When we talk about a concept for strategic engagement our focus is on the entire overarching conceptual framework for the social media campaign. This framework helps us understand why we are doing this and to what ends, and it helps us see the potentials of engaging with others strategically in order to identify those connections with whom we might have mutual business interests.

In other words, strategic engagement means intentionally looking for conversations with people (both B2B and B2C) that will add value to your business and create a return on your investment – and it means identifying the best tools to start those conversations.

Our concept for strategic engagement was two-fold:
- Make the content easily accessible to the highest number of relevant people
- Use partners to reach the highest number of relevant people

Make the Content Easily Accessible
Before we produced the content we needed to define how people would access it. With our small budget and desire for wide exposure, social media was chosen as our channel.  Avid social media users ourselves, we knew that targeting the message would be worth the while. And we believed that aiming for quality over quantity would yield the best results and facilitate a feeling of discovery that so appeals to adventure travelers.

We decided to produce a dedicated microsite for the Rough.Real.Remote. journey where the vidoes and blog posts would be posted, but we did not anticipate that people would initially view the content on the website. Rather, we correctly assumed that people would discover the content through social media, and we would place it in front of those people who we thought would be most interested in it. They would visit the microsite when they were searching for more information.

Certainly, you can’t control social channels once your content is released, but you can control how and when it gets put out there, and that makes all the difference.

Our goal was to have people discover our videos over social media and then turn to the website for more information. We knew that if a person was interested in Greenland, once they viewed one video they would either find the previous episodes or tune in the following week for the next in the series.

After we had determined the shortest path to the content, we engaged our partners.  We had two sets of “partners” – our project partners Air Greenland and Visit Greenland and our ambassadors/influencers.

Project Partners
Our key partners shared our goals and were willing to work with us, and our combined voices took the message further. For example, Air Greenland, has left a link to the final episode, Settlement Songs, on their homepage since the end of the campaign, and as a result of the airline’s reach across the globe people from 70 different countries have clicked onto the landing page for that film.

Our partners also traced the Rough. Real. Remote. journey through their respective Facebook and Twitter feeds. Although the posts on each channel were not identical, they followed the same ideas and themes as outlined in the overarching content plan that we will describe in our next post [in-blog- link].

Therefore, we staggered them over the course of the day (GTE posted first for early morning in Europe, we posted for early morning in Greenland and Air Greenland posted for early morning in North America), and this timezone sensitive scheduling allowed us to reach broader audiences and remain active and engaged with users at different times of the day.

Ambassadors/ Influencers
Secondly, we identified ambassadors and influencers (we will post on this tactic in detail later on) who would be interested in our content.  These ambassadors and influencers were individuals as well as companies who we thought would gain social capital by spreading our message – they were either enthusiasts or supporters of Greenland, or they were innovative, early adopters in the adventure industry.

Bringing it All Together
Along with our partners, we made our content easily accessible to people and companies who were interested in our product. This broad orchestration of engagement helped us target people who considered our content valuable to them, because it was in line with their interests.  These people were more likely to explore our content and therefore help us reach our key goal of raising awareness of the region and inspiring people to one day visit Greenland.

As such the concept of strategic engagement was a matter of using a combination of our brand values and social media goals to set up a plan of action based on our interest in finding and engaging with oncoming traffic that we knew would turn up and show an interest in Greenland once we set in motion down the road we had planned for ourselves.

Your messages are the articulation of your brand values. For the Rough. Real. Remote. campaign, we chose videos to interpret our brand for the world.

Based on our experience, we found four key things to keep in mind when defining messaging:

- Be Consistent
- Be Different from your competitors
- Be Synergistic with your partners
- Reflect Your Branding Position

The messaging needs to be uniform, so that the message is clearly received. Before you create your brand messaging, be sure to understand the messages of your stakeholders, partners and competitors.  You want to work with your partners and stakeholders and stand apart from your competition.

As a destination in Greenland, we didn’t want our messaging to contradict the national brand messaging – we needed it to work synergistically – yet we wanted to stand apart from other destinations in Greenland.  Our point of differentiation was our focus on the quality and diversity of regional adventure travel products and values.

The messaging obviously needs to reflect the brand position. Our goal was, and continues to be, for people to think of “Rough. Real. Remote.” when they think of Destination Arctic Circle, just as they would think of “romance” when they think of Paris or “modern” when they think of Tokyo. We know we are still a long way off from this type of brand recognition, but consistent and effective messaging is the only way to get there over time.

As we brought our brand to life and defined the messages that would help us reach our long-term goals, we found that we were actually shifting the tourism narrative away from outdated cultural traditions, such as igloos and drum dancing, that are often showcased solely for touristic entertainment.

The shift that the brand values brought about was and continues to be towards authentic, living Greenlandic culture while we continue to produce messaging that contemporizes and contextualizes our place for the adventure tourists.

Our key message is: Modern Greenlandic culture is alive and evolving in Destination Arctic Circle.

One example of how we conveyed this message was to show how the Rough Riders pushing the limits of snowmobiling in the backcountry of Sisimiut were creating new Greenlandic cultural traditions. And another narrative was the story of a 17 year old high school student and a 70 year old hunter both passionate about dog sledding. While other stories focused on sharing Arctic street culture, with kids playing soccer in the snow, doing bike tricks in town, and snowboarding.

