Tourism Aus’ social media secrets: a guide to marshalling a social media army

by Marketing ON 20 February 2013

To pursue its goal of making Australia the world’s most talked about holiday destination in social media, Tourism Australia has released a social media guide for tourism operators.

The guidelines aim to turn the near one million people employed in Australian tourism into ‘The World’s Biggest Social Media Team’, by empowering the industry with the tactics used to attract millions of followers to the ‘SeeAustralia’ Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram accounts.

Gathering a loyal army of fans to act as ambassadors for the country is one of the key strategies listed in the guide. “Ultimately, we want our four million Facebook fans, the 23 million Australians who live here and the 6.1 million people who visited last year to become part of the world’s biggest social media team and ambassadors for our country,” Tourism Australia managing director Andrew McEvoy, comments.

Creating social media platforms for fans and allowing them to be the ‘hero’ is one of the five steps to social media success listed. The presentation (shown below) gives the example of 81-year-old Facebook fan Harry Willey, who regularly engages with fans, as one of Australia’s most passionate advocates.

The guide suggests not just telling the destination’s own stories, but giving people compelling stories they can tell themselves and share with their networks. Free wifi access is highlighted as an important enabler for telling stories in the moment.

Tourism operators are also advised to be on the look out for ‘big waves’ and small waves’ to ride in their social media activity – small waves being content easy to get mileage from, such as fans photos, and big waves being contextual opportunities, such as SeeAustralia’s “Yes, we’re alive” Facebook post on the day predicted by the Mayan’s to be the end of the world.

Test and learn was another key mentality promoted, with operators encouraged not to be afraid of new ideas.

The World’s Biggest Social Media Team from TourismAustralia

McEvoy highlights the affordability of social media as an entry point for small to medium companies in the tourism sector.

“78% of our industry is made up of small to medium sized enterprises, and a lot of them just don’t have the time or the resources to fund traditional marketing campaigns. Social media has levelled the playing field for everyone and is a proven and effective way to secure endorsement,” he says.

“If I own a hotel and someone tweets or posts about it on Facebook, they’re advocating for my business. This makes everyone who comes through the door a potential fan and advocate. We see the same opportunity from everyone that visits our shores and the industry can help itself by embracing the power of social media.”

Hamilton Island ‘Instameet’ roadblocked Instagram’s 100m global users

by Marketing ON 18 February 2013

Hamilton Island’s ‘Ultimate Instameet’ generated 800,000 likes and saw over 50 photos of the island make the app’s feature page to appear before its 100 million users.

The global social media initiative, which brought together Australian and American Instagrammers to act as ambassadors for the island, created user-generated content from influencers that crossed over a number of social networks.

This type of content forms an important part of travel decision making behaviour, according to executive general manager of consumer marketing at Tourism Australia, Nick Baker. “The internet and social media has completely transformed the way we research, plan and book our travel,” Baker explains. “The destination marketers that are going to do well in this new digital age are the ones that are enthusiastic and ready to embrace this changing landscape by creatively integrating digital, social media and advocacy into their core marketing and commercial activities.”

Held in November and attended by bloggers and media personalities, including Australian fashion model Annabella Barber and Masterchef contestant Hayden Quinn, the event generated over 400 photos in one weekend alone, which attracted over 800,000 likes and 17,500 comments.

The combined reach of the Instameet participants totalled 815,000 while the campaign hit over 8 million people through other social media outlets, including Tourism Australia’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.

Since launching the Instameet last October, Hamilton Island’s Instagram followers increased by over 3000% while its Facebook community grew over 20%, necessitating the creation of a community manager role for the island.

“Social media has proven to be a cost effective way to reach a broad, yet targeted, socially-savvy audience,” Hamilton Island’s CEO, Glenn Bourke, says. “Through harnessing this potential imaginatively, we’re seeing significant increases in our global community of fans and advocates.”

The campaign spoke directly to the ‘belongingness’ layer of the social media community, adds Hamilton Island’s senior communications manager Sophie Baker. The belongingness layer is “the community layer of the individual, which is best served with rich content experiences that share stories and present opportunities to contribute to the experiences of others within the audience,” Baker says.

