house was on Twitter. Not an unimportant contact when it comes to state budgets.

Fast forward to today (Jan 7th): the Florida Tourism industry started a Twitter account to share their thoughts on the proposed 40% cut of the Florida tourism budget (see story here). Why are not more tourism organizations doing this? Get on Twitter and tell your story – economic impact, job creation, tax revenues etc. If you use traditional media you compete with banks, the automotive industry and – who knew – the porn industry (see story on CNN here) who are all lobbying for money and all have much deeper pockets.

Are you following your politicians on Twitter? Have you ever talked to them on Twitter? Why not?

To get you started I have prepared a (very ugly) list of some politicians who I found on Twitter (surprisingly there is no complete list anywhere, if you find one, let me know. The Twitter Fan Wiki lists many branches of the US government and their Twitter accounts but some of the accounts for politicians are fake).

Now go and find your local politicians and connect with them as well. Can you imagine 40 or 50 constituents contacting a politician on the same day to talk about a specific subject? Maybe also tell the press about it … I guarantee this would get noticed.
It will be interesting to see what Florida Tourism will make out of the Twitter account, it would be nice if they would add a description and a link to a website so people can find out more information. Oh, it would also help to follow some Florida politicians and media. But overall a great step in the very right direction.

Feedback and comments as always very welcome. Leave them on the blog or find me at @coldinpdx .

If you have any interest how other destinations are having success with Twitter make sure to read a very insightful comment from @paadventure on yesterday’s blog post. Thanks for sharing!

Based on your feedback we have added more destinations to our growing list of tourism organizations on Twitter. 
@travelynnmo pointed out a very good point: many destinations have several Twitter accounts “powered” by different staff members. While this is a very valid strategy we are tracking (at the moment) just the main Twitter accounts as otherwise this exercise would get out of hands. But please share with us all accounts your organization is using, then we can start a separate list.

So, are more and more tourism organization starting to chirp?

See for yourself:

The two phases for growth were certainly influenced by a hands-on social media workshop we did for DMOs in Michigan at the end of September and a workshop ChicagoPlus did for it’s member DMOs in December.

And for sure we are still missing many other tourism organizations that are using Twitter. To make it easier for you to tell us which ones we are not tracking we have prepared an overview per state (US & CA).

We have added new destinations over the last days to the list, however we do not have data for them for number of followers and updates, even if they joined before Dec. 31 of 2008. 

While the number of followers in itself can be a misleading indicator (quality vs. quantity) I find it nevertheless impressive that of the DMOs we are tracking @VisitChicago or @BaltimoreMD have more followers than all DMOs from Florida and California combined.
 

But these can’t be all! Who else are we missing?

We want to know, even if this growing list is becoming more and more work …

Yesterday we published our monthly ranking of US tourism organizations on Twitter. Over the next days we will analyze the data some more and see if Twitter is really having an impact on tourism or if it just a fad. 

In this post we rank the 50 destinations that picked up the most followers in December of 08.

Pennylvania picked up almost 500 new followers, followed by Cleveland and Chicagoland.

Soon several DMOs will have more than 1,000 followers and if you look at the average number of daily updates this means that it will be possible to make several thousand contacts with consumes every day.

And here is a quick look at the growth rates for the three most followed and three fastest growing destinations over the last 3 months.

Most followed:

Fastest growing:

Of course now we all want to know what @paadventure did on December 2nd when they picked up 200 new users in just one day. 

And don’t forget: if you work for a tourism organization and have not participated in the “Social Media in Tourism” survey then please click here and give us your thoughts. The survey will close at the end of this week.

Another month has ended – time to see which new destination have started using Twitter and time to again rank all destinations we could find on Twitter.

Queen Anne of Chicagoland was able to defend the Nr. 1 position, picking up over 300 new followers in December alone. VisitChicago and BaltimoreMD both have now more than 1,000 followers. But other are catching up, @paadventure is closing the gap very fast.

We added 21 new destinations to our Twitter list. VisitMesa made a very impressive entry capturing the Nr. 20 spot on the list. More detailed analysis of the data in the next days.

As usual please let us know which destination we are missing. Leave a comment on the blog or D us on Twitter @coldinpdx or @ariannap.

And please do not forget to participate in the survey about tourism organizations and social media. 10 minutes is all it takes, results will be shared with all participants. Click here for the survey.