TRO monitors most social media for any mention of the term “Travel Agents“. Yesterday we noted that someone on Twitter was bashing travel agents. Upon closer examination of the poster’s profile, it appeared to be coming from inside the reservation offices of a supplier! (No, I won’t say which supplier and, no, it was not an advertiser.  However, they should be). The poster, by the way, was also commenting how little she cared for being at work. Knowing that the management would be horrified, I contacted someone in the company headquarters. Twenty minutes later, the posts were gone. Fortunately, the Tweeter had only a single follower, being rather new to Twitter and apparently not recognizing how public her comments were. Also fortunate was the fact that Google had not yet “crawled” the poster’s comments – had the search engines found it before the supplier’s management taken action, the post would have lived on forever to be repeatedly revealed through searches.

This is a good opportunity for every travel agency, and supplier, to formulate an internal policy regarding social media. The potential negative consequences of the actions of an unofficial spokesperson with a virtual podium is staggering. Companies should not permit employees to identify themselves with the company brand without official clearance. Further, set guidelines as to the approved topics and tenor of each post.

Social media is a powerful tool. Very powerful. Make sure it stays in the correct hands!

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Twitter is often referred to as “micro-blogging.” Twitter allows friends, family, and co–workers to communicate through the exchange of short messages. The writer will post a short update, called a “tweet”. Each message must be 140 characters or fewer. URLs can be embedded in a post, and many use http://www.tinyurl.com/ to shorten the length of the URL. Twitter posts the message to your profile and then sends the message to your “Followers”.  Messages can not be edited, but can be deleted. Messages are also searchable via Twitter’s search function. A person using Twitter can read Tweets they follow on the site, on their mobile device or on an application such as Tweetdeck.

For a clever explanation of the consumer use of Twitter, see this short video by Common Craft.

Twitter is one more social media platform you can use to build your personal brand. Keeping in mind the warning from past articles about focusing on one or two social media platforms, Twitter will appeal to those travel agents most comfortable with developing a casual marketing persona. But to Twitter well, it’s important to take a very concerted examination of your branding, the development of your online persona and the content you develop to post.

It was actually the “what are you doing now?” emphasis that initially put me off of Twitter. There seemed a great deal of risk involved in time-consuming information of little value. That risk is real. So for the purposes of marketing your travel agency, let’s back up and examine a slightly different way to engage your audience.

One of the first considerations for a business marketing on Twitter is whether to open their account in a business or personal name. A word to the wise – names are going fast. I was unable to get “TRO” as my first choice when I set up our corporate account yesterday. Because Twitter, like all social media, is about establishing a relationship between your company and consumers, it is a good idea to project a personality to which your readers can relate. You can place your company logo on your Twitter page, or a photograph or other personal image. You can also customize the background of your Twitter page to further establish your brand.

Once your account is established, it is time to begin building a community that you follow and who follow you. Twitter will allow you to utilize a search of your email contacts to send invitations to those you know who might already have a Twitter account or to suggest signing up for an account. You can also search by name for others who might have accounts. When you locate a Twitter account you want to follow, clicking the Follow button will add the account to your home page and you will begin receiving messages from the poster you are following. Often, those you Follow will in turn follow you. In addition, work through some of your key suppliers and begin following their Tweets to learn from other marketers how best to provide relevant content.

Let’s now use TRO’s new Twitter account as an example.

View TRO’s New Twitter Account at http://www.twitter.com/travresearch 

Note how we have personalized the look and feel of our page rather than using a generic Twitter background and color scheme. (Note – If you have a Twitter account, and you are either a travel agent or a supplier, we are happy to become one of your Followers. Click our Follow button and we will in turn begin to Follow you as well.)  

Throughout our series on Social Marketing the emphasis has been on creating information that is interesting, useful and of direct benefit to your audience. Consumers seldom perceive overt commercialism as having each of these qualities. Since TRO is a B2B media, our market and therefore our Twitter content will be different than what a travel agent will choose to add to their Twitter posts. However, note how the information we have added has a direct bearing and interest to the travel agency community.

As a travel agent, you may on occasion want to post a “what I’m doing now” type of post, especially if you are clever enough to make it truly interesting, and what you are doing will add to the ongoing conversation between you and your community. However, it is likely that your readers will find most interesting news they can use, or which is of immediate benefit to them. A good example is http://www.twitter.com/VacationInfo. Note the interesting nature of the posts, much of which was garnered from other news sources. Where can you find good articles for your Twitter posts? Certainly you can scan your local paper for travel articles and information. Each day TRO’s Travelgram brings articles to you that you can in turn use. Keep the information short and lively, the type of post that a reader will feel compelled to investigate further.

