How social media marketing has become an important tool for destination companies

The travel and tourism industry has uncovered the potential of social media in promoting destinations. Sharing of travel related content has become second nature for Indian consumers who are driving a high level of engagement through their travel stories. Cashing in on this wave are tourism boards that are using social media to disseminate their messages. South African Tourism believes that ‘travel is social’ and has been driving its marketing efforts through social platforms. In conversation with Rashi Bisaria, Hanneli Sabber, Country Manager, South African Tourism explains how consumer outreach initiatives have been amplified through the digital medium and how the number of Indian visitors to South Africa has steadily increased over the years. Edited excerpts:

What kind of presence does South African Tourism have on digital media? How did you amplify the latest campaign through social media?
 

When #TakeMeToSouthAfrica was first conceptualized in 2012, the main objective was to reach out to travel enthusiasts all over India thereby showcasing the variety of wonderful experiences on offer to Indian travel enthusiasts. We wanted to launch a direct consumer outreach initiative where we get them to experience the destination first-hand and to further augment the consumer outreach, we decided to get our Brand Ambassador and cricketing maverick Jonty Rhodes to don the role of a host to the winners on the 2 week trip to South Africa. Hailing from South Africa and being extremely passionate about travel we were sure to have had made the perfect choice.

Rightly so, the entries for the first edition and the current one of #TakeMeToSouthAfrica received phenomenal response from travel junkies across the country. This year in an attempt to further intensify our approach as per the tastes of Indian travelers, an extensive external research was carried out. The results indicated that gaming was one of the key influences of the customer’s preferences. On the basis of this understanding, South African Tourism introduced the latest edition #TakeMeToSouthAfrica through an online gaming contest where contenders had to cross multiple levels on adventure, wildlife, art & culture and history about South Africa. As expected, the contest was a huge hit across India with a very high level of engagement across platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and a specially designed microsite linked to the South African Tourism website.

With the understanding of ever rising influence of social media platforms on travel decisions of Indian travelers, South African Tourism is extremely active on various digital media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Our official website is also extremely user friendly and provides our consumers an insight into South Africa with a number of blog posts, tweets with popular hash tags, Instagram posts and much more.

In the social space there is a focus on building communities that will be most receptive to the content you have to share. Community building extends the reach of organic activity if the communication is good. The recent South African Tourism “Reconsider Ad” garnered more than 500,000 views on YouTube not only due to the sheer brilliance of the ad also due to the sustained efforts of the #MeetSouthAfrica community that invested in the initiative almost 18 months prior to the ad, by proactively sharing content in order to generate initial buzz around the ad . The ad along with the hashtag #MeetSouthAfrica has worked perfectly and generated large conversations with the majority of comments and shares.

What was the #TakeMeToSouthAfrica campaign all about?
#TakeMeToSouthAfrica commenced earlier this year and immediately caught on with the audiences. Participations started pouring in from across the country, the moment the contest went public. Over 800 numbers of entries were received and from the 24 shortlisted contestants who made it to Round two, 4 lucky winners have been chosen for a two week trip to South Africa with Jonty Rhodes. This year, we adopted a distinct and innovative strategy to inform the chosen winners about their victory. Billboards were set up outside the office of the four winners with a personalized message from Jonty Rhodes announcing that they have won a trip to South Africa with him. Amazed to see their billboards, contestants expressed excitement for this once-in-a-lifetime voyage to South Africa. These travel enthusiasts will embark on their journey to South Africa from December 1-15, 2014 for some amazing travel experiences with Jonty as their personal host.

Compared to last year what is the consumer sentiment like this year? Are people travelling more this year?
All our efforts with varied initiatives in the Indian market to reach out to our target audience and key stakeholders have always paid off extremely well and has helped strengthen the perception of South Africa as a tourist destination offering a varied set of experiences. 2013 recorded 1 12 672 Indian tourists visiting South Africa which was an increase of 5.5 per cent vis-à-vis 2012. 24 556 Indians have visited South Africa in the first three months of 2014.

Has digital gained prominence as compared to 2013 in the tourism industry?
The tourism industry has changed dramatically with the overwhelming emergence of social media platforms. While choosing a holiday destination, consumers today opt for research on the internet for reviews as the first step to understand the destination and its varied offerings. Hence, digital and social media marketing has gained immense importance in the overall marketing and communication strategy for destination companies and tourism boards. Social media is a massive tool to reach out to the global audience with your key messages and immerse prospective consumers in an engagement programme through contests, pictures, videos among others. Engagement is the key feature of social media marketing which has worked well for many destinations including ours.

