Once your project team and its main partners are in agreement over the key messages and the key emotions you want your audience to be left with, you can move into the practical task of creating content.

Our content was based around six films, but we also had a Flickr stream, a blog, and daily Facebook and Twitter posts, and for every channel we considered frequency and tone, and made sure the posts were timed and not duplicated.

Videos
While videos are a more expensive option, we had a skilled videographer, with a history of capturing the spirit of Greenland, and we knew that an investment in his time would be worth it.

But most importantly we wanted our content to be more than just a compelling video: it needed to be so relevant for viewers that they would want to go out and be able to recreate the experience on the ground here in Destination Arctic Circle.  We are promoting tourism experiences, so we wanted to promote activities that any tourist could have access to.

Our six films followed the course of an adventure itinerary, where the adventurers Arne Hardenberg and Stefan Gimpl spent a night on the Ice Cap, a couple days dogsledding, a spectacular day of heli skiing, two days exploring contemporary local culture (one day in Sisimiut and one in Kangaamiut) and a day snowmobiling in the Sisimiut backcountry.

For the videos we included key facts in text overlay and used only Greenlandic music for the soundtracks to enhance the viewer experience and make the content both more compelling and informative.

In creating our content, we also embedded our tactic for deeper engagement in the shape of a small hidden bone carving called a tupilak. In each episode (except for the Rough Riders snowmobile film) the tupilak served as the starting point for our competition (more on the specifics of that in a later post.

Blog Posts
There was no talking in our videos, and there was a lot of information we wanted to share! So for each episode we included a blog post in the shape of “field notes”, told from either Stefan or Arne’s position. They included behind the scenes anecdotes, details on the experiences, fun facts, and travel diary entries.

While the main spectacle of the campaign was surely the six videos, the blog provided content that was necessary for setting the scene to those who were searching for a better understanding of our Greenlandic context. As it turned out those few people who were really digging into our content were also the ones mostly likely to share it and ultimately come visit the destination – so catering content to those might have been time consuming but it was well worth it.

Facebook/Twitter Posts
Each day for the six weeks of the campaign, from June 7 till July 18 2011, we posted on Facebook and Twitter. We had three Facebook pages (Destination Arctic Circle, Adventure Greenland by Air Greenland and ILoveGreenland by Visit Greenland) and two Twitter feeds (@dacgreenland and @ilovegreenland).

We strove to make the content different for each channel, or at least variations on the same thing. Furthermore, we prepared all posts ahead of time, literally in a word document that was uploaded into the publishing software Hootsuite for scheduled posts.

This was valuable exercise, because it prevented us from struggling each day with content. It was also important to post something every day to keep our audience engaged, and preparing posts for the entire campaign made this much easier to do while also freeing up time to be available for the everyday conversations across the various social media channels.

Flickr
People love photos, and as we realize every day, its impossible to take a bad photo in Greenland.

We had thousands of photos from the trip, which we eventually singled down to twenty select pics from each episode to go with the video content. We focused on photos that were not part of the videos as such in order to provide different content on Flickr, and we linked everything on Flickr back to the Vimeo video channel and vice versa.

Although the content on each of the channels was different, it worked together in a flow across different platforms, and everything was timed in relation to our ideas of how each specific channel worked for us. Facebook/Twitter posts were daily, whereas videos, blog posts and Flickr albums were posted weekly, and we always kept the messaging and goals top of mind, which kept it consistent.