Bringing It All Together - Key SoMeT takeaways to bring back to your organization today | William Bakker | #SoMeT15AU Caloundra, Australia

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

WillIiam Bakker, Cheif Strategist at Destination Think!, wraps-up key takeaways that were discussed by all the speakers throughout #SoMeT15AU. Destination Think!, a global marketing agency focusing exclusively on the tourism industry. He is considered a leader in the world of digital destination marketing and speaks at conferences around the world. Before joining Destination Think! in 2010, William was the eMarketing Director at Tourism British Columbia for over 10 years. You can read his thoughts on his blog: wilhelmus.ca or connect with him on Twitter: @wilhemus.

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Bringing It All Together - Key SoMeT takeaways to bring back to your organization today | William Bakker | #SoMeT15AU Caloundra, Australia

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In 2011, when Ontario, Canada established tourism regions in order to spur the provincial tourism economy, most of those new regions invested in creating and promoting new brands. Regional Tourism Organization Four Inc.(‘RTO4′) went the opposite direction. First, the organization chose a name that couldn’t be more obscure and second, committed to a process of critically assessing all its initiatives based on a strict model of goal – strategy – measurement. The regional tourism board focuses on helping the destinations in their region to become highly effective in their marketing approach through product development and differentiation. Today the team works with operators in their region to market their businesses more efficiently through a combination of digital tools and strategies that have a proven ROI. This is RTO4 – a destination with a highly relevant approach to modern destination marketing. In this keynote, CEO, David Peacock, shared the history of how RTO4 became a tourism development incubator and their vision for a new approach to destination marketing that is suitable for the connected and distributed economy.

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

In the closing keynote of #SoMeT15US, William looked at the overall state of destination marketing and put this in context with the broader opportunities he sees for Destination Marketers. As part of his presentation, he introduced an exciting new standard we developed with six DMOs around the world that finally answers the question “What’s the ROI of social media?” To get notified when William's whitepaper on this topic becomes available, sign-up here http://destinationthink.com/. William Bakker is Chief Strategist at Destination Think!, a global marketing agency focusing exclusively on the tourism industry. He is considered a leader in the world of digital destination marketing and speaks at conferences around the world.

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Social transformation is happening throughout the business world whether you’re part of it or not. At #SoMeT15US, we heard from Mark Rybchuk, Hootsuite’s Specialist, State & Local Government and learned how this transformation is important to Destination Marketing Organizations. Get practical advice to get empowered to sell social change into your organization and takeaway key strategic considerations specifically for DMOs as you scale social media across departments from his presentation. Beyond marketing and communications, hear how you can optimize social media effectively in other departments like Customer Service, Sales and HR. The presentation concluded with a fireside chat with Destination BC to showcase how DMOs leverage the power of social to drive business objectives.

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

Melissa Washington helped demystify the use of LinkedIn in the world of destination marketing. LinkedIn is usually not the first social media platform thought of when it comes to helping promote a destination. LinkedIn should be in your social media tool box and Melissa will share why and how in her session. She is an early adopter of LinkedIn, joining in 2011 (LinkedIn started in 2010). She has used this dynamic platform for selling, researching, marketing, job seeking, recruiting, and collaborating. The main topics Melissa focused on were: - How to use LinkedIn to promote your destination - Having your employees become your brand ambassadors - Targeted news updates - Build connections for meeting and event organizers - BONUS – Never make a cold call again

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Eagle, Colorado has a passion for mountain biking, and they’re using it to their advantage. Destinations can achieve wonders by focusing on what they do best to differentiate from the crowd, and Eagle is proof. They’ve even traded their foot paths for a mountain biking trail system! Learn from Amy Cassidy how the remarkable Town of Eagle’s trail system draws in visitors within the mountain biking niche. Eagle focuses on mountain biking, but along with the mountain biking “lifestyle” comes a host of other amenities for travellers, such as breweries, coffee shops, events, races and a general healthy attitude of embracing the outdoors.

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LoveSpringfield.co is an experiment in crowdsourcing by the Springfield, Missouri Convention & Visitors Bureau. In his presentation, Sean Dixon will discuss the story behind the project, the insights and learnings that were gained from the stories they collected, and how that information will impact their future marketing efforts as an organization. Sean Dixon is the Interactive Media Manager for the Springfield, Missouri CVB. In his spare time, he enjoys being a father, photographer, video gamer, and software developer. He holds an MA in Communication and a BS in Mass Media from Missouri State University.