We at South African Tourism believe that “Travel is Social”. This means that travelers worldwide love to talk about where they have been, where they are going and the things they are planning to do at the destination. This process is aspirational and it is absolutely crucial in today’s digital age to pay attention to what is being said. Digital media and technologies now affect every single stage of the visitor’s journey to a destination – from planning to stay to post trip conversations. The purpose of every Tourism Board should be to develop a holistic digital marketing strategy targeting the decision-making process of planning a trip, to providing useful visitor information to utilizing attractive social media tools for sharing their memorable experience upon their return home.

Read original article source : http://pitchonnet.com/blog/2014/10/30/social-media-marketing-important-tool-destination-companies/

Read More

10 Tools for Making Your Digital Life Easier

Do you ever find yourself creating to-do lists for organizing all of your to-do lists? Are you struggling with establishing a system for storing files online? Is the idea of sharing your screen in an online meeting a daunting task that you would prefer to completely avoid? Have you ever had hiccups in the past when attempting to collaborate with clients via the Internet? If so, you are not alone. Here are 10 tools to help you increase productivity, boost social networking, manage online storage, simplify communication, and make your digital life easier.

Wunderlist

 

Wunderlist is the ultimate "to-do" list that seamlessly integrates all of your tasks through desktop, web, and mobile applications. Manage items in multiple to-do lists by adding due dates, reminders, subtasks, notes, and sharing the tasks with teammates or individuals working on a project with you. Prioritize lists or tasks by setting the item as "Starred" and quickly figure out at a glance for what's due today or this week.

Download: iOS / Android

Evernote

 

Evernote is another productivity app that lets you create notes via text, camera, photos, reminders, and lists. Organize notes into notebooks for work, home, travel, and more or import information into a new notebook from apps such as Penultimate. Use tags and places to make notes easier to find too. And if you plan on investing in some wearable tech in the future, Evernote works great with Google Glass too.

Download: iOS / Android

IFTTT

 

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a service that gives you the ability to make recipes based on triggers and actions. Add channels such as email, SMS, phone call, weather, social media, calendar, etc. so that you can configure your recipes to automatically make something happen. Personal favorites include receiving daily weather forecast text messages, adding files to Dropbox whenever files are saved to Google Drive, starring email adds task to iOS Reminders/Wunderlist, and uploading YouTube videos automatically creates a WordPress post with the video in it.

Download: iOS / Android

Dropbox

 

Dropbox comes with 2 GB of storage and is an excellent way to store files and photos online. Easily share items with others by creating links to specific documents or allowing access to entire folders. Works great on mobile devices and tablets and is especially useful if you find yourself switching back and forth between a Mac and PC throughout the day.

Download: iOS / Android

Google Drive

 

Google Drives offers 15 GB of free storage that is shared between Gmail, G+ Photos, and Google Drive. If you need additional storage, monthly plans are available starting at $1.99 for an extra 100 GB of space. Google Drive is great for those who need a little more storage space than the 2 GB available with Dropbox and/or want to keep everything on the Google platform.

Download: iOS / Android

Box

 

Box is another method of secure online storage that is popular with financial services professionals and starts out with 10 GB of free storage. Box is mobile-friendly and allows you to easily create notes, share documents with others, and sync data between devices.

Download: iOS / Android

Hangouts

 

If you use Gmail, then Hangouts is a great tool to use for instant messaging, sharing files, and impromptu video calls. The Hangouts Toolbox comes with a variety of options for sharing documents, your screen, and fun visual effects when communicating with others.

Download: iOS / Android

Skype

 

Skype is a nice tool for making calls from your computer, instant messaging, sending files, and sharing desktops. It is a reliable alternative to Hangouts, especially from the making calls from a computer perspective, and also works well on mobile devices.

Download: iOS / Android

join.me

 

join.me is a great screen sharing service for online meetings. It is a quick way to start a meeting and is a simple method for joining meetings; simply enter the meeting code, type in your name, knock, and join the meeting. Basic screen sharing is free and additional plans are available at the Pro and Enterprise level for $13 and $19 per month, respectively.

Download: iOS / Android

TeamViewer

 

TeamViewer is the "All-In-One software for remote support and online meetings." It is free for private use and perfect for those in technical troubleshooting roles or in need of remote access to computers and/or servers.

Download: iOS / Android

Do you find any of these tools particularly essential to your day-to-day life? Are there any tools that we should add to the list? Feel free to join the conversation and let us know what you think by leaving a reply in the comments section.

