I really liked the stand and thought it was cool.  It also kind of made me think that while many are struggling with the shear weight of the amount of work social media marketing entails to turn your back on it and focus on the marketing that leads to direct results seems like a brilliant strategy.

But do I agree with this strategy? Probably not. Whether Nigel likes it or not people/customers/potential customers are talking about Felton Road on Facebook, in Twitter, via You Tube and in my opinion he should be there involved in that conversation.

But it more importantly that strategy has had me weighing up the pros and cons of social media marketing. Just something to thing about.

Social Media Marketing – The Positives

• Potential to create a relationship with customers and brand loyalty;
• Customers become brand advocates virally spreading the marketing message to others;
• The message of which can be spread rapidly across many;
• Including all age groups and demographics,
• A brand personality can be created and reinforced easily through social media tone;
• Opportunity for direct informal customer feedback; and
• The supposed low cost of creating profiles and pages on Facebook and Twitter.

Social Media Marketing – More Questions Than Answers

• Are you really building relationships of value? Are customers acquired through social media likely to be returning ones?
• Social media marketing is very time consuming – who is going to maintain and manage your marketing? Is it necessary to have a consistent voice across all your marketing? Are you happy that you or your staff can respond professionally and creatively all the time?
• The more fans or followers the better, but where is the financial return coming from and for what?
• What about negative Word Of Mouth? What will you do if you suddenly see negative feedback? Do you have time to respond to each and every criticism?
• Is social media marketing really low cost? When you take into account the amount of time required, the ongoing staff training, and the possibly low return – what is the real return on investment? Is it even measurable?

For example, let’s look at the myth of the Facebook page.  It is not difficult to setup an interactive Facebook page for your business, with competitions, videos, latest news, polls and quizzes. So why would some businesses be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on having professional social media companies do this?  Well the truth of the matter is that your Facebook page probably doesn’t work – despite all your best endeavours you are probably wasting the majority of your time (and money) working on your Facebook business page.

Why?

Unfortunately the answer lies in the Facebook EdgeRank Algorithm.  EdgeRank is designed to ensure that you are getting the information on your wall which Facebook determines is the most interesting to you.  In fact less than 2% of the fun, interactive content that you create on your Facebook fan page actually sees the light of day on your fans news feed because of the EdgeRank Algorithm!

The EdgeRank Algorithm determines which content shows in your news feed from the pages you are a fan of (or friends pages) based on a value given to the relationship between the creator of the content and you as the individual fan/friend, your interaction with the content (that is, the likes, comments, tags etc you give to the content of your fan pages or friends when it displays on your wall) and the length of time between when you actually do interact and when the content was posted.  So, if one of your business page fans leaves a comment on say a video or photo you post within a few hours of your posting that content on your wall then your future content will have a higher EdgeRank value and will be more likely to appear in your fans “Top News” feed in the future.  On the flip side if your fans simply ignore any content you post then the EdgeRank Algorithm will determine not to bother showing them your content at all in the future.

At least 90% of all fans of a Facebook fan page visit that page once when they like it and never ever return again!!  In fact, they never ever see content from your again

By default “Top News” is always the content that Facebook users firstly see on their wall (unless they change the settings – of which only a very small percentage do).  Users can change to see “Most Recent” content which theoretically would show a user a fire house of all content from their friends and fanned pages – but not so according to the a study by The Daily Beast.  The EdgeRank Algortihm even influences which content is shown under the “Most Recent” feed as well.  This means that the likelihood of your fans even seeing your content is more likely to be less than 1%!!!

So what does this mean for companies using Facebook to market and promote their products on Facebook or to interact with fans?  Quite simply, it is clear that if you want your content to be seen you need a strategy on how you are going to get your users to regularly interact with your content therefore building up your EdgeRank Algorithm.  If you can not buck the averages of 90% of your fans never returning to your page after their initial like or the content that you are so meticulously generating not even making it to your fans news feed then how can you justify the spend on such a channel?  At Xebidy we have a method where content we generate in Facebook for our clients is systematically purposefully interacted with across the company – but can a small individual business guarantee the same processes and resources to do this?  Are you wasting your time in Facebook? Now that would suck!!

But long-term the economic implications could be deeper.  Tourism in New Zealand is massive business and the impact of the images of the quake that were beamed around the world in the days afterwards are likely to have incredible knock-on effect on our tourism economy.  I have already been told anecdotally that as many as 5,000 bed nights have been cancelled in Queenstown alone.

The blog4NZ project is an initiative to cover the world in content about how great it is to travel New Zealand for a 72 hour period starting 21st March.  Travel bloggers, photographers and social media users are being asked to generate non-stop content about travelling to New Zealand and publish these across their blogs, across Facebook,You Tube, Flickr and Twitter.  Event Organiser Craig Martin of INdie Travel Podcasts described it as “a complete black-out of travel content across the world, we want Twitter dominated by Tweets about travelling to New Zealand, we hope that all travel bloggers rally behind this cause and publish as many articles as possible throughout this period about travelling to New Zealand” .

From my perspective if successful the long-term value of something like this is immeasurable.  The shear amount of content that might be authored and shared across the Internet could surely put New Zealand on everyone’s travel radar for this year or next.  Because the content is not being produced on a single site – but travel bloggers are being asked to produce the content on their own sites – the reach could be enormous and ongoing.  Even if someone does not come across the volume of content during the 72 hour #blog4NZ period they will come across the stories and images at some stage.