“This shift from transactional to contextual content not only increased the quality of individual brought to our audience, but also reinforced the shared sense of ‘buy-in’ required to unify and direct our audience’s attention in a sustainable way over time.”

The Instameet, which the team claim was a world first, will be repeated in May, this time inviting Instagrammers from the United Kingdom, as well as four Australian competition winners and new ambassadors.

Tumblr most underused platform by marketers, microsites are dead

by Marketing ON 7 February 2013

Tumblr is one of the most underused platforms among marketers, while the commonly used microsite is failing to attract visitors, according to an industry expert.

The writer behind viral hit ‘Dumb Ways To Die’, executive creative director at McCann John Mescall, points to Tumblr as a platform with high levels of engagement and strong ‘shareability’ at a time when it’s experiencing rapid growth among Australian audiences.

Despite jumping from one million to 3.2 million unique Australian visitors per month over the course of 2012, few marketers are using the platform and even fewer are doing a good job, according to Mescall.

He credits the short-form blogging network as one of the key drivers of success for Melbourne Metro Trains’ ‘Dumb Ways To Die’ video, which became the fastest spreading Australian viral clip ever when it was released in November last year and has since racked up over 37 million views on YouTube.

“We went really hard on Tumblr, because that right now is a medium that’s really underutilised by marketers,” he says. “There’s not a lot of good marketing on Tumblr, and it’s a format that people love to share from.”

Mescall believes that web browsers, particularly younger audiences, no longer travel to microsites. “They won’t go to a campaignmicrosite.com/whatever. You go into the places they’re going and they will [interact with it] – because they want to take it, own it, put it on their Facebook page and share it with everyone they know, [and say] ‘Look at what I did. Look at what I found’.”

Read: Marketing’s interview with Mescall where he shares tips on being disruptive online, details on the inner workings of ‘Dumb Ways To Die’ and how to be human on social media.

Statistics from Google’s Ad Planner tool show Tumblr received 3.2 million unique Australian visitors in December, up dramatically from one million at the start of 2012. However, Nielsen figures released to Marketing show visitation to be more conservative, at 1.8 million for the month of December.

However, while the researcher’s hybrid Online Ratings system collects mobile web impressions it doesn’t collect impressions through apps, suggesting much of Tumblr’s use may be coming through its smartphone application.

Via web sources, Nielsen could reveal that engagement with the platform was high, with the average session lasting 5.6 minutes. The audience is split evenly between males and females, although females making a higher number of page views, accounting for 68% of views. Browsers aged between 12 and 24 years were responsible for over three-quarters of all pages viewed in the month of December.

Globally the service boasts 54 million members, an audience of 141 million and monthly page views of 17.5 billion. It reports itself to be the eleventh most trafficked site in the US.

Tumblr’s Radar ad units, which constitute sponsored placements of accounts/pages in a featured blog section, cost $25,000 per six million impressions in the US, according to DigiDay.

A range of brands have a presence on the site including media brands The New Yorker, The Economist and GQ , apparel brands Calvin Klein and Adidas, automaker Land Rover and Coca-Cola.

The platform is best suited to brands that create a lot of strong, visual content, writes David Moth from Econsultancy.

“Unlike more traditional blogging platforms, Tumblr’s social focus means that short-form content tends to gain the most interactions.

“For brands that create a lot of content it’s a great way of highlighting their most eye-catching or attractive images, but even if original content isn’t your forte Tumblr can still be used to share things that help to build your brand’s identity.”

The platform enables sharing via a ‘reblog’ button, which functions the same as a tweet button, enabling brands to turn owned content into earned quickly and easily.

Pinterest to test new look for greater ecommerce referrals

by Marketing ON 31 January 2013

Pinterest is to test a new look in a bid to boost ecommerce referrals and increase engagement on the social scrapbooking site via aided discovery.

The almost-three-year-old social network announced it will soon test an update with a small number of users that features changes to navigation, increased image sizes and more information below each pin.

The update follows the launch of accounts designed for marketers last November, as the site begins to pave the way for brand pages.

Changes have been made to the navigation and search panel of the site, in an effort to make getting around more intuitive. The changes will enhance the image based nature of its search tool, to make searching more visual for users, a feature that Google and Facebook are likely to watch closely as they move to enhance their own social search offerings.