Read Original source article: friedmansocialmedia.com/blog

Read More

Customer Service Is the New Marketing

Social media has fundamentally changed the world of customer service and marketing. Customers control the conversation, and the service you provide can no longer be an unsatisfactory or merely an acceptable experience. It’s not even enough to provide unique products or services. Customers have shown that due to bad service, they are willing to change and will let their friends, family, and fans know about it. An America Express study shows an astounding 83 percent of customers left the purchase due to bad service.

The Heart of Marketing panel at the The Social Shake-Up 2014 (#tssuheartofmktg) got to the source of the matter: only when customer service is put at the heart of marketing will you reach your marketing and revenue objectives. In fact, Customer 2020 Report shows that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

Read on to hear why, and what you can do about it, from Dan Gingiss, Digital Customer Experience & Social Media, Discover; Natanya Anderson, Director, Social Media and Digital Marketing, Whole Foods; and Shep Hyken, customer service expert.

Connect on the Customer Journey

“You know your audience wants human-to-human interaction,” said Hansen Lieu, Director, CRM Product Marketing, SAP, and moderator of the panel. “It can’t be what we used to do—paint a fantastic image of the content of the product or service, and convince them to spend money on it. Marketing isn’t relevant anymore because people don’t trust it. They want the truth. They don’t want us to tell them what to do. They want us to show them what we said. Customer service is at the heart of interaction. It’s engagement with the customer when they’re on the buying journey. Help the customer and engage and nudge them from one step of the journey to the other. Earn the right to be on the journey like a friend.”

Gartner and Forrester research predict that by 2020, 80 percent of the buying process will occur without any direct human-to-human interaction. That’s because customers are turning to digital channels to self-educate about products and services, and they are waiting later in the buying process to speak directly with a sales person.

However, an April 2013 CMO Council and NetLine survey of B2B decision-makers worldwide found the greatest percentage of respondents (58 percent) said content played a role in purchasing decisions when it helped them find new solutions to problems. Plus, eConsultancy showed 83 percent of consumers require some degree of customer support while making an online purchase.
 The bottom line: you need to know your customer and be there when they need help on their journey.

Seize the Social Opportunity

Also a New York Times bestselling author, Hyken believes we confuse customer service with customer experience: the new marketing online and in person. He said marketing isn’t telling anymore. It’s doing and proving, and earning the right to do business with the consumer.

“At Discover, our tagline is, ‘We treat you like you treat you,’ but I’ve always said the core of the TV commercial is saying, ‘Trust us.’ Show beats tell every time. Social is the only channel where you can demonstrate or publicly show this,” Gingiss said. “But you actually have to be good at customer service to be on social. If not, social will destroy you. People who tweet something positive to a brand actually expect a response more than those who tweet something negative.”

A Search Engine Land article shared “about 49 percent of local consumers are more likely to use a local business having read a positive review online.” Therefore, you must interact with happy and unhappy customers to get more positive reviews and ROI. Positive reviews influence other customer decisions, too, such as 90 percent of consumers online trust recommendations from people that they know, with 70 percent trusting the opinions posted online by unknown users.

“The way I think about marketing is that it’s not Mad Men any more,” Anderson said. “It’s about supporting the customer through the entire buying cycle. Inspire them how to use your goods. That’s marketing. Provide a fantastic purchase experience. That’s marketing. A customer has an issue or question. That’s marketing. We’re with the customer the whole way, not just in the store. The whole organization has to get involved to be with the customer through their entire journey. Social media isn’t just the responsibility of the ‘social team.’”

According to an Edison study, 42 percent of consumers expect a response on social media within an hour. Unfortunately, a typical business hears from only 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers, while 96 percent don’t voice their complaints and 91 percent will never come back. If these facts and statistics don’t prove we need to make customer service a key initiative, perhaps others will.

“Responding to positive feedback is fun, engaging, and builds community,” said Gingiss. “On the negative side, it’s equally important to address the core issue, be empathetic, say you’re sorry, and fix it.”

He suggested, when appropriate, to also mirror how they ask for help. For instance, a Tweet from a prospective Discover card customer who was tired of receiving mailers from the company tweeted, “Please get the hint, I don’t want a Discover card.” The quick, witty response, “Wow, we must really want you as a customer,” turned the angry tweeter into a customer.

Talk Table Stakes

“So what’s the implication for customer service and marketing?” Hansen asked the panel trio.

“It’s interesting how many companies do customer service so poorly,” Gingiss said. “It should be the table stakes. Customer service can very easily become a differentiator among many competitors.”

No matter what is your industry, the table stakes are no longer simply the tools you need to be capable in your business. Customer experience is just as important. But are all channels equal in the need to respond?