If you produce content get on board please.  There is more information at http://blog4nz.indietravelmedia.com.  If you are a New Zealand travel provider contact me on how you can help us with images and content for the bloggers to use.  If you don’t have somewhere to create content I will post anything anyone produces on TravelGeneration.com during this period.

But talking to a good friend Backpacking Matt one thing that has struck me is what happens to that blog when you stop travelling.  Many bloggers continue their blog indefinitely tinkering in the evenings, writing a few posts a week and collecting the extra cash.  Others try to keep the blog alive by bringing in more writers.  But there is then the issue of the name of the travel blog, take NomadicMatt, BackpackingMatt, JasmineWanders – these sites are about one persons travels.  (Perhaps Nomadic and Backpacking Matts could merge, invite all the other Matt’s and create a community of travelling Matts – could call the site FlyingCarpets).

Surely, then it makes sense to name your blog something that might have a life after your travels.  I think GapYearEscape has done a great job of building himself a very profitable web business that has the potential to carry on for many years to come, now that he is back in the UK, from what I can see from the outside.

Alternatively, though I was thinking that surely there is room for a second hand travel blog market!  If blogs are such a great way to make money while you travel then once you have finished travelling could you not sell your travel blog with all the traffic and revenue to someone else.  How much would that be worth?  If you were earning USD$1,000 per month then I would think that someone travelling for a year would pay US$6 to $9k – seems about right to me, especially if you could prove to them that the revenue will rise over the year if they do x, y and z.  Surely, buying a travel blog that is already making money is a huge kick start rather than building something up slowly from scratch.

Which begs the question of my thoughts – wouldn’t it be better to call you travel blog something generic that you could subsequently sell (or get in more writers)?  Just a thought.

At it’s most simple it is a method of telling Facebook more about what your web page is about so that it can be better represented on Facebook. This will improve the matching of users to your page when they search and it will vastly improve the quality of the content that is shown on a users wall when they like your page.

It involves someone (your web company or web administrator – or even yourself if you have access to your web page such that you can edit your meta data) inserting Facebook specific descriptive meta-tags into the head of your pages. Tags such as “type” allow you to define if the page is about say a hostel or a wine tour (Facebook only supports a number of page types which you do need to get from developer documentation though). The “og:image” tag allows you to specify an image URL such that when someone is liking your page that image will be selected as a thumbnail. The relationship between the information you provide to Facebook through Open Graph protocol and the information that is subsequently used when a person likes you page is an important part of the protocol in terms of business marketing on Facebook. It is your opportunity to dramatically improve the way your business information is displayed throughout Facebook.

Something that I think will be really good is that you can add Facebook user IDs for those that administer a page so that if someone likes a page you administer they can easily find you and potentially make contact with you further. This could be perfect for businesses.

The potential is endless such as adding a location to your business which can be then passed through when someone likes your page. In the first place though you need to be optimising your pages for Facebook using the Facebook Open Graph protocol meta tags.

A strategy canvas is a graph that on the horizontal axis lists the competitive factors of any particular industry while on the y axis your (or your competitors) offerings for those competitive factors are graded.  Here is a hypothetical example for web development in Queenstown:

One business clearly competes on price and offers a substantially different content management system.  At the other end of the scale one business (the dark blue) differentiates itself on the quality of the developer and is not competitive on price.

The advantage of the strategy canvas is that it allows you to identify the blue-oceans spaces in a market and focus your business strategy on those areas as opposed to competing in the crowded space.  For example in the above scenario by not competing on price the dark blue company has to be able compete on an alternative offering.

I always use a strategy canvas when consulting with clients on their web strategy and business strategies.  Here is a great excel template for deriving your own strategy canvas.  It shows both the comparative canvas but also a value curve which you can monitor over time as a KPI to see that your business execution is going in the same direction as your strategy.

Download strategy-canvas-template

I have just done some tests as to whether the site will generate traffic. Lots of people around New Zealand have commented to me that they are scared shitless about the site because they barely have enough resources to manage their own web content, plus the social media, let alone to be generating content for Tourism NZ. But the feeling is if they don’t they will be missing out. Small businesses are concerned that because bigger businesses have the resources so they will be able to dominate the content and thereby generate more traffic. I think this is a fair call. I guess it remains to be seen if the site is a major generator of traffic and if so perhaps there is a possibility to out-source the production of content to someone like Xebidy, after all we are already looking after a number of companies social profiles in Twitter, Facebook, or blogs etc. This may simply be another important medium.

From a search engine optimisation point of view there is nothing really to be gained from having your website linked from NewZealand.com as the links all contain no-follows tags which means Google does not count the link toward your overall Page Rank.

So the big telling point will be whether the site generates traffic to those that generate content – if so then it will be a vital tool for everyone in the travel industry – and more importantly probably we will need to work on ways to game it to ensure that the content we need to be most popular is.

Probably the one thing I don’t like is the ability of someone to edit someone else’s article – the idea is that the site is like a Wiki but not quite. Only the author has the right accept or reject the comment – not the whole community. I edited an article by Sarah Berry from Ministry of Development – adding a link to NZbyBike. It is a justified addition – but whether she lets it stay is another thing. It certainly did not feel right editing some of the other articles which are personal pieces.

I will report back on the success of my tests over the next few weeks in terms of traffic etc., but whatever the outcome you have to applaud Tourism NZ for the whole development and braveness of the experiment if it works it will genuinely be delivering better quality content to potential visitors to New Zealand that is truly reflective of New Zealand – or alternatively it will be a big spamfest!

What’s your opinion – are you going to be generating content on this site? Are you scared of it or can you see some benefits to your business?