Making the most out of working with digital influencers | Eva Kiviranta | #SoMeT15EU Amsterdam, Netherlands
•
1 like•632 views
Digital influencers such as bloggers, vloggers and Instagramers are more and more popular, and more and more of them are professionals in their respective fields. However, practices for successful co-operation between influencers and destinations still drags behind, which causes neither of the sides to benefit fully from the co-operation. Visit Finland has a reputation of being savvy when it comes to digital influencers, and will now share what they have learned from the field. Eva Kiviranta does PR and social media for Visit Finland and focuses especially on bloggers and digital influencers. She does the PR of social and the social of PR with a background – you guessed it – in PR and social media. Good writing gets her excited. Currently she is working on her thesis on destinations working together with digital influencers. Eva loves talking about Finland, traveling solo and drinking too much coffee!
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Making the most out of working with digital influencers | Eva Kiviranta | #SoMeT15EU Amsterdam, Netherlands
Similar to Making the most out of working with digital influencers | Eva Kiviranta | #SoMeT15EU Amsterdam, Netherlands (20)
More from SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing
More from SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (15)
Making the most out of working with digital influencers | Eva Kiviranta | #SoMeT15EU Amsterdam, Netherlands
- 1. 1 3
- 2. 1 3 Hecktic Travels Making the most out of working with influencers Eva Kiviranta Communications Coordinator Visit Finland @ekiviran Backpacker-org
- 4. 1 3 Vagabrothers Finding the Universe World of Wanderlust @ekiviran
- 5. Nordic Bloggers’ Experience 2014 & 2015 Together with Messukeskus, Visit Helsinki and Innastus #OutdoorsFinland 2014 Together with Innastus #KAAMOS 2015 Together with Taipale Brothers • 27 bloggers • Twitter reach 3 million • Over 100 blog posts • Over 16 videos • Location: 4 different areas in Finland • 47 bloggers and influencers • 2,5 million monthly readers • Twitter reach over 4 million • So far over 100 blog posts • Location: 11 locations in Finland in Sweden • 9 instagrammers • Reach: 2,2 million • Impressions: 16 million • Location: Ylläs @ekiviran
- 6. MEDIA KIT FOLLOWERS SEO The Crowded Planet Time Travel Turtle @ekiviran
- 7. BRAND SOCIAL MEDIA WRITING Fotostrasse Borders of Adventure @ekiviran
- 8. To whom this may concern, My name is blogger, and my blog is called XXX and I write about food and luxury. Would you be interested in a partnership? Let me know! -blogger Hi Eva, I’ve heard amazing things from my blogger friend who visited Finland last year, and I’d really like to do the same things. Let me know if you want to collaborate. -blogger Hi Eva, My name is blogger and I write a blog called XXX. We have 20.000 unique page views / month, and we focus on storytelling and soft adventure. My media kit is attached. I’ve done research and Lapland in autumn sounds wonderful. It’s something that our German audience would be really interested in. I’d really like to highlight the area in 3 posts and a video + social media updates. Please let me know if you have any questions! Looking forward to your thoughts, -blogger @ekiviran
- 9. MEET THE BLOGGER TAILORED PROGRAM WIFI TIME Monkeys and Mountains Dream Euro Trip @ekiviran
- 10. RESULTS ASK FOR POSTS Monkeys and MountainsAdventurous Kate @laurenepbath @ekiviran
- 11. EXPECTATIONS MONEY TEAM INVOLVEMENT Monkeys and MountainsOh Darling @kpunkka @ekiviran
- 12. 1 3
Editor's Notes
- Tähän jokaiseen boksiin VF-logo?
- Thanks Aaron! My name is Eva and I work for Visit Finland, and I do our PR and social media. I work with mostly bloggers these days. I’ve been onboard for almost two years, and before that I did PR and social media in other fields. Last year at this same event I got super excited and inspired by the like-minded people and I’m fairly sure I ended up tweeting that I’m going to change my title from communications coordinator to communications curator. As you can see from my title today, that change never happened. However, what I also tweeted was a link to this.
- Last year there was a lot of discussion regarding whether blogs are crap or worth working with. I felt super inspired and posted a blogpost to my own blog about why we should still work with bloggers. I recently also tweeted it so you’ll find it in my twitter So anyway, in that blogpost I shared why I think bloggers are still worth it, but that both bloggers and businesses should do our homework a lot better. In that same post I also share my pet peeves about working with bloggers, which pretty much include incorrect spelling of Finland and pitches that shouldn’t convince anyone.
