VOL. 1
2009
2009 MEDIA NEWS What is Social Media? Social Media transforms people from content consumers into content producers. The world of social media is being shaped and reshaped every day. There is no perfect solution to promote your business within social media, the key is to try something, see if it works and if it doesn’t try again. The main thing is to get your business out in front of the consumer and they will tell you what they think. This goes way beyond a survey, this is how you can make or break your business model to better your bottom line. Advertising agency Campbell Ewald writes: “When you see an ad that either interests you or makes you question its authenticity, what’s the first thing you do? Go to Google or Amazon and read reviews, ratings, opinions, blogs, etc. We all do. This is the norm. No one goes to the experts anymore. They go to friends or peers (even if they don’t know them) who represent the collective experience of that brand’s ownership. Marketing needs to have a social media presence for the brand; one that represents it in a manner that meets consumer expectations, provides information they are seeking, content they can share and re-purpose and addresses questions, misconceptions and rumors” Social media has three components: the concept, the media type and the social interface to get across the concept within the media type. Common forms of social media include concepts, slogans: statements with a high memory retention that excites others to repeat. Grass-Roots, the direct action information dissemination such as public speaking, installations, performance, and demonstrations. And electronic media with ‘sharing’, syndication, or search algorithm technologies that includes internet and mobile devices. And lastly, print media that is designed to be re-distributed. If the idea of getting involved or getting involved deeper in Social Media is overwhelming, consider picking up the book Dave Evans, Social Marketing in an Hour a Day. This will introduce you to the basics, demonstrate how to manage details and describe how you can track results. Hands-on tutorials will help you execute a social media marketing campaign in just one hour a day on user-generated content sharing sites like YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr and more. Michigan Ranks #1 in the use of Social Media The State of Michigan’s Travel Michigan campaign ranked number first amongst the 50 official U.S. tourism office web sites in the use of social media according to a recent study by Gammet Interactive. Michigan uses popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube to get their message out. While on-line numbers of Facebook fans and Twitter followers are increasing illustrating Social Media is a growing marketing tool for the tourism industry.
49757 Features Newspapers/Magazines
Milwaukee Examiner Lansing State Journal Petoskey News Review Gadling Detroit Metro Times Fort Wayne News AAA Living Traverse Magazine Midwest Living Arizona Republic Birmingham Business Review Puget Sound Charlotte News Review Pacific Business Review Minneapolis/St. Paul Journal Music Festival & Fall features in newspapers in St. Louis, Denver, Boston, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, South Florida, Dallas, Tampa Bay, Wichita, Baltimore, San Antonio, Sacramento, Austin, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Orlando, Houston, Philly, Jacksonville, Memphis, New Orleans, New Mexico, Dayton, Atlanta, Washington DC, San Jose, Nashville, Portland and more. Music Industry Today ASCAP Interest Alert US Politics Today Hoover’s Market Watch Corporate Media News Audio/Video Producer Inbox Robot
Regional Radio Stations WKLT-FM WWJ-AM WJR-AM Clear Channel Sirius XM WCSX-FM WRIF-FM WDET-FM WCMU-FM
Other Talsma Furniture: Grand Rapids Furniture Company Henry Clay Estate Lexington Convention & Visitors Bureau
Television Today Show Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe 9 & 10 News WAFF NBC 48 (Huntsville AL)
KLKM ABC 9 (Lincoln NE) WSFA NBC 12 (Montgomery AL) WLOX ABC 13 (Biloxi, MS) WAFB CBS 9 (Baton Rouge, LA) KYTX CBS 19 (Tyler, TX) KMPH FOX 26 (Fresno, CA) WXVT CBS 15 (Greenville, MS) Montana News Station (Butte, MT) KFJX Fox 14 (Pittsburgh, KS) KWES NBC 9 (Midland, TX) WUPV CW 65 (Ashland, VA) WAND NBC 17 (Decatur, IL) WBAY ABC 2 (Green Bay, WI) WDBJ CBS 7 (Roanoke, VA) KTIV NBC 4 (Sioux City, IA) KLFY CBS 10 (Lafayette, LA) WTOC CBS 11 (Savannah, GA) WGBA CBS 12 (Greenville, SC) KOAM CBS 7 (Pittsburgh, KS) KRNV CBS 4 (Reno, NV) WTVM ABC 9 (Columbus, OH) KATCH ABC 3 (Lafayette, LA) WXIX FOX 19 (Cincinnati, OH) KHNL NBC 8 (Honolulu, HI) KTNV ABC 13 (Las Vegas, NV) KWTV CBS 9 (Oklahoma City, OK) plus 80 more stations throughout the Midwest, South and Southwest)
Web Yahoo UK & Ireland (47,000,000 visitors/day)18,000 visitors a day Yahoo Canada (47,018,000 visitors/day) Media Atlas WAFF RBC Dain Rauscher News Blaze Bolsamania SYS-Con Entertainer’s Resource Mega News Network Soapdom.com Bizjournals.com AOL Money News State House News Service Crains Detroit Blogs Small Boat Big Summer Variety ASCAP News PR Log Reuters FaceBook The Graphic Weekly Pollstar My North Surfwax Corporate Media News Entertainment Press Watch Black Liberal Boomer
Listmania TripAdvisor TripAdvisor branded sites alone make up the most popular and largest travel community in the world, with more than 25 million unique monthly visitors, 11 million+ registered members and more than 25 million reviews and opinions, this is the go to site for everything about travel in today’s online world. How to Post o Update your business profile: contact info, description, photos and amenities. o Keep up by responding to visitor comments not only to you show the online travel community you care about their perception of your property, but also to raise your business in the ranking. o Who can be listed? Accommodations, restaurants, attractions and travel resources Contact Jim Brody: jbrody@ tripadvisor.com.
