DestiCorp 2.0

Possible Augmented Reality Innovation for Phocuswright Next Year?

• *    Have you ever attended a conference or business event and imagined how it would be great to have your name positioned on your forehead to avoid watching eyeballs failing to find contact as they search for the label known innocuously as a name tag but used as a social filter? 
•  *   Did you think that the ideas Pranav Mistry described in the previous post were too futuristic to be believable? 
• *    Have you wondered how Augmented Reality could be used in addition to finding nearby cafes, hotspots or bars that sell Stella Artois? 

If so, be careful what you ask for. The bright young folks at The Astonishing Tribe (TAT) have just produced a powerful demo eliminating the problem - whom do I talk to in a crowded room? What might we have in common? Simply whip out your iphone (of course) and point it at a person of interest (their face not their label) and layered upon your screen will be details of the individual which he or she has deemed relevant for the event. 

Would this app add value to an already amazingly good-value conference - Phocuswright, next year? or would it mean that, instead of looking at name tags, participants would be tripping over each other as they view their real world through the augmented lens of an iphone.  A new meaning for "stumble upon" perhaps? But then,  it won't be long before we'll have a nano camera attached to our bluetooth headsets (or equivalent)  that will deliver the relevant information orally and chance encounters - the source of innovation - will be few and far between. What a pity!

PS: Don't underestimate these guys - they hail from Malmo, Sweden the city that brought us Spotify....

Two more screen shots from the demo follow....

  

Inbound Marketing and The Power of Attraction

Long before social media erupted as "the next big thing, many observers noticed that,  as power shifted towards the consumer, PUSH marketing would be replaced by PULL marketing. We even wrote a paper called When Push Comes to Pull ( Download Push-pull)  back in 2002!

And I'm pleased to discover on a recent reading that our predictions then are now becoming today's reality.  For example, here are 3 prognostications dated 2002: 

1. There'll be a shift in focus from promoting to listening, from selling to serving, from control to relationship building and from marketing as sophisticated promotion to a committed form of customer care. 

2. A task/event driven approach will be enbled by the widespread adoption of open standards, XML-wrapped web services and service-oriented architectures. 

3. A collaborative, event-driven approach to satisfying consumer's needs will, in turn, be enabled by a new business ecology comprising service providers, brokers, channel managers, affinity agents and network providers........

Sadly, with every generation and every new, "next big thing", the lexicon is reinvented to distinguish those "in the know" from those still struggling to keep up. That trend is unfortunate because it only slows down the process of diffusion.

The word now being used to describe PULL marketing (ie where the customer assembles the information they need when and where it is convenient to them, is INBOUND marketing and I think Mike Volpe of Hubspot is the author. Not that I wish to appear critical of Mike as he is a GREAT communicator;  has done much to advance understanding of this critical marketing shift and his firm delivers practical solutions that deliver results. Hubspot's slides on the topic are a good place to start and The Social Times Consultancy has just published this precise summary of Inbound Marketing that is useful for those in a hurry. 

The graphic of the magnet - copied, without permission from the Social Times post - provides the thousand word summary:  PULL or INBOUND marketing is all about ATTRACTION. 

 STOP PROMOTING and START ATTRACTING

That means stop talking about how great you are and start living and modeling your values and brand attributes. For tourism destinations that means ensuring that you ARE friendly and welcoming. Have you interacted with airline check-in staff recently or the taxi drivers that provide that critical first impression?. If you claim to be green and sustainable, is that commitment immediately obvious to the visitor on arrival and throughout every aspect of their experience? If you have positioned your city as one that is cool and creative, is WIFI ubiquitous and free?

It's an old maxim that "like attracts like". The beauty being that customers will self select if you act authentically and consistently with your brand's values. Given that so many parties are involved in the delivery of the experience, such consistency cannot be assured without widespread community effort. Branding is not a task that can be delegated to an agency no matter how creative or clever. A destination brand has to "ring true" and reflect the past, present and future aspiration and values of the community and they way its residents would like to welcome guests. PULL marketing is really all about service delivery and exceeding guest expectations. The concept maybe about 10 years old now - hardly new - but from an execution point of view is hardly out the womb!

Escaping the Commoditization Trap - intro

In a resource constrained world, tourism, like all sectors, will have to deliver an honest return on the use of precious resources i.e., pay the true and total cost of its operations. 

 In the long run, cheap travel cheapens everything. The supplier sees his already thin margins evaporate and has to slash costs, standardize, homogenize and automate. Travelers’ experiences deteriorate and the host community ends up picking the tab – to cover increased costs of handling waste, congestion, economic and social dislocation (see earlier post on the new Death in Venice). 

