The Tourism Tech Corner will shine a light on technology and how it affects the world of tourism. The primary objective is to show how using interactive social media can help your website become more service-oriented and more valuable to your customers.
Follow some of our social media initiatives at our Follow Us page.
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Joy Cropper’s presentation at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit was all about Permission Email Marketing. Joy went over – in detail – the campaign that Williams Randall put together for our office.
Below is Joy’s entire presentation:
Joy Cropper is the Director of Internet Strategy at Williams Randall Marketing. Joy brings 18 years of B-to-B and B-to-C marketing experience, with a special passion for website information architecture and usability. She is the agency lead for internet strategy, user research, permission email and landing page optimization. Joy is a former partner and Lead Web Strategist at J. Walter Thompson in Detroit, where she directed the strategic development of all Ford Division websites. At Williams Randall, her interactive clients include NCAA, Indiana Tourism, Purdue University, Indianapolis Museum of Art, IndyCar Series and USA Track & Field.
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Pat Coyle presented at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit about social media web trends and, specifically, Smaller Indiana. Pat created Smaller Indiana in January, 2008 and it has become a hub for Hoosiers who want to connect with one another in an effort to strengthen community, commerce and culture. Pat talked about some of the keys to Smaller Indiana’s success:
Plausible Promise – Make People Findable
Smaller Indiana makes people findable through the platform they have created.
Rules/Governance
Members must use their real names. This fosters community because you’re interacting with a real person, not just an internet screen name (think of the difference between Facebook and MySpace).
Hyper-local
Smaller Indiana focuses on Indiana, so there’s already a built-in demographic. Nearly half of the visits to the site come from outside of Indiana, but everything on the site is related to the Hoosier State.
Offline Activities
Smaller Indiana Bigger Ideas conference
Indy Fringe Festival
Live/Streamed Healthcare Debate
Smaller Indiana has great potential to help Hoosier tourism entities and they should absolutely become involved in the site. Check out Pat’s entire presentation below.
Pat Coyle is among a new breed of digital pioneers who are inventing business strategies inspired by emerging technologies. Pat is also the founder of Smaller Indiana (SmallerIndiana.com), and online platform which strengthens community, commerce and culture in Indiana. Before opening his own firm, Pat was the executive director of digital business at the Indianapolis Colts, where he lead an interactive staff responsible for the Colts’ digital businesses. Coyle remains involved with the Colts as general manager of MyColts.net, a sociable network for Colts fans. Based on his Colts experiences, Coyle also leads an online community for digital sports marketers at SportsMarketing20.com. He facilitates Sports Marketing 2.0 conferences throughout the U.S., and maintains a popular sports marketing blog at PatCoyle.net. Coyle earned a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Hamilton College in 1988. Pat, his wife Amy and their five children reside in Indianapolis.
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John Packer, from TNS Research, was the first presenter at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit. John brought his expertise in both web marketing and the tourism industry for his presentation and there are some absolutely fascinating statistics included. Here are some of the highlights of his presentation, followed by the PowerPoint itself.
Five Emerging Travel Marketing Trends:
Travelers are still traveling and can be influenced
31% of visitors to VisitIndiana.com are extremely more likely to visit Indiana after seeing the site
54% of visitors are very likely to visit Indiana after seeing the site (score of 7-10 out of 10)
Affordability is the watchword
79% of respondents said that Affordability was very or extremely important when planning a trip
Search is still King
Many more people find out about VisitIndiana.com via search than any other medium
Travelers are shopaholics
63% of visitors to VisitIndiana.com are shopping around for their vacation destination – many people are looking at several states within driving distance
Websites are money well spent
48% of all visitors to VisitIndiana.com are potential travelers to Indiana 50% actually end up traveling to Indiana after visiting VisitIndiana.com
For every $1 spent on VisitIndiana.com and web advertising, the state of Indiana experiences $1,071 in visitor spending
Here is John Packer’s presentation:
John Packer is a vice president in the Travel & Leisure segment for TNS Research. He is a marketing research professional with over 15 years of client and supplier experience. His primary responsibilities at TNS are working with travel and tourism clients to fully understand their business issues an then working with team members to design and execute research programs that will help travel and tourism clients succeed. Previous marketing research postions with increasing responsibilities were MarketVision Research, D.K. Shifflet & Associates an SnowSports Industries America. he is the pas president of Travel and Tourism Research Association International, and he is affiliated with numerous professional societies. Educationally, he holds a BA (Physics) from the University of Connecticut and an MA (Tourism Administration) from George Washington University.