TravelPost Kayak is a travel search engine, which means they search hundreds of travel sites from all over the world. TravelPost, developed by Kayak is a place for visitor’s to post comments about their stay, similar to Trip Advisor. Currently, they only permit properties to post on the site but we expect restaurants and attractions to be added soon. This is gaining in popularity on the web and is projected to be as popular as TripAdvisor shortly by industry analysts. How to Post: o Create an Account: for access to Kayak along with Travel Post o Update Business Profile-contact info, description, photos and amenities. o Respond to visitor comments o Get room availability and pricing posted, properties featured and put in weekly e-blasts for Kayak and TravelPost.
Michigan.org Michigan.org is the State of Michigan’s travel and tourism site. This is a great resource for generating visitors to Mackinac Island and a place for businesses to advertise and promote themselves. Michigan businesses are permitted to post their businesses on the site for free, but the business itself must do the posting. How to Post o All properties on Mackinac Island are welcome to have a free business profile o Create your business profile on www. michigan.org/travel/ admin o Deals and PackagesContact Carol Royse about being considered for e-blasts Contact: Carol Royse 517/373-3848 roysec@michigan.org
Contact Pegasus 888/431-0700 Kayak and
“In order to get trust -the gold dust of the Internet: a site needs “honest brokers” or people that give trust, and a “social network”the group that you can trust). ” —Jens, Tourism internet Marketing.com
Pure Michigan Campaign The Partnership Tourism Bureau businesses banned together to raise funds to support the Pure Michigan Campaign. Funds were used to help promote Mackinac Island as a featured destination on the www.michigan.org website this past summer along with radio ads in the Chicago Market. The agency hired to create the Pure Mackinac commercial was McCann Erickson, a global advertising agency network with offices in over 130 countries and almost eight decades of multinational experience. McCann Erickson was directly responsible for the success of Coca Cola’s campaign “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” in 1972 and most recently the Mastercard commercial saying “There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.”
Pure Michigan July Stats During July, the Mackinac Island partnership received 49,312 page views by 43,245 visits. Nearly 74% of the visits were referred to michigan.org by a search engine; over 49% of the total visits were from Google. The average Mackinac Island partnership visit lasted 12 minutes on michigan.org and included 12 page views. Over 81% of the visits navigated to the partnership page using the Featured Destinations link. The “Accommodations” link was the most popular with 23% of all clicks. The July 2009 click-thru rate was 64%. Last year visitors spent $17.5 billion, generating $971 million in state taxes and accounting for 193,000 jobs statewide, making tourism a vital industry in Michigan.
Actor Tim Allen was our voice and the commercials have proved to be very successful. McCann Erikson and Travel Michigan granted us permission to use the Tim Allen radio spot on our internet radio station, Radio Mackinac. The spot opens the stream each time a listener clicks on our station.
Contributing Hotels: Grand Hotel, Mission Point Resort, Island House, Lake View Hotel, Harbour View Inn, Chippewa Hotel, Inn at Stonecliffe, Murray Hotel, Inn on Mackinac, Lilac Tree Hotel, Metivier Inn, Hotel Iroquois, Cottage Inn, Market Street Inn, Main Street Inn and Cloghaun. Contributing Attractions: Mackinac Island Carriage Tours Contributing Restaurants Woods Restaurant, Jockey Club, Bistro on the Green, 1852 Grill Room, Goodfellows Grill, Pink Pony, Doud’s Market, Carriage House, Millie’s on Main, Horn’s Bar, Village Inn, Mary’s Bistro and Yankee Rebel Tavern Give Thanks Please be sure to thank the above mentioned businesses for assisting every business on Island in bringing more tourists there this summer. This campaign helped everyone. If your business would like to contribute and we hope you will, please contact Tourism Bureau President Bob Benser.