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

“If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.” – Eric Shinseki Navigating disruption isn’t easy, especially without effective tracking, measurement and reporting tools in place. “Destination brand” can be defined as the collective sum of shared stories about a destination. Big Data now allows destinations to easily track, measure and report meaningful digital metrics about destination brand, marketing and storytelling efficacy. Having a transparent, honest lens into these digital metrics helps organizations focus on performance-based initiatives and also builds digital skills capacity. Assisting key demand generators to deploy digital operations dashboards is a tactic with measurable results. Zac Gribble is an entrepreneur at heart with several business ventures brought to fruition since graduating from business school in 1996. His current mission as Director of Media Technology with Regional Tourism Organization Four Inc. (‘RTO4′) is to help build an entrepreneurial mindset within the world of destination marketing and management that focuses on experimentation, agility and adaptability. As the tourism industry continues to navigate the massive technological disruption from the web, social media, mobile, wearables and proximity awareness, Zac envisions a brave new world ripe with opportunity for tourism organizations willing to shift towards adaptive KPIs and a culture of innovation.

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Budget, resources, and visibility of social in business is growing every year. Marketers are now integrating social strategies into all campaigns and programs as a core channel. This increased focus on social requires the need to measure its business impact, changing how marketers measure and report on their social activities and successes. In this session, hear from Ben Cathers, Senior Strategic Solutions Consultant at Hootsuite to learn the tactics leading marketers are using to measure social attribution in their business and how they tie social back to marketing KPIs and overall business objectives. Ben is a Senior Strategic Solutions Consultant at Hootsuite. He sells, pitches and manages the initial and expansion rollout phases for some of Hootsuite’s largest government rollouts such as The Canadian Government, State of Massachusetts, State of Maryland, City of Boston and New York City.

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

The majority of meeting and event planners don’t know what a convention and visitors bureau is, much less how to use one. They tend to be social media dilettantes and lurkers. So how do you reach them? What kind of key performance indicators do you need to track? What elements of your leisure strategy can be repurposed for the meeting, incentive, conference and exhibition market? And how can you do all this with your limited budget and staff?

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Do you ever think that agencies are lucky to be able to work with such a wide variety of clients? If you’re in an agency, do you ever dream of how you could change your client’s approach if you were in the trenches? Grace Goodman will discuss the transition from agency life to being client-side at a DMO. She will talk about challenges she faces in merging the worlds of agency and DMO life and will share how the knowledge she gained from her agency days influences what she works on now – helping Destination DC improve its digital strategy – by focusing on content marketing, social media, email, web strategy and user experience.

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As any marketer knows, when it comes to content, quality trumps quantity. But quality content takes time and resources that many organizations just don’t have. To ensure you’re providing your social community the best possible timely content on the frontlines, you need to be backed by efficient workflows to streamline coordination and collaboration between teams while also ensuring a secure publishing environment. In this session, hear more from Ben to learn best practices and tactics for safe and effective content management including social scheduling, hashtag monitoring, message assignment and permissions and simplifying content curation.

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Kelly Kingman is passionate about helping people think and communicate more visually. Combining careers in publishing, design, digital content and graphic storytelling, Kelly shows marketers how to harness the power of pictures and words to make messages engaging and stickier. As a graphic storyteller, Kelly captures and visualizes information in real-time and teaches individuals how to use simple images to ideate, collaborate and communicate more effectively. Combined with a publishing and digital marketing expertise, she specializes in simplifying and visualizing messages so they spread farther, faster in an increasingly image-driven social media landscape. In her workshop, Kelly showed you how to take one post idea or a handful of bullet points and turn it into a plethora of shareable, memorable content. By adding a visual layer to your content, you can super charge your content creation efforts. It’s like putting a megaphone to your words! And you don’t have to be an artist to use these techniques. This in-depth (and creative!) session will cover: • How to turn one idea into 10 pieces of content (without writing 10 times as much) • How to greatly increase sharing and “stickiness” by harnessing the power of visual media • No design team required: the few basic principles and tools anyone can use to create visual content

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

Destinations and tourism marketers now have a valuable opportunity to obtain guest intelligence from the social web and online review sites in order to: - Better understand visiting travelers through public reviews - Know specifics of what guests like and dislike about their hospitality offering - Benchmark guest satisfaction levels between cities or regions - Assist operators in improving the guest experience through providing tools and education

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Transforming a DMO in a customer centric organization implies a double movement: no digital transformation without a human transformation. In his presentation, Frank Cuypers will discuss how a DMO should think like a festival. Frank is one of Europe’s leading experts on destination marketing and will bring an exciting international perspective. This will be a very informative and eye opening presentation that will force you to think outside the box. Frank has been consulting and transforming the DMO Visit Flanders for four years. He is a Associated Professor of Marketing at the University of Antwerp and also teaches City Marketing at Karel De Grote College. He is a firm believer in a new way of marketing destinations who argues constantly with people who still confuse marketing with promotion.