Pins will now be larger and contain more details, including related pins, copy and links to aid discovery and deepen engagement on the site. In December last year, 1.2 million unique Australian visitors accessed the site, spending an average of three minutes and thirty-six seconds per visit, according to figures from Nielsen.

The changes will mean businesses on the social network will need to optimise copy and links attached to pins, adopt a greater focus on platform management and ensure high quality, larger sized images are available, Matt Owen from Econsultancy writes.

“In theory this should deepen the site’s already impressive engagement figures, but for business accounts it means something more important: cross and up-sell opportunities,” Owen says. “By highlighting other content and even users related to an original pin, there’s an increased chance that your account will be found through a users’ organic connections, and a chance to showcase more of your products, services, and even those all-important influencers who already engage with your product.”

When rolled out universally, the changes look set to deepen engagement and boost ecommerce referrals, making the site an even stronger social commerce tool.

Social media to remain a ‘backwater’ sales channel: PwC

by Marketing ON 30 January 2013

Only a tiny minority of online shoppers transact through social media and few are likely to do so in the near future, according to a PwC study, prompting the management consultants to label social a “backwater” sales channel.

The findings come from an 11-country study which aims to debunk ‘myths’ of multichannel retailing. “Recently we’ve noticed that much of the literature on online retail shoppers seizes on a few data points and parlays them into a trend,” PwC’s John Maxwell elaborates in the report.

“Take social media, for example… Consumers use social media to research brands, praise their favourite products and point out the weaknesses of other products.

“But our survey reveals that just 12% of our respondents have purchased an item through a social media site… and only 18% purchased a product as a result of information obtained through a social media site.”

“Social media will for the near future remain a backwater sales channel, if you can call it a sales channel at all,” the report asserts.

However, the report acknowledges that social media is a robust marketing and communications channel for retailers and consumer goods companies.

Around half of respondents say they check social media sites daily, but seven out of 10 online shoppers have never shopped within a social network. That figure is unlikely to lift much in the immediate future, with only around 5% saying they’ll shop more via social media in the next 12 months.

PwC’s report also names ‘showrooming’ – the trend where shoppers visit bricks and mortar stores to view products before buying online – the ‘home turf’ advantage of domestic retailers, the domination of global giants and price as the primary driver of store choice as ideas that warrant reconsideration.

PwC’s ‘Demystifying the online shopper: 10 myths of multichannel retailing’ was conducted among 11,000 consumers from Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States.

UBank in world first NFC social media campaign for Midsumma Festival

by Marketing ON 11 January 2013

UBank will use Near Field Communications (NFC) technology in a social media campaign, in what it claims is a world first for a banking institution.

The bank, an arm of NAB, will use NFC chipped wristbands that create posts to participants’ Facebook accounts each time they touch on at designated points around Melbourne’s upcoming Midsumma Festival.

Upon entry to the festival, participants will be enticed to register for the campaign by the chance to win $5000 and an assortment of other prizes. Entrants will be given a wristband which they can then use to touch on at seven designated points, or with seven roaming attendants, each representing a colour of the rainbow.

Over 20,000 festival-goers of the queer culture festival will be able to enter, as can people who register through the festival’s UBank Facebook app from home.

The campaign will promote UBank’s ‘PeopleLikeU’, a tool which finds spending trends among consumers similar to the searcher and compares it to the nation’s spending habits to help people visualise how they’re spending.

A fact from the tool’s database, such as “Melburnians spend 10% more on fashion than Sydneysiders, but 20% less on the arts”, will be shared on participants’ Facebook walls each time they check in.

The campaign is an attempt to bring UBank’s sponsorship of the event to life, according to cofounder of the social media agency behind the campaign, Troy Townsend from Tiger Pistol.

“The big thing for UBank was that they were trying to bring social into one of their sponsored events; so how do they actually leverage their sponsorship of Midsumma to increase likes and engagement on their Facebook page.”

NFC was chosen to get into an innovation space and to make participating easier, Townsend adds. “Instead of just being a one-on-one interaction you only have to connect it once to have that sort [check in on Facebook] of interaction. It’s easier for the consumer and they get something that they can reuse – a wristband that they may use again around the event.”