END OF SUMMER STATS Pure Mackinac
Radio Mackinac
AT&T
USPS
Top 10 Metro Areas Chicago Grand Rapids New York Southfield Lansing Indianapolis Columbus Washtenaw County Livonia Oak Park
Top 10 Metro Areas Green Bay Lexington Detroit Chicago New York Columbus Washington DC San Francisco Philadelphia St Louis
Top 10 Area Codes Northern Michigan Oakland County Ann Arbor Lansing Upper Peninsula Chicago Detroit Flint/Grand Blanc Suburban Chicago Suburban Cleveland
Top 10 Zip Codes Livonia East Lansing Ann Arbor Grand Blanc Rochester Hills Swartz Creek Granger (IN) Howell Westland Crown Point (IN)
Ranked 7th on iTunes in AAA (Adult Album Alternative, Americana and Folk Rock genres
(Granger & Crown Point are also college towns)
Bounce Rates vs Exit Rates Bounce rates can be used to help determine the actual performance of an entry page and measures the percentage of visitors that hit your website on a given page and don’t visit any other pages on your site. An exit rate is the percentage of visitors that leave your site from a given page based on the number of visits to that page (or page views in some cases) An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the web site. Avinash Kaushik of Google shares: “It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying Why are bounce rates and exit rates important? Both can help you glean insights about the usefulness of your site. Bounce rates are important for determining how your home page or landing page performs as compared to visitor expectations. Exit rates are important for determining which page in a process isn’t performing up to expectations. The exception would be if the customer is leaving regularly on a page that would answer their query or convert to a sale such as a contact/accommodations/ dining etc... or checkout/shopping cart on an e-commerce site. Addressing bounce and exit rates can help you better the customers expectations, which can lead to higher conversion rates (whether that means sales, registrations, RSS subscriptions, etc.).
Web 2.0 Means Listen First Listening allows us to track conversation trends, brand/ product mentions, what people are saying about the competition and what the competition is saying about themselves. This listen first mentality applies just as much to travel and tourism marketing as it does consumer packaged goods.
Having a good listening post in place also enables marketers and business owners to quickly identify positive and negative stories in social media which gives the business owner/ marketing agency the ability to respond immediately. But, how do you monitor what is being said so that you can listen?
Sign up for an RSS Reader through Google and populate your RSS reader with feeds from every important source of news and information (newspaper, magazine or blog) from your particular industry. Everyone from Travel Michigan to blogs about Mackinac Island to the The New York Times offer RSS feeds. Look for the universal RSS icon and get clicking. As you use your reader more and more you’ll find your comfort zone in organizing the incoming feeds. Consider using Twitter Search (http://search. twitter.com/) to find mentions or “tweets” about your business and subscribe to the resulting RSS feeds.
Google has overtaken everything today and has taken over Technorati as the preferred blog search engine. You can just surf on Google to see what is being written online, grab the RSS feed or subscribe to the ever popular Google Alerts to receive email alerts in your mailbox daily, weekly or as they happen. This works for all areas of Google, including news, images and video. Because consumers are showing information about your businesses online and through multimedia sharing sites like Flickr and Youtube, it is imperative to pay attention and thank them for posting information about your business online.
What is Web 2.0?
“Web 2.0” is commonly associated with web development and web design that facilitates interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design[1] and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, socialnetworking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them.
Numbers During the 2009 season so far we shipped out 35,000 visitors guides, had 115,000 downloads of the visitors guide to date from mackinacisland. org and went through 220,000 maps, 100,000 accommodations guides and 85,000 dining guides. Your support of our publications ensures the consumer gets the information they need and you get your message in front of the right audience.
Flickr.com Flickr is an image and video hosting website and online community. In addition to being a popular website for users to share personal photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository. As of June 2009, Flickr is host to more than 3.6 billion images, up from 3 billion in November 2008. Mackinac Island currently has 36,283 images of the Island on the site.
Tourism Bureau on Flickr The Tourism Bureau has posted 2,957 images to date with over 14,248 views of those images by surfers. We also offer Flickr photo contests for the Lilac Festival, Dog & Pony Show and the Budweiser Clydesdales visit to the Island to encourage visitors to interact with us online during the winter months when the most postings occur. We encourage all businesses to do the same.
YouTube.com There are 1,150 videos posted about Mackinac Island with additional videos posted that relate to the Island - such as musicians performing, clubs, housing, school groups, etc. The Tourism Bureau has extensive video archives and now breaks them down and posts them on YouTube to promote the Island. Our most popular video is “A Mackinac Winter” showing the armchair traveler remains curious about us year ‘round.
Official Websites
mackinacisland.org mackinacislanddogandponyclub.org mackinacislandfudgefestival.org mackinacislandlilacfestival.org mackinacislandtourismbureau.org mackinacislandweddings.org radiomackinac.org
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