“Customer service isn't just for B2C," said Anderson. "Word of mouth is powerful. Table stakes have gotten much broader. It’s not only call centers and the telephone. Social is for real. The issue for business is all channels are equal in terms of the need to respond. Take it seriously when the customer is coming at you at every possible direction. Make customer service good in the first place, and then add the social layer. It’s the easiest place to prove ROI. It’s a wakeup call to businesses.”

Hyken added that it’s true for B2B and B2C. “There is always going to be a competitor. It’s rare there’s not someone else doing it, too. Customer service gives the right to bid and shape bids. If the supplier is B2B, it de-commoditizes itself. I’m a buyer of services and tools as someone who manages social tools, for example. We talk more about customer service relationships with partners. Are they there for us? How do they support us? Although it’s hard to talk about it on social, we see it manifest through word of mouth, which is more important for B2B. Service is table stakes. Service provides the right to re-market.”

If you wanted a question answered in two to three hours, wouldn’t you wait for the question to get there in two to three hours? “When you don't reply to people on social, it's like unplugging the phone,” Gingiss said. “Would your organization ever do that? We call it First Tweet Resolution. We want to provide service to customers on the channel of their choice.”

Determine Damage Control

But how can you turn a critic into an advocate? When do you respond to negative comments publicly or solve them offline? When do you get involved or stand back? The audience asked these questions as the panel progressed.

“Invite the customer to email if it will be easier to solve through that channel,” Anderson said. “Never force them to change channels. Always try to solve the issue where it started. There are some people in the world that you can never make happy. Vegetarians will never be happy with Whole Foods because we sell meat. So be respectful, but at one point disengage.”

Make Customer Service a Culture

"Customer service is not a department, it’s a culture,” Hyken said. “There are six Ds to creating a customer-centric culture: Define it. Disseminate it. Deploy it. Demonstrate it. Defend it. Delight in it.”

Anderson said it’s how you change from doing what it takes to doing what is right. She also offered creative staffing ideas if you have only one person running and monitoring your social channels. One solution is to ask employees from other departments or locations to sign up for a social media shift. This not only offers backup but also helps everyone in your business understand social.

“Hire the right people,” Gingiss said. “Social is a great place for really good customer service people to show off their personality. Ask 10 people the same question and you don’t get the same answer.”

Case in point: even if it’s not part of the script, allow employees to show their personality. While a smiley face icon is often used in email at the end of a message, you can express your care for the customer with a heart icon, or <3.

Customer service is not only the new marketing. It’s also the heart of marketing. Without human-to-human engagement, you’re just another [insert brand, industry, service, or product here]. Authentic communication is everyone's job. Help us spread the love by tweeting from here.

Source: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/customer-service-new-marketing-turning-satisfaction-roi
Image source: mycustomer.com

Read More

Killer Advice for Your Social Media Marketing Plan

All businesses need strategies to help find their targeted audiences online. This is often achieved through various marketing campaigns, such as SEO or article marketing. Social media is a new, yet effective tool for marketing. Through good business sense and some of the tips mentioned here, you can use social media to take your company to the next level.

With social media marketing, it is important to utilize creative and interesting titles. If you can do this, you have the potential to gain many more customers.

If you are a blogger, use the ‘retweet’ button for every blog post. This makes sharing your blog on Twitter easier how do you increase your twitter followers for others. You will get more exposure this way.

It’s important for you to truly engage in conversation with your social media followers. Companies often forget that when a customer offers feedback, they are also opening up a dialogue. Engage fully with the customers that contact you and build a mutually-rewarding dialogue with them. Take an interest in finding out their needs and wants, and use this information to develop your next promotion, or to think of innovative ways to improve your business.

You need to have a ‘like box’ on your blog that is linked to Facebook. This makes it easy for people to like you on the social website. When you have this box on your blog, it makes it easy for your visitors to show their appreciation without being distracted from your page. Making things easy will make it more likely for people to perform an action.

Have a plan of attack before tackling a marketing campaign involving social media. Make sure you understand how to manage your media pages and allot plenty of time for updates and networking. Like other marketing campaign, create a timeline to accomplish any goals. If you don’t stray from your plan, you have a very good chance of making money with social media marketing.

Make frequent updates to your content. Many followers in social media have an expectation of frequent updates, and if you don’t supply these, you can hurt your reputation online and lose followers. Aim for publishing updates more than a couple times a week.

Write new posts on Twitter as often as possible so that your updates do not get buried in your followers’ feeds. Twitter is about volume: you will still need to post quality content but you also need to post it often. With the short posts on Twitter, you can definitely get multiple tweets from a single event.

Connect social media profiles with your website. Make it easier for your existing customers to forward the content of your articles by including a share button. You should include these buttons on your main web pages, blog posts, and RSS feeds to make it easy for your visitors to share your content.