Cheap travel is neither good business (prone to boom and bust and dependent on volume growth) nor sustainable.

If a destination is talking about being sustainable, it has to escape the commoditization trap. Here are three ways out of this nightmare – to start: 

1. stage experiences unique to a place and time; 

2. engage and enable customers to personalise their own experiences in meaningful ways; and 

3. enable the customer to have a transformative experience – ie, experience an inner change of perspective, being or value. 

The rest of this essay describes these three antidotes in more detail - read on here to learn about how places as far apart as Lapland, Canada, and Nevada are using experiences to avoid the gravitational pull of "commoditization" through experience design and innovation. Readers - please add more case studies to this discussion. A sustainable tourism depends on your efforts!

This DMO Gets It!

If survival is all about getting the new paradigm - attracting not promoting; peer2peer invitations; and a focus on the personal, then Stratford, Ontario is doing fine. Thanks to Todd Lucier's post on What makes a Successful DMO?, I discovered how this town is getting it right. Three key points emerged for me: 

• Focus - Cathys Rehburg from the Stratford Tourism Alliance talks about the essence of the experience focusing on character, culture and cuisine.
• People - just look at the Stratford site - it oozes welcome because it's clearly about people inviting people. 

3. Todd's observation -  "At the core, a shared community vision about the values in a community are at the heart of any shared marketing project.....By bringing together traditional and non-traditional partners in tourism, and getting the word out with a variety of online media, the entire community benefits."

This DMO "get's it", don't you think? Thanks Todd for drawing our attention to this. 

My iphone is useless

Hopefully that got your attention. 

The truth is, I love my iphone.

It was love at first sight – a multi-purpose device that kept me connected, soothed my spirits with its music, entertained, educated me during long flights with its videos, brought me up to date with the activities and musings of my Facebook friends while standing in front of the baggage carousel, prevented me from getting lost, told me how much to tip and did the currency conversion, even taught me some useful Mandarin phrases. But the real appeal was and is its design. It’s so pleasing on the eye and functional….wistful sigh….

So why my headline – well it works fine at home but when I need it – i.e. when I am roaming around the world – it’s too expensive to use. I look longingly at the 20 downloaded applications but can’t use them

After one week in Vancouver, I received a text from my friendly but monopolistic UK service provider informing me that because of over use, they were restricting my service.  They gave me a number to call but when I tried it, I was informed that the number was inaccessible from outside the UK!  So much for being in touch while mobile….Then, when I got home, I discovered a bill of £799.00. So much for falling in love….. 

So I can’t fault Apple for that – or can I? In the UK they initially  did an exclusive deal with O2 who have made a mint out of people like me….Let’s hope Vodaphone  - who will now compete with O2 - can give them a run for their money but,  as I am tied into a contract, I am not yet free to move. 

Now I have just spent three weeks on the road (three countries – Finland, Australia and New Zealand) and, as you can expect, turned data roaming OFF!  So much for the benefits of 3G. But that makes one utterly dependent on wifi availability and nothing prepared me for the challenges of traveling down under where wifi seems to be considered an alien from outer space. Broadband is not a commodity down here – it’s treated as a scarce jewel.  Few hotels offer it and the Ethernet connection in the room, which ties you to a desk and computer, is expensive, IF you can get it.  Even if there is a wifi connection in the lobby, you have to sign on in your room first so that renders access by iphone impossible. 

Here in sunny Auckland the sky may be blue but I can't access the cloud while I'm out enjoying this delightful city. So much for software as a service and the rise of cloud computing - if you want to be part of that revolution that is supposed to be the death of distance, you'll have to huddle together in cities with high speed broadband. 

Now it’s not my nature to blame. The problem is that none of the providers in this connecting ecosystem seem to acknowledge that they are in the connecting business nor realize their inter-dependence, nor the impact on customers. Apple sells its phones, mobile providers get their monthly pound of flesh, and hotels source an income to replace their dwindling mini bar sales. 

Douglas Wright has written an interesting piece called Destinations and Online Marketing Disconnect.  A good article, but IMHO the problem goes deeper. Tourism destinations are in the connecting business big time but many haven’t realized that to be really supportive of their customers they are the ones who should be putting pressure on the telecoms industry and their own members to ensure blanket free coverage of wifi in all major connecting places; airports, hotel rooms and lobbies, cafes, public spaces and meeting rooms etc etc.**** Or be really imaginative and offer a local SIM card that provides really useful visitor information, acts as a privilege pass and accesses special offers. I’d happily pay for that on arrival as the time saved from endlessly logging in and out of multiple systems, remembering arcane passwords, or paying for wifi in one hourly increments might make it a good investment…..

