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Earlier this month the B2B travel industry event World Travel Market (WTM) provided an outstanding opportunity for Ogilvy PR and its travel clients like the Brazilian Tourist Board to meet and network. For our travel PR specialists a particular event highlight was the Travel Blog Camp, a knowledge session on online PR and social media. It offered bloggers, journalists, travel industry and PR professionals the unique chance to discuss the impact of social and online media on the travel and tourism industry.

Run by Darren Cronian of Travel Rants (www.travel-rants.com), the Travel Blog Camp was first and foremost a forum for travel industry leaders to voice their opinions and share experiences on all things social media. As social media pros, we were pleased to learn that many of them have already embraced the new medium and its progressive possibilities.

Yet, what emerged during the session was the recognition of what social media in essence stands for – an extremely powerful and contemporary form of word of mouth marketing. With some serious commitment for generating positive word of mouth and best practice procedures in place, travel brands needn’t shy away from incorporating social media into their overall marketing strategies. As much as social networking sites like Twitter allow countless visitors to see a customer complaint, they also offer a democratic platform for eye-witnessing companies’ proficiencies in dealing with disgruntled customers. 

For more information on word of mouth marketing hot topics, visit the websites of Ogilvy PR’s global 360 Digital Influence practice head John Bell who is the President of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) (http://womma.org/main/). He’s in fact opening the WOMMA Summit 2009 today. The Summit Buzz Room (http://womma.org/summit09/) is a great way to keep up-to-date with all the latest word of mouth debates.

So what did the Travel Blog Camp teach us? No matter if one is an advocate of publicly displayed criticism or not, the means of travel industry communications are changing fast. But the basic principles of customer service, right at the heart of all travel and tourism businesses, remain unchanged. Social media is another, and indeed very powerful, platform through which travel brands communicate with their consumers.

The words ‘Achilles’ and ‘heel’ often come to mind when PR professionals discuss measurement. How do the self-proclaimed owners of ‘earned media’ evaluate effectiveness when we are often perceived to measure output rather than outcomes, even in a digital age? 

For those who are implementing social media, citizen journalism, digital PR campaigns – call it what you will, this has become an even more urgent question – and for too long have responded with a most dissatisfying answer. As the digital opportunities form and reform with each new blog post, video upload and 140 character musing, we’ve steadily moved towards the classic moment when a big question has to be addressed. How will we measure it?

In these difficult economic times, where budgets are being re-evaluated and ROI is even more scrutinised, we as an industry need to justify our slice of marketing budgets by focusing not solely on output (CPM, AVE, etc) but on the ability to measure effectiveness like never before. As an agency that has turned inside out to transform itself into an organization where Digital Influence runs through everything we do, this has been at the forefront of our mind. The fact that 84% of social media campaigns are not measured1 is a huge opportunity for those of us who focus on evaluation when analysing the digital fruits of our labour. How we measure the impact of social media is a question that is not only fundamental, but is answerable in the here and now, with software doing a good proportion of the legwork.

We do have an opportunity to be more rigorous given the rise of technology solutions. At a tactical level, the adoption of social media releases (SMR) for example has proved invaluable in shaping the way we now engage with stakeholders and measure the impact of our outreach. Whilst working on the 50th anniversary of Barbie earlier this year, a project targeting multiple international markets, we were able to shape the campaign around the creation and distribution of broadcast and online video content via the SMR, ensuring the story reached a global audience in a cost effective, measurable and impactful way.

The ability to tag, monitor and measure the impact of video content in particular is also shaping the way brands are leveraging this most powerful of communication tools. As the thirst for video continues to grow, so has the need to demonstrate its effectiveness to clients in helping to communicate the brand’s key messages.  The adage that ‘good content will always find an audience’ still rings true, but now is the time for us to embrace the ability to demonstrate the impact of this content rather than focus disproportionately on the ‘perceived’ effectiveness and output of our campaigns. The rules of third party engagement have evolved rather than revolutionised over the last few years, providing PR with the ability to tangibly quantify behavioural change through more scientific metrics.

The Holy Grail is simplicity and comparability in media measurement. As a result, John Bell, President of WOMMA worldwide and an Ogilvy digital leader, developed the Conversation Impact™ model. Born out of a need to align closer to widely accepted marketing and reputation building models, particularly the ‘purchasing funnel’, it places a bigger emphasis on measuring behavioural change rather than solely focusing on ‘traditional’ metrics. This has to be way forward in my view. The challenge is for us all to focus on the big objectives and outcomes while forensically exploring the granular range of new digital tools to support us in this process.

It’s about time that we who deal in social communications do the same. We need to come together and take an “open-crowd-wiki-sourced” approach to it and set some benchmarks and agreed parameters we are all happy with. We should be able to shouldn’t we? It’s called SOCIAL media after all…

1E-marketer, August 2009