It might be difficult to get going, but once you start, momentum will gather, and you’ll be on a roll. Some companies have made a name for themselves using social media marketing. You may be able to do the same. With dedication and a willingness to try new things, your social media marketing strategy is almost guaranteed to succeed.

Read original article source: http://symbolo.net/outstanding-advice-for-your-social-media-marketing-plan/

Read More

Social media marketing is dead

In today’s millennial-inspired economy, social media marketing is dead. I didn’t say social media is dead — just the idea that social media marketing is the most effective approach to win over millennials.

Yes, millennials are heavy social media users and are 2.5 times more likely to adopt new digital, social and mobile tools. What drives social media activation for millennials, however, is content excellence.

Marketers are often pegged with questions related to the future of social media such as: Is Facebook still relevant? What’s the next social platform? Which is most powerful — a like, a share, a re-tweet, or a favorite?

While these are all fair questions, attempting to grade the social landscape in this manner is counterproductive and missing the greater point.

Your approach to content is what will make or break your marketing communication efforts in the future. Social media is simply one way to activate your content strategy.

Re-imagine creative excellence within a content excellence framework

For more than 40 years, the great brands of yesterday were focused on creative excellence. They crafted the perfect message and then pushed those messages out via various shotgun methodologies, hoping to build brand awareness and regard for their cherished products.

Brand awareness and credibility alone will not correlate in any way to extraordinary and sustainable financial performance.

Think of content as an opportunity for your brand voice to live everywhere you are not. We used to think of advertising as a means of communicating a message to a certain audience. But traditional advertising messages are limited to their medium. People experience brands in fluid ways and we can no longer simply rely on creative advertising to make an impact. Content is about the message and the context.

Your content strategy should be about activating and engaging your digital community in ways that traditional advertising never could.

Focus on creating content that is “share-worthy”

Millennials share content that interests them, not content that companies want them to share.

The idea of content being “share-worthy” is nothing new. Marketers used to encourage sharing by word-of-mouth. Today we talk about sharing by word-of-mouse. The “share” is no anomaly — we’ve just shifted from a mindset of advertising ideas to creating ideas that are worth advertising. Treating content in that manner ensures your message is meaningful to your audience.

Remember the Seinfeld “Break Up” episode? George says, “It’s not you — it’s me.” Sharing is rooted in peer affirmation and how millennials feel about themselves when they share content with friends, family and random strangers. The great brands of tomorrow will not simply push out social media messages — they will inspire sharing. Millennials share content that adds to their story, and bypass content that doesn’t.

Unique content will drive sustained brand success

In the future, the most successful brands will get consumers who are active participants to create more content on behalf of the brand than the brand creates for its own benefit. The key to this content is maintaining a certain level of uniqueness and meaningfulness.

The most unique and meaningful brands will have the highest probability of sustained economic performance. Uniqueness will be a proxy for brand-pricing authority and meaningfulness will be a proxy for sales volume potential.

5 implications for brand strategy professionals:

1. Build a content excellence strategy first.
2. Think about content and social media as different players. Integration will drive performance. Social media marketing isn’t a strategy.
3. Inspiration is your brand responsibility.
4. Useful is the new cool. Your content should be functional and inspiring.
5. Participation increases brand value. Find ways for your most avid brand fans to join the movement.

For read original Article source: http://www.bizjournals.com/jacksonville/how-to/marketing/2014/07/social-media-marketing-is-dead.html

Read More

Infographic - Social Media Is Hot But Email Packs Digital Marketing Power

There’s non-stop buzz about social media in all its forms: How to use it, when to maximize it, and how to grow your followers. While social media can be valuable, email is still where it’s at when it comes to online marketing power.

Almost half of Internet users in the U.S. spend an hour or more reading their email every day, according to new survey data conducted by My.com, the developers of myMail, a free mobile application that allows individuals to monitor all of their email addresses through a single inbox. We also check email multiple times throughout the day. Three-quarters of survey respondents said they check email in the morning, half check at lunch, almost six in 10 say checking email is the last thing they do before they go to bed.

So, collecting customer email addresses and crafting killer messages should be a top priority for your startup marketing campaigns.

Gmail is the most popular email service, according to My.com’s survey results, with 59 percent of Internet users reporting to having a Gmail account. Most Internet users have more than one email account, though, and Yahoo came in as the second most popular email option, according to the data. Only 12 percent of Internet users still have an AOL account.

Check out the infographic (below) for more stats on when, where and how Internet users are interacting with their inboxes.

For original Source : http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/235718

Read More