Google+ to be forced on all new users of Google services

by Marketing ON 8 January 2013

Google has started automatically setting up new users of its services with a Google+ account, in a bid to foster greater adoption of the social network.

The move is part of efforts to make the Google experience more integrated across its portfolio of services, as well as a grab for more data on its users in order to offer advertisers greater targeting capabilities.

New sign-ups to Gmail, YouTube, and other Google properties like Zagat, a restaurant review platform, are now being set up with Google+ pages.

Consumers wanting to leave reviews of restaurants, stores and other companies on Google sites have been required to use Google+ profiles since last autumn, something the company says enhances reliability as it includes the author’s real name. Similar rules came into play encouraging YouTube users to display their real name to help arrest the negative tone of comments on the video sharing site.

Bradley Horowitz, a vice president at Google, sees social as the future of the search giant. “Google+ is Google,” he said. “The entry points to Google+ are many, and the integrations are more every day.”

Like its main social network competitor, Facebook, Google earns the majority of its revenue from advertising, but it hasn’t have access to the same level of personal information about web browsers, such as the ability to tie online activities to real names, and know who those people’s friends are.

Figures from researcher comScore suggest that Google+ had 28.7 million visitors from PCs in October 2012, compared with 149 million for Facebook. In December, Google reported that 235 million people had used a Google+ feature, like the ‘+1’ tool to recommend a website, versus 150 million in June 2012.

Socialmedianews.com.au estimates that there were 377,500 Australians operating a Google+ account in December.

Up to speed: 2012 in social media marketing

by Marketing ON 7 January 2013

Facebook floated, Pinterest took flight, Tumblr bolted and Instagram soared, while social TV, social search, social commerce and social media customer service dominated industry buzz.

2012 saw the use of social networks for marketing reasons mature, despite falls from grace from the likes of Qantas and McDonald’s, and social giants introduce a range of ad options in a scramble to monetise their success.

Facebook, which went public in May, introduced a range of promoted post and ad unit variations through the year. It cracked 1 billion users globally and stood at 11.8 million Australian users in December, a 10% increase across the year.

In response to growing pressure to boost lacklustre profits, it looks set to introduce auto-play video ads to its news feed and a ‘want’ button on photos featuring brands or products this year.

Twitter, which boasts over two million Australian users according to socialmedianews.com.au, also tinkered with ad options introducing promoted tweets and users for brands. The microblog is currently in the process of rolling out promoted tweet targeting options that will enable targeting by location and interests.

Scrapbooking social network Pinterest experienced the biggest jump in visitor numbers, up by 306% to reach 650,000 unique Australian visitors (UAVs) in December. It looks to be paving the way for brand pages, with features for marketers launched in November.

Instagram, acquired by Facebook in April for $1 billion, grew phenomenally in 2012 and is estimated to have reached 1.2 million users by December. Use of the platform by brands continues to grow strongly also, with more than half of the world’s largest brands maintaining a presence on the photo-sharing platform.

See: Marketing‘s social media and brands in Australia infographic.

Social network-blog hybrid Tumblr also had a big year, increasing its unique audience in Australia by 220% to command an audience of 3.2 million unique visitors in December.

Social network growth – January to December 2012
Note: where user numbers are not available, unique visitor figures have been used.

While MySpace continued to decline, down 29% in visitors between January and December, the ‘new MySpace’ launched in December with a redesign featuring a horizontal Pinterest-style interface.

Video sharing site YouTube held steady at around 11 million views per month across the year, while blog networks Blogspot and WordPress commanded audiences of 3.5 million and 2.5 million unique visitors respectively in December.

Google+, which is used by around 377,500 Australians, still has potential according to many industry commentators, despite its comparatively slow growth. Read: The marketing director’s guide to Google+.

What will 2013 hold?

With social TV gaining a head of steam in the last few months of the year, it is sure to be a trend to watch in 2013 as TV networks look to socialise programming and IPTV becomes more prevalent.

A number of big brands, including NAB which recently invested in a social media customer service ‘command centre’, have set up dedicated teams to respond to enquiries and complaints posted on social networks. More are likely to do so in 2013 as organisations adopt an increasingly ‘human’ style of interacting online.

Social search is billed as another area set to grow – Yelp, Foursquare and local start-up Posse are taking on Google in this space.

