Here is our updated list for the number of conversations US destinations are having on Twitter. 

A conversation on Twitter is not a tweet but a series of replies back and forth between two Twitter users. For destinations on Twitter conversations – together with retweets – can be seen as the best engagement with other users.

The ranking at the end of November by number of total conversations:

And here is the number of conversations taking place in November – Philadelphia, Asheville and VisitChicago were far ahead of everybody else in that category:

When looking at the conversations of destinations keep in mind that a significant number of conversations on Twitter is still taking place between different destinations and not with consumers or travelers.

We plan to track the growth of conversations over the next months to see if the number grows as the travel industry figures out better and better ways to use Twitter as a tool to talk to travelers.

Anybody interested in this?

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)

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?

Twitter usage by DMOs and tourism organizations is clearly growing with the number of DMOs using Twitter in the US we could find doubling from 30 to over 60 within the last 4 weeks. The number of followers for most of the DMOs is however still very small (we will have a more in depth analysis on growth rates for the top “Twitters” in US tourism later this week) with the most successful organizations attracting only a couple of hundred followers so far.

The numbers become even smaller when you take into consideration that a lot of DMOs are following each other. Even the poster-child of Twitter usage in the travel industry – Southwest Airlines – has only 4,000 followers. Not much for an airline that transports over 90 million passengers a year.

So what is the point of spending time on Twitter and reaching only a couple of hundred people when one can send an email to 100,000-150,000 people? Especially as Twitter does not give you the analytics email (if done right) can give or does not allow you to use rich media and limits you to only to 140 characters (TwitWall might change that a bit).

The point is that tools like Twitter cannot be compared to other marketing vehicles like email, radio, TV etc. It is not about blasting out a message to as many people as possible. It is about one-to-one or one-to-few interactions in a highly relevant context. This can not be done if you talk to thousands of people.

I am going to say it one more time: Twitter offers huge opportunities for the travel industry. Not because millions and millions of travelers are using Twitter already but because it is the perfect tool to learn how to deal with “micro-interactions” that will soon replace a good chuck of what we call today “marketing”.

If you cannot figure out how to interact with 200 people that are following you today, how are you going to handle 20,000? It will take time to learn this, to set up the structure needed to manage it and to develop the tools needed to measure it. Better start today. And better follow your peers to quickly learn what works and what does not.

With a worldwide community of over 100 million members, Facebook has nearly limitless potential and obvious benefits, which is why the Dine Out Vancouver campaign is so exciting.

Quick stats for the group:
Members: 6,684 (currently)
Established:  for the 2008 campaign
Comments: 414
Photos: 207

These numbers are especially significant because the campaign ended Feb 3, 2008, so the remaining members are so excited for the next installment that they have remained within the group and in many cases active.  The last post was October 3, 2008.

Why this matters:
Due to their group member’s profiles Vancouver now knows much more than they did before about the people that are invested in their marketing.  Vancouver provided their enthusiasts with a platform to interact and in turn created a viral marketing success story from a free Facebook account and the event information that was previously available, in static versions. Additionally, people are so engaged within this campaign that they take pictures of their meals and in many cases uploaded them to the group’s page, which caused them to return to the group post event.  The continued interactions among the group members are additional touch points for Vancouver to engage their market.

Keys to Success:
Vancouver knew that their customers loved this campaign, it sells out quickly, comments were showing up on blogs and other social communities, and perhaps the best indicator of all was that seats were being resold on Craigslist, much like coveted concert or sporting event tickets.  People were already discussing, planning and waiting for Dine Out 2008, so Vancouver merely provided them with a platform to express this passion with likeminded users.

Moral of the story:
In order to gain attention and spread virally within the fiercely competitive Facebook landscape the interest and excitement needs to exist.  If you create a group, members will come, but only if they are invested in the topic, passion will drive involvement.

Twitter is going more and more mainstream in the travel space with new Destination Marketing Organizations and Convention / Visitors Bureaus joining every day. Wondering which US destinations are already on Twitter? Here is a list of who we have found so far. We probably missed a few, please let us know which ones. Next week week we will publish our monthly update on how these destinations are doing on Twitter, whose following is growing the fastest etc.

So here is who we found on Twitter, sorted by date of first tweet:

Who did we miss? Let us know!

If you are just starting with Twitter have a look at what Chicagoland is doing on Twitter – they managed to get over 200 followers in less than 2 weeks due to a very clever “twitter recruitment” campaign. Very impressive!

CnnMoney list the 100 best places to start a company and Portland came in 6ht! Reasons given where the attraction the city has for a young and talented workforce and the strong local design and tech industry. Another plus: you will not be alone with your new company: in 2007 more than 2500 start-ups were registered.