- And that’s basically why I’m here to share why Visit Finland works with influencers and how. I’ll tell a little bit of what we’ve done recently in terms of influencers and what we’ve learned from all that. I feel like to a lot of us the toughest part is to shift through to find the good influencers and to figure out what to do with them, so I’m going to be focusing on that. You’ll notice photos in the slides, and those photos are taken by influencers we’ve worked with in the past year. They are all influencers who I enjoyed working with, and would recommend to work with. As we are all professionals in this field, we don’t have to talk all that much about why bloggers matter. However, I do want to take a minute to define what we are talking about. Often, even today when we think of a blog, we think 17-year-old girls posting mirror photos of their daily outfits (which I don't judge by the way), when in reality many of the professional blogs don’t really even look like blogs anymore. They are more like online magazines and sites and platforms for a specific niche. That said, I think the definition of a blog or a blogger has expanded a lot to cover blogs that focus on tips and practical information to blogs that focus on stories and deep personal experiences. It can vary from random notes that look like a hobby to something that people do professionally. But the key word here is professional. There are tons of blogs and vlogs and Instagram accounts out there In 2014 there was about 75 million wordpress blogs out there but maybe one in thousand is actually a good one that you want to work with. And those professional, one in a thousand, bloggers and influencers are the ones that we want to work with. So we are just going to focus on the professional ones and forget for a little while about the unprofessional ones. Just so that we don’t loose our minds. There is a reason why I keep referring to influencers and not just bloggers, and that’s because I don’t think that we should work with just bloggers, but influencers or content creators in general. By influencers I mean the twitter folks, instagrammers and youtubers who are influential in their channels and are listened to by their audience. Bloggers and for instance instagrammers work in a very similar way, but the outcome is very different. But they are significant nevertheless. Recently we have gotten a lot more requests from Instagrammers, and it has caused us to rethink what kind of influencers we want to work with.
- Ok, a few words of what we have done with influencers in the past. We started working with bloggers in 2011, when Keith from Velvet Escape reached out to my colleagues who were like what’s a blog. The road for where we are today, was mainly paved by my colleague, and I just get dance on the road she has paved. So it all works out. We have done individual trips based on the bloggers interests and what destinations in Finland we have wanted to promote. We have done big campaigns such as Outdoors Finland and Nordic Bloggers’ Experience and Kaamos 2015. *Nordic Bloggers’ Experience in 2014 and 2015 together with Visit Helsinki and Messukeskus Convention Centre and Innastus Mid-January, 11 locations in Finland and Sweden 47 blogs, 2,5 M monthly readers, twitter reach over 4 million, so far over 100 blog posts *Outdoors Finland / August 2014 / 27 bloggers /twitter reach 3 M, over 100 blog posts, location: 4 different areas in Finland *Kaamos2015 / 9 instagrammers /50 K-800 K followers, 2,2 M reach, 16 M impressions, location: Ylläs The reason we work with influencers is obviously good SEO visibility, but also to raise awareness of Finland. Every time someone writes a post about Finland, there is always someone commenting something like I never thought of Finland as a travel destination. I never thought they’d have a decent summer there but you’re convincing me to put it on my list. And I’m like yeah we have summers thank you very much, but it also goes to prove that there’s still a lot of work to be done to make people think of Finland as a viable travel destination. And that’s why we need the visibility influencers can provide.
- So that’s what we’ve been up to lately in terms of working with bloggers and influencers. Now to the part of what we’ve learnt from that all. We are in the fortunate state at Visit Finland that I don’t really have to reach out to influencers to get them to come to Finland, because they reach out to me. Which is great. But it also means that I get about 10 emails a day asking for collaboration and the proposals vary from amazing professional proposals to absolute waste of time. I do reach out to specific bloggers when we are running something very niche, but a big part of the collaboration comes first from the influencers. So instead of looking for the perfect blogs, my day goes to shifting through to get to the gems. Because finding the gems is tough since you have to go through so much crap, but it’s worth it. So these are the things that I look into when I’m researching influecers. Media kit. If you don’t have one or can’t provide numbers of your followers and reach, you’re out. I don’t think numbers are all that matters, but I still need to know your numbers, no matter what they are. Followers. Who are they? Are they bloggers or “regular people”? It’s great that bloggers support each other by sharing and liking and commenting, but bloggers don’t usually come to my destination without asking me for free stuff. Basically if I know all the people who like your posts, I start to question the audience you have. However, if none of my contacts for instance like your social channels, that is questionable too. It means that either you’re not connected in the different communities, or that you don’t understand how social media works. SEO test. If I google a topic of your blog post, you blog post should come up on the first three pages. No one has the energy to go past page 3 on google, so unless your articles are on those first pages, I don’t know how anyone will ever find your posts. This is a test that I use when deciding on which level to work with a blogger. It’s all very scientific.
- Does it fit your brand? We all have our target audience and that should be kept in mind when deciding which influencers to work with. For instance for us it’s specific countries, especially China and Japan these days, people who are well travelled and who are looking for unique and genuine experiences. They are also willing to put money in their travel, so backpackers aren’t really the thing for us. But the point is, the audience the influencer has, needs to match with the people you want to connect with. It can be geographical location, but it can also be the style of travel. Backpacking vs clean and soft sheets. Social media. We are back to this. Every influencer has a channel that is his or her strong suite, but all the channels should have quality content uploaded frequently. At Visit Finland we focus a lot on photos and videos. So we tend to look for bloggers who are influential also on Instagram. Or instagrammers who also write. Or vloggers who also write freelance articles for newspapers. Writing. This one is my favorite. As said earlier, bad language is my pet peeve, and it’s very few cases when I think bad language can be excused as a style decision. Aside from the actual posts, I see the first email as a writing sample. I never again want to see emails saying “dear sir” or “to whom this may concern”. You found my email address, which has my first name and last name, so technically you know my name. At least try. I lose my interest also if you can’t spell Finland correctly. I know everyone sometimes types things wrong, but the first email is also the first impression that I’m getting of an influencer. Let’s bring professionalism back to the game.
