Bigger isn’t always better – How passion, not numbers, rule blog trips: Mikala Folb, Destination Think!
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Blogger Trips have replaced media FAM trips but traditional thinking remains: you need the big guys – the Gary Arndts, the Nomadic Matts and the Wandering Earls – to properly showcase your destination. Connecting with 2,000 rabid fans of experiences that your destination offers is better than not being seen by 100,000 casual travellers. Mikala will show you why bigger isn’t always better and how best to find passionate bloggers whose community members hang on their every word, and create budget-friendly itineraries that result in a wealth of customized niche content. Blogger and content strategist Mikala Taylor will give first-hand tips on how to bring balance to your blog trips. Mikala is a content strategist, editor, writer and photographer with 14 years of online content, social media and community management experience, and 20+ years of journalism experience. Before joining Think!, Mikala managed content and social media strategies for Destination BC, co-managed 10 editors and 450 writers at a general interest website and was an interactive producer for a TV channel in London, England. As a writer, editor and photographer, Mikala’s work has been published internationally in print and online. She is also the creator of irreverent music website BackstageRider.com. She is addicted to social media. Really, really addicted.
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Bigger isn’t always better – How passion, not numbers, rule blog trips: Mikala Folb, Destination Think!
- 1. Bigger Isn’t Always Better – Working With Digital Influencers Mikala Folb, Content Strategist, Destination Think!
- 3. I know digital influencers 3 Flanders is a Festival Tourisme Montréal #ExploreBC Queensland, Whitsundays, Antwerp, Ostend, Cleveland, Manitoba, and more
- 4. The “Now” of destination marketing4 Other people’s stories Your stories
- 5. 5 Influencer trips are part of something bigger To create the right marketing strategy for your DMO you need to: define your target audience match the right experiences to them
- 6. And then… FIND THE RIGHT STORYTELLERS
- 7. 7 What’s your objective? Inspiration Consideration Education Relationships Photos/Video Content
- 8. 8 The new world of mouth “Your pics looked amazing, I think Iceland is going to be next on my list after Spain” – Leah, Destination British Columbia
- 9. Why Work With Bloggers? 9 Represent a rare marketing opportunity Know niche audiences and passionate communities Perceived as authentic, trend-setters, and adventurers Can activate a community and generate positive ROI
- 11. “Passion leads to knowledge. Knowledge leads to confidence. Confidence gives you a voice.” – Mikala
- 12. “Your exuberance is contagious”
- 13. Blog trips aren’t media trips
- 14. Go niche or go home BE EXCEPTIONAL
- 15. What are your 15 remarkable experiences?
- 16. Are niche trips too niche? 16
- 17. Bigger isn’t always better
- 18. Gary Arndt doesn’t have time for you
- 19. Behold the dung beetle
- 20. 20 200,000 vs. 2,000 Traffic Traffic’s nice. But maybe a traffic really only goes to a few articles because of good SEO, or they got a exposure somewhere else. Loyalty Look for bloggers who have influence and whose readers TRUST them and almost rely on them for good content and tips.
- 21. Here’s an example 21
- 22. 22 9 Criteria for Blogger Selection 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Value to the Blogger Reach/Size of their Audience Audience Demographics Influence in a Niche Connection to Other Influencers Quality – Style of Writing/Photography Speed of Content Creation/Communication Use of technology and tools Personality
- 23. 23 Even MORE suggestions Be proactive - don’t wait for them to contact you! Go beyond bloggers: Twitterers, IGers and Videographers – what else can people offer? What fits the objective? If you’re paying them, put together a contract, and get all their contact details. Trust your gut. Compare experiences offline and online.
- 24. Itineraries: do you actually know what’s cool in your destination ?
- 25. Use your communities 25
- 26. Use your staff Somewhere in your staff is a music expert, a foodie, or sports nut. There’s a person with kids, or an intern who knows what’s hip. TALK TO THEM
- 27. Use other bloggers 27
- 28. 28 Things bloggers like Your time Their own time Clear expectations An itinerary matched to their interests Transportation Wi-Fi A per diem*
- 29. 29 Things DMOs like Time to do the project correctly: Influencers are a finicky breed. They all have a million questions. Budget for this time. Stakeholder involvement: Get in touch with businesses on your itineraries, and other stakeholders in the niche. Send out an email to your database and encourage them and tell them how to engage by following the blogger’s trip or hashtag, replying, posting or RT’ing. ROI: Of course! We’ll talk about this shortly.