And social commerce (see Marketing’s top10 uses of social commerce) will continue to be a focus as retailers look for smarter ways to drive traffic to their sites.

Add your own predictions to the list, by letting us know what you think the major trends will be in social media for 2013 in the comments below.

Data sourced from socialmedianews.com.au, Quantcast, Comscore, Google Ad Planner tool, Google Trends, Google Insights, Facebook self-serve advertising tool/ Checkfacebook.com. Additional analysis by Marketing.

Pinterest paves way for brand pages, launches features for marketers

by Marketing ON 22 November 2012

Pinterest has started paving the way for brand pages by launching accounts designed for marketers.

The social scrapbooking site launched accounts that allow marketers to sign up using business names (rather than requiring a first and last name) and verify websites last week.

While the pages themselves are no different to the current page layout, the move signals the social network is ready to work more closely with brands and includes the launch of ‘pin it’, ‘follow’ and featured content widget options for third-party sites as part of the sign up process.

A business microsite displaying case studies from brands like Etsy and Jetsetter, as well as best practices and guidelines for brands, has also been launched. Its terms of service have also been updated to include businesses.

Product manager at Pinterest, Cat Lee, played down the launch of the business features, telling Mashable they have nothing to do with monetisation or [Pinterest's] business model. “We know that when we do introduce a business model, we definitely want to design it in a way that makes the user experience better, but this announcement is just about taking that first step,” she said.

Companies that already have a personal account on Pinterest will be able to convert it to a business account free of charge.

The company raised $100 million in funding and was valued at $1.5 billion valuation in May, according to Mashable. Its hired several ex-Facebook staffers, including head of operations Don Faul and head of product management and partnerships Tim Kendall, who once directed Facebook’s monetisation strategy.

How to think outside the (Face)book

by Dan Goodswen ON 15 November 2012

In Rocky, a mumbling underdog boxer goes toe-to-toe with a big-talking, well-funded opponent by using unorthodox training methods designed to help him go the distance with the best fighter in the world.

Social media was Rocky a couple of years ago. It allowed the smaller, creative brands to compete with the multi-nationals and their colossal traditional media budgets.

In Rocky II, an injured Rocky has to learn to fight left-handed in order to take on Apollo Creed in a rematch. He adapts to his limitations, evolves, confounding his opponent and ultimately beating him.

Social media was Rocky II about a year ago. Brands who had adapted and evolved quickly were able to gain traction by blindsiding competitors with huge gains in social, ultimately beating bigger, better funded brands in their industry.

Right now, social media is somewhere around the second act of Rocky III.

In that film, a complacent Rocky, a long-time world champion who has learned to rest on his laurels, is soundly battered in the ring by a younger, faster, stronger, tougher, meaner opponent – aptly named ‘Clubber’.

As more brands pour money into Facebook, as the bigger brands get better at social, as your radical approach turns into complacency, you’re now finding it harder and harder to cut through, to grow your followers, to achieve high engagement.

In all likelihood you’re being beaten, and it isn’t pretty. Something has to change.

Back to the film. Shell-shocked, Rocky completely rebuilds himself as a fighter. He starts from scratch, re-thinking his entire strategy, re-learning how to box in a way that will let him compete.

In the rematch, a leaner, fitter, faster Rocky lets his opponent hit him. And then he lets him hit him some more. He lets his opponent concentrate all his energy on hitting him hard for long enough that the bigger, stronger fighter tires himself out.

And then Rocky attacks. He hits Clubber hard when he least expects it, and beats him convincingly.

Let them concentrate on Facebook. Let them take it, they can have it. When they’re not looking, hit them from different angles, from different platforms. Hit them hard.

You need a Facebook page like you need a .com, but Facebook is not a social strategy.

There are over five million brands on Facebook, and counting. You can’t win at Facebook. But you can still win at social.

The 2012 Presidential Election is an excellent example. Barack Obama didn’t win by going after the big majority where he would have probably lost, he won by gaining huge percentages among minority groups – Mitt Romney largely ignored or insulted these groups, he didn’t think he needed them, and it probably cost him the election.

Many brands are doing this exact thing right now in social. Consolidating their foothold in Facebook, relying on the majority user base for engagement and return on investment.