If, as Charlene Li suggests in Groundswell, as many as 84% of customers rely on the opinions of people they know before making a major purchase, then surely the objective must be a). ensure existing visitors want to rave about their experience and b). make it easy for them to do so while their positive feelings are fresh?   In short, if visitors are our partners on whom we depend upon to rave and refer and share their experiences, isn’t it time we made it easy for them to do so?

**** Postscript - the good news is that New Zealand's new government is rectifying this situation as quickly as it can with a mammoth investment in broadband to match the stellar attractions and hospitality that Kiwis are famous for! 

Shock & Awe Video on Social Media

Here's another load "shock and awe" video designed to jolt traditional marketers out of their lethargy. But how accurate is it? Also funny how, in an age of connectivity, collaboration and sharing, authors still feel the need to apply a Trademark to a term - Socialnomics - whose lifespan might be a matter of months. He also provides no credits, reference or sources....

The accuracy of many of the statements has been investigated by Robert Cole in his blog on Voodoo Economics here - do please read. It seems that in the rush to jump on the bandwagon, catch some celebrity glitter,  or be first to publish, authors are  in danger of jettisoning critical thinking. This won't help the cause of changing traditional mindsets and there's no need for it either. 

The pace and scale of change is great enough - there's no need to exaggerate. Perhaps Robert should have called his post Voodoo EGOnomics.....

PS - I think you'll be able to better concentrate in the content if you mute or turn sound down before viewingg!!

Using UGC To Attract Visitors - Which Destinations Lead?

In the good ‘ole days – a mere 30 years or so ago – destination marketing was a relatively simple affair: figure out your major selling features, maybe add some positioning spin ( a “snazzy byline or contemporary looking logo), print some brochures, run an ad campaign; ensure there was a “call to action; ” wait for the phone to ring; mail out the brochures and hope for the best.

The Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) had an important role to play in creating awareness and desire among national and international markets on behalf of its small businesses simply because the latter, acting alone, could never develop the same reach, influence or impact. The role of the DMO was “to extend the invitation” on behalf of tourism suppliers and residents.

The Internet has, of course, changed all that and the marketing task has mushroomed in complexity requiring new and unimaginable skill sets and generating a constantly changing set of acronyms. It’s also having a profound impact on the roles of the various members of the tourism ecosystem.

While the role of the DMO used to be to “show, tell and persuade” it is now becoming facilitate, orchestrate and enable. That’s because the same tourism suppliers and residents, who were unable to reach out to international audiences some 20+ years ago, can now enjoy instant contact with anyone 24/7. So while the DMO used to lead from the front with glitzy, push-style campaigns based on a brand, customer and product database they considered to “own;” wise DMOs are learning to lead from behind by allowing and encouraging others to do the persuading for them. Utilizing the power of Web 2.0 (notably open source) and social media, smart destinations are encouraging their residents, local businesses, visitors and third party suppliers tell the destination story. The acronym for this is UGC – user generated content- and is finally capturing the interest of several tourism offices.

Here are just five interesting examples:

1. Visit Britain - According to this press release, Visit Britain will formally launch their new social media initiative at the Travel Distribution Summit being held in London today.

“We want to offer travel organisations promoting Britain a media stream of our reviews, photos and videos”, Comments Justin Reid – Head of Online Marketing for Visit Britain. “UGC has been shown to increase browse time, bookings and online interaction and if we can entice more people to come to the UK using innovative media marketing like this, then this is a win win for Visit Britain and our tourism providers.”

Using software developed by Digital Visitor, Visit Britain enables visitors and residents to upload videos, still images, and make reviews on their own and others’ contributions.

2. Vancouver 2010 – in February next year, Canada will host the Winter Olympic Games. Bell Canada – a major Games sponsor and one of Canada’s largest telecoms company has endeavoured to show the host destination through the eyes of residents. A great idea and one we have been promoting for years but, and I hate to be negative, one that suffers from poor execution. Instead of mashing up a range of easy-to-use, well proven software modules that provide the easy-to-use functionality enjoyed by Visit Britain, Bell had to develop its own proprietary and, may I say it, clunky interface that inhibits exploration. Take a look at Canada Code: That’s if you’ve got the time to fill in all the forms. Too bad that they don’t appear to have been working with the tourism agencies – Tourism Vancouver, Tourism Whistler or Tourism British Columbia (Hello BC)…see below

3. Tourism British Columbia – if prizes were to be awarded to individuals who changed the way destinations are marketed, then it should go to Wilhelm Bakker at Tourism BC. What’s most endearing about Wilhelm is his willingness to share his thinking, his trials, tribulations and triumphs with little or no sense of ego – see these posts.  Here’s the link to Tourism British Columbia’s approach to User Generated Content in the run up to the biggest tourism event to be held in the province since Expo 86.