- 30. 30 A welcome pack on their hotel bed with the aforementioned stuff is always good During the trip Be available to them for questions or let them know that your expert in the niche is available Engage with them on your social channels and make sure your team knows how to, too
- 31. 31 The trip’s over. Now what? Gather their data Learn from their content Use their content – emails, blogs, channels, website Encourage stakeholders to do the same Build lasting relationships Continue the conversation
- 32. See your destination with new eyes
- 33. 33 Service Design Bloggers are seasoned travellers and experts in their niches. They are telling you more than you think: - Did they not write about something? - Did they hint at an unhappy or subpar experience? After a trip, invite them to a positive debrief. This is your opportunity to learn and feed back to your industry.
- 34. NOW let’s talk about ROI You won’t really know what your return is until you do the trip. Influencer trips are iterative, just like media trips used to be. (Sorry.)
- 37. Visit Flanders 37 “We have realised an ROI of 1 on 100, which means that for every real, financial Euro we got 100 virtual euros back - virtual because we speak about free media publicity.” – Frank Cuypers, Dir. International Markets at Visit Flanders Advertorial Value Impact Value (actions) Number of Readers Conversational Value X X =
- 38. 38 Tourism Ireland Created the Social Equivalent Advertising Value (SEAV) Based on: Post impressions: Views of brand posts in a social medium. Page impressions: Views of a brand owner’s social platform. Personal actions: Consumption of brand content through an action such as a click on a photo or video or a link. Public actions: Liking/commenting/recommending posts conspicuously so they’re exposed to other networks
- 39. So is it worth it? 39 Actually, yes
- 40. 40 THANK YOU! For further information please contact: Mikala@ destinationthink.com Twitter: @MikalaThink
Editor's Notes
- I just got back from Iceland where I went for a music festival and general touristing. I instagrammed 250 photos ranging from sunrises to sunsets, to geysirs to and glasses of beer, to bands, buildings, street art and hot dogs. In one week, on my own accounts, more than 20 people told me on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook directly that they were now adding Iceland to their list of “places to go.” Some even started planning trips. But here’s the not so great news; even though a member of the local DMO knew I was in town, had been reminded of my arrival, none of my material was shared via Visit Iceland and they engaged with only one photo. And their fun Facebook page, which has more than 100,000 people on it, stopped posting entirely a week before the festival started. So I’m here to talk about how you can work with digital influencers and not miss a single opportunity. I have some insight into this because….
- I WANT TO SHARE SOME OF THE LEARNING FROM SOME OF INFLUENCER TRIPS WE’VE WORKED ON or that I have attended because I also run my own music blog that has a small group of passionate, influential and incredibly dedicated followers.
- If anyone’s heard or seen any Think! presentation before you’ve probably seen this diagram. It’s that important and it’s really that simple. This should now be the basis of your strategy for destination marketing. You no longer tell the stories about your destination. Other people tell the stories about your destination and you engage and amplify and learn from them. Influencers can play a large part in that storytelling.
- Bullet points!!!! 2 slides – 5 steps
- Have them tell the stories for you, on the right channels that speak to the right people.
- Do you want to inspire people to go to your destination by being showcased in a large outlet? Do you want them to consider new aspects of your destination? Do you want to educate them about different aspects and niches in your destination? Build relationships with the new media? Or do you simply want incredible photos, video or content to use on your channels in future? All of these need to be taken into account and focused on when selecting the right influencers. Not everyone will give you everything.
- Like how we now get travel tips from our friends, digital influencer and bloggers can help spread word of mouth. Because digital influenders aren’t really getting paid, they’re doing what they love. And passionate people want to inspire others. People who are excited to travel will influence others to think about your destination in a different way. That is, at its very basest, what your ROI will be. And as you could see from my pics before you don’t have to have a volcano or a geysir to do it. You just have to have remarkable and interesting experiences and plug them into the people who are most obsessed with them.