Change your approach. Go after the small percentages, target niches.

Look at Tumblr, 80 million blogs worldwide, more than WordPress, and serving more than 20 billion page impressions per month, more than Wikipedia. Part blog platform, part social network, the potential for great content to go viral is huge.

Look at Pinterest, the fastest growing website in history. Look at Twitter. Look at Instagram.

Sure Facebook has over 11 million users in Australia, and Tumblr only has three million, but add that to the three million on Twitter, the half a million on Instagram and the half a million on Pinterest and those percentages start to add up.

You’re not going to win by trying the same old tactics, or by fighting competitors on their terms. You’re going to win by evolving, by changing tack, by trying something new.

Ultimately, you’re going to win by thinking outside Facebook.

There are exciting times ahead. Social media is only a few years old. New platforms are emerging all the time, each with unique opportunities and user bases, each allowing the savvy brand to refresh their strategy, to change, to adapt.

Each offering another chance to win.

If the coming year brings as many changes as the last, by the end of 2013 we’ll be in the middle of Rocky IV, training in the Russian wilderness trying to work out a way to beat an unstoppable opponent.

Forgive the analogy. My point is that as long as there are new platforms and new opportunities, there will always be a way for you to write your own underdog story with social media.

Whether you decide to get in the ring or not is up to you.

Obama’s victory photo smashes Facebook and Twitter records

by Marketing ON 8 November 2012

A photo shared by newly re-elected President Barack Obama has smashed records on both Twitter and Facebook.

Captioned with ‘Four more years’ on both Twitter and Facebook, the photo shows Obama in a loving embrace with his wife after winning re-election in yesterday’s US Presidential Election.

At time of publishing, the photo had received more than 747,000 re-tweets, around 500,000 more than the reigning most re-tweeted image – a photo shared by Justin Bieber which hit 200,000 plus, according to AllTwitter.

The photo has also been favourited nearly 260,000 times to date.

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st…

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

Meanwhile on Facebook, the same photo shared with the same caption had received 3.7 million likes as of this morning. Facebook confirmed that it was the most liked photo on its network in history.

The simplicity of President Obama’s post – only a four-word caption and a picture of just himself and his wife with the sky as background – may have played a part in helping it go viral. The image’s success pays homage to the sophisticated social media campaign waged by the President’s team, who regularly posted content that showed the real, human side of the President and his family.

Dubbed the ‘Twitter Election’, the 2012 campaign didn’t disappoint, also breaking records for the most tweets about a political event at several stages throughout its cycle. As the results of the election were called by news organisations, the conversation surged, hitting a peak of 327,452 tweets per minute, according to Twitter.

Social media was one of the key platforms the battle for the presidency was waged upon. President Obama consistently outperformed rival Mitt Romney throughout the course of the election, taking advantage of a strong following built since 2008.

Marketers rely too heavily on social, need to diversify digital into gamification

by Marketing ON 25 October 2012

Digital marketers are too heavily reliant on social media and should diversify into gamification to boost engagement with their online efforts.

Such is the message to come out of SapientNitro’s ‘Insights 2013’ report, which predicts corporations will spend $2.8 billion on gamification by the end of 2016.

The report questions the long term value of social media like Facebook, pointing to an increasingly passive audience on social networks as information overload and network fatigue start to impact on how consumers interact on these platforms.

“Between July 2009 and June 2011, there has been a large level of decline in contribution and active participation on Facebook,” SapientNitro’s information architects Mohammed Iqbal and Syed Suffiyan write.

“This raises the question of whether brands should invest everything in Facebook pages. To counteract this, marketers need to diversify their digital marketing activities.”

Marketers need to transform consumers’ passive behaviour into a dynamic high-end user engagement and involvement activity, with gamification the perfect way to achieve these higher levels of engagement, the report contends.

Gamification can be coupled with social media and existing online content to add an extra layer and greater motivation to engage in digital programs. But the report warns that using it as a quick and tactile solution can lead to poor engagement and low return on investment.

“Gamification, when coupled with social, has tremendous potential in dynamically engaging users, and is a strategy marketers can use to diversify their offerings in the future. It is very important to understand the process of gamification and behavioural engineering to make this endeavour a success,” the report concludes.