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Lauren Bath was back on the stage at SoMeT again this year! Lauren’s presentation covered her in-depth experience in the tourism industry as an Instagrammer and advice on undertaking these sorts of campaigns. Lauren also spoke to delegates about how to effectively work with influencers, emerging industry standards, making the most out of a social media campaign and what your budget will get you. Lauren is a chef turned photographer due to her early success on the popular social media platform Instagram. Becoming Australia’s first “professional Instagrammer” two years ago, has seen Lauren extend her skills from destination marketer to social media educator, consultant and strategist. Also delving into project management, Lauren is a wealth of information on social media campaigns, their KPI’s, working with influencers and more.

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

Senior Strategic Consultant for Destination Think!, Aaron Nissen is a digital native, who in his 11 years of experience, has worked on just about every kind of web project imaginable. Aaron was formerly the Director of e-Strategies for Travel Alberta where he managed an annual budget of $3.8 Million. He has served three years on advisory committees for Canada e-Connect and Online Revealed Canada. As part of Travel Alberta’s Management Committee, Aaron shared responsibility for setting the organizational strategy. He was responsible for building digital strategies that considered both internal and external stakeholders. Aaron has extensive experience working with large DMOs, Governments, and consortia partnerships. Aaron has been asked to speak at a wealth of conferences and Annual General Meetings, such as TIC BC, Canada eConnect, Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association AGM, Tourism Kelowna AGM and the Travel Alberta Industry Conference.

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

A travel blogger’s influence extends across multiple channels where they share stories, destination highlights, tips and recommendations that targets people moving through each of the five stages of travel. How can you then collaborate with travel bloggers in a way that maintains the integrity of their story, yet tap into their influence to showcase your destination, and commit them to visiting? Caroline (‘Caz’) Makepeace shared her insights into how they effectively marketed destinations on their road trip while keeping it very real to their own story. She offered tips on how to create these campaigns, choose the right bloggers and how to effectively work with them. Caz is the co-founder of yTravel blog with her husband, Craig. They’ve just finished an 18-month road trip around Australia with their children, collaborating with many tourism boards along the way. They’ve been featured on Lonely Planet, National Geographic Online, Virgin Australia, Expedia, and the Today Show. Their reach extends into the millions. yTravel have partnered with brands such as Nissan, Ford, Qantas, Amex, and Canon. They were invited as one of the top travel bloggers in the world to attend the first ever travel summit at the White House and regularly speak at travel, blogging, and social media conferences.

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So you’ve implemented an inspiring social media campaign and you’re getting loads of social traction, but what about the real results? Are you confident your social investment is driving real visitation to your region? It’s all well and good to have an engaged and growing social community, but how are you nurturing these social leads so they take the next step to actually visit your destination? In her presentation, Rebecca White offered practical insight and case study analysis of how the publishing of epic content, in conjunction with a well optimised website and a targeted communication plan, can help you to convert more of your social spectators into destination visitors. Rebecca is a tourism industry specialist with over 15 years in tourism marketing. After a decade with the South Australian Tourism Commission, Rebecca has helped many tourism businesses and destination marketing organisations grow their profits and visitor numbers through her consultancy work, facilitating eCourses through Tourism eSchool and speaking at tourism events. Content marketing is Bec’s specialty; she loves showing the tourism industry how to grow their visitor numbers and bookings by creating and sharing great content online.

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Destination Instameets have been done… and done… and done. So, how do we make them different? Hosted influencer activity isn’t just about capturing striking imagery to generate a spark in a potential visitor, pride in a local advocate, or an engagement from someone on the other side of the world. There has to be a conversion element, brand messaging and actively engaging content. Enter: timelapse and hyperlapse photography. In March 2015, Tourism NT hosted Australia’s first ‘Hypermeet’, inviting influencers to Do Instagram with a difference, and Do the Red Centre Way while they were at it! Cory Gale is a tourism professional with experience ranging across a range of tourism disciplines: marketing, communications, PR, Visitor Centre management, event management, and major attraction management. A proud Western Australian, Cory has worked at LTO, RTO and STO level for both government and NFP organisations. He has swapped golden shores and vineyards for deep, red earth – currently heading up social media at Tourism NT, working in the Social Media and PR Team.

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

In the future, every job and role that can be digitalized, will be digitalized. We are moving to smarter cities, but doesn’t that also require smarter organizations? What will be the future role of a DMO in this time of transformation? Frank provided an in-depth discussion about the future role for destination marketing, with some theoretical considerations and practical cases. Frank Cuypers is a strategic consultant for Visit Flanders, Associated Professor of Marketing at the University of Antwerp and also teaches City Marketing at Karel De Grote College. Frank has been integrally involved with transforming and creating a new strategy for Visit Flanders. He is a firm believer in a new way of marketing destinations who argues constantly with people who still confuse marketing with promotion. Frank is one of Europe’s leading experts on destination marketing and will bring an exciting international perspective. This will be a very informative and eye opening presentation that will force you to think outside the box.

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SoMeT: A New Model for Destination Marketing

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