- Donna Moritz from Socially Sorted spoke at #SoMeT13AU used a great quote from Apu Gupta. This is the SOUL of marketing right now. It’s not about about short-term thinking and Bums in Beds. The role you play is part of a longer-term destination vision.
- So how do you find the right story tellers? Find the passionate ones. It’s not just about readership, it’s about passion. Truly passionate bloggers, who speak to a smaller group but are experts in their fields, often have louder voices.
- They’re also excited/surprised/energised to be there. Excitement means a blogger may end up posting more than you might have expected. When my colleague, Robyn, who also has a popular blog under the name “BCRobyn” was the official blogger for a Travel Manitoba campaign in which she travelled the province for a month – she wrote a whopping 34 blogs.
- They’re not site visits. They’re aren’t about showing a writer the general highlights. They’re not about packing full the itinerary Some bloggers work slowly, others publish a ton of content. Some want to be part of a group, others want to be on their own. And while we’ll talk more about ROI later, you can’t think of them in terms of ad equivalency rates.
- When working with bloggers, the key to a successful blog trip is focusing on a key niche, not trying to get them to see everything at once. If you don’t know what remarkable, exceptional experiences and niches your destination is offers, you likely won’t connect with a digital influencer and their audiences Why? You can’t be everything to everyone anymore – you have to dig into what your destination does best, and you have to get noticed.
- Is it Fashion in Antwerp? Sailing in the Whitsundays? The Aurora in the Northwest Territories? Or is it Marvin Gaye in a tiny Belgium seaside town? In 1981, Gaye fled to Europe under the advice of his promoter and cleaned up from drugs and spent some time here. Oostend now offers Gaye walking tours, an app and invited local soul music writers and afficionados to explore the town and enjoy the fare. NOTHING IS TOO SMALL for a niche audience. It just needs to be exceptional.
- NO! I was chaperoning a blogger for Tourism Montreal – we were there for 18 days to experience their music, and we were both thereas bloggers because of the music niche but we showcased all aspects of the city – food, neighbourhoods, film and architecture. The thing that gets you on the plane is different to the other things you happen to experience when you’re there. That’s the reason why niches work.
- So which influencers to choose?
- In 2013, Gary Arndt, considered the top US blogger and from site EverythingEverywhere, he’s been profiled on USA Today, he gets 100K a month, travelled to 44 different countries. When I asked him back in September what he had planned for the next two months he rattled off 12 different countries. In two months. No wonder he just last week announced that he was going to take a break. Got a Unesco Heritage Site that isn’t one of the 284 he’s visited? Maybe you’ll entice him. We once tried to invite pro photographer and G+ influencer for a remarkable customized trip in Queensland, tailored to his interests, offering to fly him first class, and basing the trip around his busy schedule…he referred us to his assistant and in the end declined because the opportunity didn’t hook him.
- The Dung Beetle the world’s smallest but strongest animal. It can push 1141 times its body weight. And while most of us might think that pushing uh, crap uphill is a metaphor for Monday mornings, I’m here to tell you can’t underestimate a small but singularly focused animal. Wandering Earl, listed as a top 25 travel blog in 2012 by Time Magazine has a Klout score of 58. I have a Klout score of 60. Which means I get better Klout perks like moisturiser samples and razors. SoMeT is another example of a small, scrappy and passionate community – our last 5 conferences were top trending topics nationwide.
- It’s like reading a newspaper (do you remember those?) 200,000 people may hold it in their hands, but what percentage read every article? Feel some connection to what’s inside? Actually care?
- WE chose Sasha for the campaign because of the size of her magazine’s audience. CoS has thousands of page impressions scattered and they publish a half-dozen stories or more that go live each day. They have 76K Twitter followers and 300K page daily page impressions, and they created a section for us but our stories were in among a whole lot of other content. The writer only had 2500 follower but CoS was Rting her material everytime she published. I have 3,000+ but my followers were way more influential and passionate in the niche we were there to represent. Find bloggers who are socially savvy – who understand the channels that you want them to engage on.
