Monday, September 28, 2009

Fiery Sydney sunset sparks social media success

With the youth market already contributing 37% of international visitor arrivals in New South Wales, Tourism NSW were keen to further encourage young travellers to visit Sydney and extend their stay.

Acknowledging word of mouth as an effective channel, they recognised a need to generate content containing a balance of information, opinion and entertainment which would position Sydney as a unique destination. By engaging social networks through defensive and then offensive strategic communications the @sydney_sider Twitter account was established to promote key messages regarding Sydney and react to discussions, comments and questions as they arise.

On 16th July 2009 the setting sun caught the attention of Sydneysiders which was reflected through the Twitter Stream. As an established account @sydney_sider was able to leverage existing followers to encourage Sydneysiders to tweet comments and photos of the natural spectacle.

The Twitter stream for “Sydney” swelled with keywords “sky” and “sunset” with descriptions including best, beautiful and love. Creating the hashtag #sydneysunset, @sydney_sider was able to direct traffic to the stream of positive sentiments and images which were retweeted and shared creating 107,274 impressions.

This user generated content was also used to create a post on the Sydneysider blog, earning high Google rankings for the query “Sydney sunset” and an increase in interactions on the Tourism NSW managed Facebook page.

By reacting immediately @sydney_sider was able to take the organic conversation around a natural phenomenon and increase the presence of Sydney in the Twitter stream, reaching 66,795 people in 191 aggregated tweets.

Daemon Digital Case Study_Sydney Sunset

Monday, September 7, 2009

Can you ease into Social Media?

I’ve been reading with interest the reactions to companies who have stumbled in the social arena. In particular on blogs outlining Habitat UK’s hashtag spam, those commenting reeled at the idea of having an intern execute such a highly visible part of the communications strategy. And yet at the same time there is disbelief around the policies in place for US Marines, US Open competitors and on game day for the NFL.

Closer to home, Mat Rogers tweeted his way into trouble with the NRL and at the Social Media Summit in Melbourne the heavily government based audience continually expressed concern at trying to have a two way conversation when it takes forever to get copy approved.

While contemplating whether companies should hire, outsource or DIY their social media strategy, JD Rucker states “having a poorly run social media strategy is worse than not having one at all”. At the same time Nancy Williams is adamant (as I’m sure many of you are): social media without conversation isn’t social media.

When it comes to sports and politics, the consequences of a social media stumble can mean more then just crisis communications. (And of all people to stumble, sportsmen and the public service seem to be the very best at it and I doubt your clear/strict/enforced social media policy is going to change that much.) This is based on rules and regulations set in stone long before the rise of blogs and Twitter.

So while those involved push for changes to allow a more open channel of communication, will we (the public, fans, advocates, constituents, lookers-on, social media mavens) allow them to approach the medium with baby steps? If they won’t let us comment, will we share their content? If they won’t publish our feedback, will we give them our opinion? If they can’t answer our questions, will we seek out (and trust) their advocates instead?

Original post by http://mab397.wordpress.com