So, in our project our messages were part of the development of a new narrative, but we still stuck to the ground rules: Keeping the narrative in tune with the new national Pioneering Nation brand, keeping it different from the messages being put out by neighboring destinations, and keeping it consistent and true to our brand.

Our goal in launching this project was to bring our newly and lovingly created brandto life for the world. As we went into content creation, we were able to recite our brand values in our sleep.  At that stage, however, they were simply words or sentences which described emotions we felt acted as the best higher order benefits tourists would receive from visiting our place. But what did that mean on film?Know Your Brand Values
Understanding brand values in context, means defining your values with words, images and a story.We literally had our brand values (Rough. Real. Remote.) written on a white board, in order to constantly remind ourselves what we were trying to convey, because it was so easy to get lost.

Know the Context
Secondly, we had to constantly remind ourselves of the context itself – promotional tourism videos.  Although we hoped to inspire pride in locals, and have them reflected in what we created, they weren’t the primary audience – adventure travelers were.

(By Adventure Travelers, we were aiming for well traveled, outdoorsy, 25-45 year olds, higher than average education, higher than average household incomes, equally male or female, unlikely to have children).

The key for having consistent messaging was simply keeping the context and the brand values constantly top of mind. Also, we didn’t drill the values into the heads of our protagonists (Arne Hardenberg and Stefan Gimpl) – because conveying the emotions came naturally to them.

Know the Goals
Defining your goals is the most logical place to start. But in tourism, especially as a destination marketing organization, its not always straightforward – because the goal is promotion not sales, so the goals are a bit more fluffy (and is called stuff like “increase awareness”).

Our key goal, as a small destination in an unknown country, was to improve awareness of our place with the limited resources we had. But other goals we think you can achieve through this type of social media campaign might be access to a new market (say you want to reach Brazillian outbound tourists), changing the focus of your brand, or launching a new product.

Whatever it is, narrowing in on the goals will help guide you down the right road: “Raise awareness of our destination among adventure travelers in the US through social media,” would be an example of that, but so would be “Increase sales of biking itinerary in Northern Italy.”

Bring it All Together
Your final project will ultimately be the product of your brand values, your context for bringing them to life, and the goals of doing that.

Keeping those three broad components top of mind as you move through the details will ensure that you stay on course, on message, and on track to reach your ultimate goals.

So for us, bringing it all together meant conveying the feelings and emotions of Rough. Real. Remote. through promotional tourism videos that would be released and shared over social media in order to raise awareness about our destination

Our entire approach is based on what we have called “The Roadmap.”

To build a working strategy for your social media adventure tourism campaign we suggest following a process that will help you structure your campaign and make informed decisions regarding content and form.

For Social Media in the Wild we created a project plan and it is based on this plan that we make the roadmap recommendations. Our experience took us from understanding our branding values in context to an online campaign that eventually went beyond social media engagement.

In short, we moved from starting and joining conversations to identifying valuable business intersections that we are now using to build the future of the destination, and this process is what we will share with you over a series of roadmap related posts.  Each post will be one stop in the road, so to speak.

Thus, we will take you through a series of posts that will suggest good practices based on our key learnings from our own social media project, and among our main points are:

- Know your brand values in contexts
- Develop a concept for strategic engagement
- Target ambassadors & influencers
- Create and execute content
- Identify high value intersections
- Take the relationships beyond social media

We will expand on each of these topics and also add our thoughts about tools, content production, tracking, and running a competition, while giving examples along the way from our own case study and the cases of industry social media peers.

Also, we are not suggesting that the roadmap we’ve used is universally applicable for every tour operator and destination out there, but we believe that our experience can help you better understand what to do and not to do in order to meet your social media goals.

Before we launch into our story, we thought we’d step back and provide some context.Travel is one of the most searched topics on the Internet, and understanding how travelers research and plan their trips online is of vital importance to anyone trying to win their business.While we acknowledge the importance of website marketing – we won’t delve into it here, because our focus is social media – we will instead start off with this question: Are people using social media in planning and researching their trips today?

Consider these facts:

52% say they are inspired by viewing friends pictures of their vacations
72% of all social network users check their social network once a day while traveling
200 million passengers will board flights with wi-fi this year
69% of travel companies saw growth from Facebook
49% of travel companies saw growth from Twitter

There are two important takeaways from this:
(1) Yes travelers are using social media when researching their trips: Social media is in fact a faster, better version of old fashioned word of mouth.  In the past, people were being inspired by holiday picture albums or stories told by friends and family, today they could be inspired by a vacation album uploaded on Facebook, by a Tweet such as “Just landed in Turkey! Weather and country perfect for our honeymoon!” or by a viral video, such as Dancing Matt.

(2) People are sharing their trips in real time more than ever thanks to wi-fi (only 7% of travelers use mobile Internet, but that is likely to change as roaming charges drop).  This has bad implications for negative experiences and great implications for good ones.

So: Travelers are engaged on social media; their tendency to share on and after their vacations may inspire their online friends.  So as a tourism destination or operator, we need to facilitate and leverage that sharing and inspiration.

Many destinations have done this successfully – see Switzerland‘s clever use of Facebook Connect, Iceland’s clunky desire to “Be Your Friend,” or Korea’s integrated “Buzz” campaign.  These are just scratching the surface, because as we learned, with careful planning, we can use these planning and researching tendencies on these channels to go beyond sharing and inspiration, to concrete business development. Read on!

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.