- It’s okay if you don’t know everything! When I was in New York It wasn’t the major sites that impressed me, it was walking the High Line. When I was in Bruges, it wasn’t the film or the windmills that impressed me it, was a tiny, weird museum that not even the head of Online Marketing at Tourism Flanders knew about. When I was in Austin Texas for the world’s largest music festival, do you think it was the fact that I just met Sean Lennon? Nope, just last week I was still telling people about the Moonshine and Corn Syrup Ice Cream I had. Don’t take your destination’s offerings for granted. So how do you build the best itinerary?
- Introduce the blogger coming to town. Tell your community what they’re interested in. Tell the blogger to feel free to engage with comments. Make locals feel like their invested in the blogger’s trip, and special. In Montreal and Manitoba, for example, blogger trips were planned with the input from Montréal’s online community as well as the readers of the two blogs. By including the community in the planning stages, we were able to engage users early on.
- For a blog trip in Cleveland we matched 12 local bloggers in a variety of niches to food, family, LGBT, fitness, lifetstyle and the result is that a) they amplified each others’ messages and b) they spoke to both local and targeted location audiences.
- Take some time to chat with them, let them know about your objectives. In Flanders: Jeremy Larson didn’t want to let the team down and published way more content. This is different from chaperoning! Time off is critical. And it’s not wasted time. Most bloggers are used to being independent. Feel free to drop suggestions of how they spend their time, but let them choose. Antwerp: told me about restaurants and cool shops that I could check out “if I wanted do.” But don’t fill every part of their day. Clear expectations doesn’t mean outlining exactly what you want them to write, but you can certainly guide them. “Always use the hashtag! “it’s great if you tag restaurants etc” and please send us a list with all your stats and content within 2 weeks etc. An itinerary matched to their interests – in some cases, we’ve even asked a few of the top bloggers we liked and wanted to work with about what they were most interested in! Transportation – make things easy for them. Give them a transit pass, a handful of bus tickets, a map or point them in the direction of the best transit apps Wi-fi – CONNECT them. Let them share in the moment, while they’re excited about it! Some will want to post in the moment, some will save them to the end, some will wait to add stuff to the blog.But let them have wi-fi – it’s a subtle means of saying “ we want you to share as much as you like.” There’s a lot of debates over “paying bloggers”. Then we get into paid advertorial coverage. But many are taking time off of dayjobs, or their families. We’ve found that by setting budgets that incorporates a per diem, it doesn’t feel for them that they’re in your pocket, but it sweetens the deal.
- SHORTEN
- When I travelled to small-town BC I was most excited about seeing a herd of deer running off the road, just as we exited the airport. To a local, that’s common everyday. DO NOT TAKE ANYTHING FOR GRANTED. There’s a tremendous opportunity to be had with the content. Learn from it.
- It took four years of pre-production for Lord of the Rings before Peter Jackson saw his films on screen. But if you’re wise like Gandalf, and put your efforts into matching a good itinerary with a great blogger, and getting your community and stakeholders and blogger ready for your trip then you’ll likely meet objectives and even exceed expectations. Blog trips are like movies – spend all your time in pre-pro so that you can run he thing in a weekend.
- OH BUT IT IS! If you do it right, it’s hugely valuable for your destitnation, You don’t have to go start big – try inviting one influencer for a weekend/m
- Source (Flanders): http://www.wtmlondon.com/page.cfm/action=library/libID=2/libEntryID=31/listID=2#sthash.IIb98OIH.dpuf 30 Million Euros from 94 bloggers, and I was 16th in the list, earning them approximately 80K Euros. Little ol’ me.
- Source: http://www.scribd.com/doc/85406652/A-new-simple-way-to-measure-social-media-Return-on-Investment-Social-Equivalent-Advertising-Value
- Blogger Lauren Folkman from Lion & Maven in Chicago. She had only about 1800 followers across Twitter, FB and Instagram… but registered nearly 340K impressions on the #ThisisCLE hashtag. You don’t need big-time bloggers or New York Times writers (and you certainly don’t want to combine them) on a trip. You don’t need big budgets. You need to connect your exceptional experiences and passionate people at your destination with passionate people who want to come to your destination. It’s WIN WIN WIN WIN.