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Welcome to our 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit wrapup post about Online Marketing, preseneted by Santhana Naidu.
Our director, Amy, calls Santhana Naidu one of our secret weapons. Santhana is the Director of Online Marketing and Analytics at Williams Randall Marketing, our agency of record. His expertise in analytics and online marketing has been a tremendous help to us in the past year that we’ve worked with Williams Randall.
Santhana brought up several points about why it’s important to spend marketing dollars online
Online Marketing is relatively inexpensive when compared to most traditional mediums
Accountability for advertiers
Nearly all aspects of campaigns can be tracked, tested and optimized
The internet is used throughout the purchase funnel in the tourism industry and is the most powerful tool in prompting people to take a trip
Search is used by 6 in 10 travelers
Just under 30% of people are influenced to book based on online advertising - I’ll repeat that: Nearly 30% of people are influenced to book based on online advertising!
Santhana talked in detail about many of these items as well as these four important types of internet advertising:
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Display Advertising
Cost Per Lead programs
Mobile Marketing
While all four types of online marketing are important, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Display Advertising help give you the most qualified leads. Mobile marketing is certainly on the rise now, but we’re still in the beginning stages of mobile marketing.
Santhana’s presentation is below:
Santhana Naidu is the Director of Online Marketing & Analytics at Williams Randall Marketing. Since joining Williams Randall in 2003, he has been responsible for driving the strategy and development of marketing analytics programs and online marketing campaigns for several clients. Santhana has worked on related projects for BMW, Volvo, Harrison College (formerly Indiana Business College) and Indiana Tourism and currently manages a $3 million online advertising budget for a variety of clients.
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I was planning to live-blog the 2009 Indina Tourism Summit, but our internet access isn’t reliable, so I’ll be posting a Tourism Summit wrapup later this week.
Until then, here were the great presenters at the Summit:
John Packer – TNS Research
Santhana Naidu - Williams Randall Marketing
Pat Coyle – Sports Marketing 2.0 / SmallerIndiana.com
Be sure to Bookmark the new Visit Indiana Blog. If you’ve already subscribed to the blog through our RSS feed or via Email, you don’t need to worry, you’ll keep receiving updates like you always have. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can get updates sent to you via RSS or Email.
There are plenty of people who still dismiss social media as useless. In fact, there are studies that show that 40% of all ‘tweets’ are pointless babble. Even though that may be true, that doesn’t diminish the power and usefulness of social media in marketing and PR today. There will always be people who don’t understand new technologies and how they can be useful, and social media is no exception. The video below has been circulating online in the past couple of weeks and it does a fantastic job of highlighting how much a part of our lives social media has become. No longer can you ignore social media, in fact, in a recent survey of Indiana Tourism entities, nearly 30% of respondents use Twitter on to promote their destination and more than 90% use Facebook.
My favorite quote in the entire presentation is:
Social Media isn’t a fad – it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
That’s such a true statement. Social Media isn’t just a way to waste time and talk with friends about useless bits of trivia, it’s truly a new way to communicate directly with consumers, with your customers.
Some other encouraging news for the use of social media is that more 80% of US adults use social media on a monthly basis. For more information about the different types of social media use check out theseposts on Groundswell):
The video below is the precursor to the other video in this post. While this one doesn’t focus on social media exclusively, there is still some pretty amazing information in here.
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If you’ve attended any of the conferences or sessions that Indiana Office of Tourism Development has recently hosted, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been talking a lot about online and social media marketing.