The significance of this would be lost on the average reader if I didn’t share this observation – Tourism BC is an organization that likes to do things very thoroughly and professionally. They like control over the final product and message. So it takes courage to include the less polished, perfect content supplied by non-professionals. The traditional approach would be to produce a high quality, expensive video but, thanks to Wilhelm’s efforts, they are now including the “right stuff”. 

4. Philadelphia – this tourist board embraced the idea of blogging very early on. While they may have got it wrong to start by creating false blogging personas, whose profile happened to correlate to their major market segments,  they quickly learned by doing. Uwishunu  is a major destination blogging community and success story – Go for it, Gophila.com!

5. Disney – thanks to blogger Josh Hallett, we can follow Disney's experience with Social Media. I’ve paraphrased the key points from his blog post below:

Disney started by partnering with CareerBuilder.com to allow consumers to upload a video to apply for a 'dream' job. For Disney it was a totally new arena. They had no idea how many videos they would receive and what the videos would could contain. The big step was of course letting go. Disney was overwhelmed with the number of video applications they received,  eventually narrowing it down to five finalists. The finalists were posted online and consumers were allowed to vote, resulting in millions of votes. The finalists built their own marketing campaigns, driving even more traffic to the campaign. A side benefit was the number of regular job applications that Disney received. Because of this, it was the most successful recruitment effort to date.

The next project was the Walt Disney World Mom's Panel. They launched a search for some of the most passionate Disney moms. Once again the response overwhelming. They received 10,000 applications over the weekend, but turned away over 30,000 applicants. That was the one major mistake they made. As the program evolved, the internal issue was once again giving up control of the marketing messaging. The mom's panel has helped them overcome the two largest barriers they've faced, affordability and age. That is, what is the appropriate age for a child to first visit the theme parks. The honest, open advice of the mom's helped break down this barrier.

 

The women that did not make the Mom's Panel became part of the Mickey Moms Club. One major step was allowing the club to select their own logo. Once again, for Disney to allow somebody outside the brand to do design and select a logo was a huge leap of faith. But, it worked. Their work with the moms made them look at how they consume media. To help promote the new What Will You Celebrate? campaign they created a viral video campaign. The program allows consumers to create a uniquely branded video to 'celebrate' an event such as a birthday or an anniversary. These videos can then be sent to friends and relatives. This builds the standard pass-along/viral effect, spreading the video even more. The site has had an 85% click-thru rate and paid for itself in just over 18 hours from launch and has gone on to blow past all expectations for views and revenue.

I am confident that there are many other great examples of the use of User Generated Content by Destinations to attract visitors so – I invite you, please, to add comments so we can learn quickly from each other. In later posts – we’ll look at UGC to enrich the visitor’s stay at the destination.

Learning Social Media From the Pros

You can read all you want about Social Media and how it is replacing traditional push channels but surely the best way is to hang it with a young traveler who uses it all the time. Visit Aarhus and a bright consulting firm called Seismonaut recently had the bright idea to develop a competition for which the prize is a free 48 hour visit to Denmark. The winner had to submit a video outlining how they would use Social media on such a trip and help Denmark make better use of all the Web 2.0 tools now available. You can check out more about this clever idea at www.48hoursindenmark.com. 

The winner, one Jesse Desjardin, just happens to hail from Northern Canada and his video is a great introduction to the ways his generation and even boomers like me are starting to use the rich array of tools to plan and experience their travels. (BTW,  I once used the GPS feature on my iphone in deepest rural India to see where our taxi driver was taking us. It worked and I was very impressed until I got the roaming charges when I returned home.)  But back to my story.....

Here's Jesse's video that  successfully persuaded the Danish as to why he should win the prize - not quite as exotic a prize as the dream job  won by a young British lad who will be caretaking a beautiful island in Queensland, but another good example of a low cost way to attract publicity for Denmark; and spike the interest of highly influential members of a target market (Jesse is online director for Global Gossip that runs 25 internet cafes around the world and regularly communicates with 25,000 people mostly aged 19-25).I bet they'll be following his Tweets - why don't you - see www.twitter.com/dessedee