Most of your posts will be of a largely non-commercial nature, in the spirit of keeping up a dialogue with your readers, who can reply to each of your posts. When you do post a more commercial message, make sure to couch it in terms of the benefit to your community. “Airfares From $99 OneWay thru Aug 14. Valid every day except Fri and Sun. 14-day adv purch required. Purchase by Apr 6th.” These items should be largely informational and timely with the “sales” opportunity secondary to the information the message conveys.

By developing interesting content for your posts, Twitter can act as powerful traffic generation tool for your website. Within a few minutes of opening our account, we were experiencing traffic from readers. The placement of links to your website within profiles and conversations is an important feature to incorporate into your posts. With luck, others with Twitter accounts will “ReTweet” your messages and a small viral marketing wind will blow in your direction.

By way of open admission, our direct experience with Twitter to date is somewhat limited. However, the possibilities are evident and we look forward to hearing from others using Twitter. Together we can build a strong set of best practices to put into place for everyone to use.  We will be using your efforts on Twitter to do future articles on Social Marketing.

Tomorrow – Online Communities

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Firstly, a confession. All those marketing gurus, including me, are guessing. There are certainly some success stories from all of the various social media formats, but the real value to any given business is at best, uncertain. The venues are new, the actual return on investment difficult to measure, and the case studies few and far between outside of very high profile brands. There is little doubt that for some companies with a tight niche market, tangible products or a well-defined brand, social marketing has been an extraordinary and exciting new way of creating buzz among consumers. However, the impact of social marketing for small service oriented businesses is far from certain. Social marketing wrongly implemented can be a productivity and time waster. Many well-intentioned travel agents simply try to do too much – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Online Communities and blogging – time that could and should be spent elsewhere if the return is not evident and growing. Therefore, travel agencies are well advised to layer on social marketing not as a primary marketing channel but as one that supplements a well-grounded repertoire of fundamental marketing tactics like networking, public relations and advertising. Social networking is cost-effective as most networks are free to join. However, each effort requires an expenditure of time and energy.

What is social marketing? Social marketing is marketing that seeks to raise the profile of a company  with a target audience by leveraging or creating networks of consumers. In essence, when you join the Chamber of Commerce in your local community for business purposes, you are social marketing. There you will meet many new people and some of them are potential clients. You will introduce yourself in your travel agent persona and have a great many conversations about a variety of topics. In your Chamber activities, you will attempt to create an association in the minds of the other Chamber members between travel and your company and thereby raise the visible profile of your company. Social media on the internet seeks to do the same thing. By joining or creating online communities of people, you will thereby encounter many who are potential clients for your business. You will also better retain those clients over the long-term by keeping them engaged in your company’s story.

Here is a very clever explanation of social marketing from Common Craft.

The essence of social marketing on the internet is creating a conversation with the other members of the communities you choose. Those conversations will often, perhaps even most often, not be overtly commercial or even about your business. Social marketing conversations frequently cover topics of a much wider scope or application than your need to promote your business. In fact, the key to keeping your audience engaged in conversation has everything to do with their needs, not your own. So to the extent that the conversations you foster are of immediate and real benefit to the other members of the community, the more engaged they will feel and the more likely you are to realize conversions from conversations to actual sales opportunities. So, avoid aggressive marketing and incessant promotion. In your conversations, share your insight, share your expertise and the rest will follow.

As we explore the most promising social marketing venues this week, keep the concept of “conversation” utmost in your mind. There are a few other points that pertain across all of the social marketing opportunities that we will want to consider:

• While you might want to experiment with a number of social marketing venues, you are well advised to find one or two and stick with them. Each different opportunity will involve your time and energy and those are limited resources. Spend them wisely. Once you have adopted a venue, make it an object of study – become an expert in the media, not just a dabbler.
• Target your community and then target your conversations! If your target audience is not on a given community, it does not matter how large the community is. Niche social networking is smarter than simply going where the crowds are – think about blue ocean strategies.
• Develop a consistent persona. Who are you? What is your brand? What image do you want to project? Just as when you meet someone in person, you will carry a personality into online social marketing. Your brand must be clear, and while you probably will not want to be overtly commercial, do remember that you are on a business mission. Your online persona will carry your brand into the online community, so spend a lot of time polishing and working on perfecting the image you want to project.

Tomorrow – Facebook

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