Back in the Fall of 2010 Destination Arctic Circle was invited to join a speaker session about emerging destinations at the Adventure Travel World Summit in Aviemore, Scotland.We chose to talk about how a destination with virtually no budget, very limited resources, no established brand, and hardly any foothold with travelers could conceptualize a future for itself as an adventure travel destination and build a brand from there.This concept of “emerging” helped us understand our role in the wider context of the adventure travel community, and we realized that people’s lack of knowledge about not only Destination Arctic Circle but Greenland would be a key element in any future strategy to build and improve brand awareness for our destination.

Later that week, as we listened in on a session about social media, we realized that not only was social media talks often much about headlines they also often avoided the in-depth question about how to get any tangible results from your activities. In short, we felt a need to connect the dots between saying that you used social media and performing meaningful, brand-related activities in your social media channels.

And since we could find no significant tourism research documenting whether spending time and money on social media was worth our while we also wanted to help others see potential benefits and pitfalls through a case study of what we wanted to do.

All this meant that we created the Social Media in the Wild project in order to combine research and social media campaigning – and this eventually became the Rough. Real. Remote. social media push in the summer of 2011.

As such we had two main goals with the project:

1: Create awareness of Destination Arctic Circle and Greenland through a social media campaign using videos and photos to bring the brand to life.

2: Document every step of the project and turn it into a research component that could help other adventure travel destinations and tour operators improve their social media ROI.

We decided to produce 6 short films about a winter adventure journey through Destination Arctic Circle, and along with the production we would document in writing and statistics as much as possible in order to not only analyze the final results of the campaign but also to help others understand the potentials of structuring a focused social media push around a set of core values and goals.

All this is documented in this blog where we will showcase both statistics, describe the wider case study of the project, and give samples of the campaign content and related cases.