- I’ve received all these pitches within the past year. I want to show these so we’ll all kinda know what’s going on, but also what we want to get more of, and what we never want to see again. When it’s bad it’s really bad. It’s a poorly written email saying “to whom this may concern, Hi my name is blogger. I’ve seen through other blogs how great your product is and I’d be keen to partner with you. Would you be interested? My blog is called XXX and I like luxury and food. Let me know!” When it’s good it’s really good. The pitch is professional, detailed and gives you a good picture of what the other one is looking after. They have done research on your product or destination, and they can pitch specific themes and areas and timeframes. None of that vague “I’m a blogger and I want free things” crap. I almost feel like some bloggers have gotten so used to the fact that just because they write a blog, they should all these wonderful things. The way I see it, just the fact that you have a blog entitles you to the same treatment as my neighbor – hello and good bye. We don’t really care about neighbors in Finland. When the influencer can pitch me something specific and show what he or she can do, that’s when I get interested. Obviously DMOs need to do their research too, but I miss the days when you still made an effort to impress the other party to get a job. Recently I’ve also discovered a third type of pitches, and it’s referrals from other influencers. An influencer you’ve worked with has told about the amazing experience he or she had with you, and now his or her friend wants that same. In theory it’s a good thing since it means that your message is slowly but surely getting across. However, in these cases I never end up getting a proper pitch. I get an email saying “my blogger friend went to your destination and I’d very much like to do the same. PS I’m a blogger too.” Well good for you honey. The fact that you know a blogger I’ve worked with, doesn’t help you very much. We are not casual friends who know each other. I still want your media kit without having to fish it from you.
- This is all pretty basic, but I still want to remind us of all of it Meet with the blogger. Building a relationship with the influencers is necessary as we all would rather work with people who we know. Wifi. It’s like oxygen. Even in Finland, in the promised land of internet, it’s not always understood well enough that if you want influencers to do their work properly, they need wifi. Make it work. Program to meet the needs. Sometimes you end up having a budget blogger staying at a luxury hotel. Which is fun I guess for the blogger, but it doesn’t really benefit anyone since the blogger can’t produce any content of something that doesn’t match his or her channels at all. Making sure that the program matches the influencer’s style takes time and it’s a bit of an effort, but is still needed to make sure both parties get as much as possible out of the deal. Enough time. Most of the influencers do their best work when they have enough time to explore independently and to reflect. It’s though for a destination though, because you have to trust that the influencer will actually do something and do something that’s worth your wile. It’s so much easier to pack the day full of activities that highlight your destination the best way you can think of. But instead, we should make sure the influencers have enough time to explore in their own pace.
- So the trip has passed, what then. Share the content. Something we should all improve on, is sharing the content the influencers have created. I believe that if you don’t share the content, you’re only doing 50 % of the work and you’re letting content just sit and die. Obviously not all of the content created will not speak to your own audience, so you also have to know what works in your own channels. Ask for results. The influencer should send over the results and links to the articles or videos, but sometimes you have to ask for them too. But what I’m especially interested in, is the comments in the articles and photos, and the feedback followers have given to the influencer. Emails from readers. I try to follow the influencers, but obviously I can’t know of all of the correspondence that takes place there. That’s why I always ask the influencer for comments in screenshots or any other form, from followers stating that the articles made them interested to come in Finland or that it led them to do more research or something like that. Because that’s proof of whether or not the collaboration actually works. That’s how influencers can prove their worth, and I’m surprised that more of them don’t do this without me specifically asking for it.
- Generally speaking, these are a couple of things that I’ve noticed lately and I thought I’d say out loud now that you all have to listen to me -expectations of both parties. I tend to be very clear with influencers of what Visit Finland can offer and what we expect in return, as I think that’s the only way no one will end up disappointed. We agree on flights and meals and the number of posts and if they’re giving us high resolution photos or if we’re paying them. To be honest, I don’t really care if there’s one tweet less or if your post comes up a week late, but I’d like to know about it. And that’s why you need the relationship with the influencer. To have that open conversation. -influencer projects should be tied together with your own social media. That said, the “owner of the channel” needs to be included (ie Noora and Instagram) for the best results and relationship -money. I’m willing to pay for a campaign, but not so much for a trip. Why is this? Because a campaign initially has goals, a theme, a plan to reach the goals and results sent to the customer. If I’m going to pay for an influencer to come to Finland, I also want more out of the deal and I expect the influencer to also do his/her research and not just enjoy the ride. What’s the outcome of a trip?