2009 June Tourism Council: We hosted a panel (featuring Jen Perry, Bruce Hetrick, Erik Johnson and John Palmer) about Marketing in a Recession that talked about different social media initiatives to get you through in this tough economic climate.
2009 Meet The Media: This event occurred just a few weeks ago. We had sessions about Social Media from Erik Deckers and Duncan Alney as well as a Twitter session from James Burnes and an Indiana Insider Bloggers Panel that featured each of our Indiana Insider bloggers.
We’re choosing to focus on web-based and social media marketing so much because it is such an important part of an effective marketing mix, especially in today’s economy. All of these sessions and conferences provide a great opportunity to hear directly from some of the smartest minds in online and social media marketing, but what do you do between sessions? Who should you pay attention to? Who should you go to with questions about online marketing?
In addition to the Tourism Tech Corner, we’ve compiled a short list of other great resources for social media and technology questions. Several of them are even located here in Indiana. Here are some of my favorite blogs to follow as well an excerpt from each:
You may have heard about Twitter in the past few weeks. It seems everyone from Brian Williams to Charlie Gibson to Jon Stewart has been talking about it. In fact, our Governor (@MyManMitch) and Lieutenant Governor (@BeckySkillman) have accounts now. You can also see if your US Congressional Representatives are on Twitter at TweetCongress.org, and you can probably find the account of your favorite company or organization (@Starbucks, @WholeFoods, @FoundersHeart (American Heart Association), and @VisitIndiana – I threw that one in to see if you were still reading ) So, what exactly is Twitter?
I embedded the video above in my last post, but here it is again if you need a quick primer on Twitter. Twitter is a website that allows you to post 140-character updates. You can also “follow” other people on Twitter to see what they’re up to and people can “follow” you and your updates. While it sounds a little odd, it’s really just a new step in mass communication and “crowd-sourcing”.
When you post a message to Twitter, anyone who is following you can see it. This works great if you’re trying to get information out or if you have a question to ask (ex. “Who is planning a trip to Indiana this summer? Let us know if you need any tips” – That was only 79 characters, by the way and Twitter allows up to 140). We use our account (@VisitIndiana) to post new entries on our blogs, new photos from our Flickr group and announcements various other new things happening in Indiana or on VisitIndiana.com.
While Twitter might seem to be overwhelming or even useless, it serves a great purpose. Just like with other forms of social media, Twitter helps you to connect with people who are interested in what you or your organization have to offer.
There are tools that can help organize the constant stream of information that is Twitter, including TweetDeck, PowerTwitter, and Twhirl. These tools give you the ability to filter out specific words or phrases or even users that you want to listen to.
Twitter an be a powerful tool for getting information out to some of your more tech-savvy users and is quickly becoming a tool that more and more organizations are using.
Are you on Twitter? If so, follow us (@VisitIndiana) and leave a comment on this blog with your Twitter name.
Shaq at Phoenix Suns Tweetup - Courtesy of Barry Gossage/Phoenix Suns
The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) recently posted an article about how the Phoenix Suns leveraged Twitter for some great PR.
Twitter has been a growing trend for the past year, and more and more people and companies have been joining the social network. The Phoenix Suns are one of the latest in a string of companies leveraging Twitter for PR and marketing purposes.
The full article gives the details, but here’s a quick rundown for you. The director of digital media for the Suns started up a Twitter account and gained a significant following. Once they reached a certain point, they planned a “tweetup”, an in-person event planned through Twitter, that gave Twitter members discounted tickets, access to the players’ warm-ups, a special section in which to watch the game and a post-game get-together where Shaquille O’Neil showed up.
Not only was this a great way for the Suns to interact directly with their fans, but it gave the organization the opportunity to thank some of their most avid fans for supporting the team. All of this leads to positive press through articles and blog posts (like this one) as well as the priceless word-of-mouth advertising the people who attended tell their friends and acquaintances about their experience.
Is there a way you could leverage social media and your most avid fans to show them how much you appreciate them?
If you’ve never heard of Twitter, or are confused about what it is and why anyone would ever use it, check out this short video, Twitter in Plain English:
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) So, what exactly is Twitter?
