Throughout this blog we have focused on the social media aspects of the “Rough. Real. Remote.” video series and the work related to the campaign launched through especially Facebook and Twitter.Now we are at the end of the first coherent, collaborative social media campaign ever launched in Greenland.

Where do we go from here?

The answer is quite common-sensical but nevertheless it is not one often given in a world where likes, comments, shares and the immediacy of fast B2C relationships still seem to dominate success criteria for social media engagement.

We simply suggest using the power of the high value intersections in-blog to move outside the boundaries of the social media sphere and start building more organic relationships with those B2B connections established throughout the push.

This basically means using whatever relevant, shared channels of communication that are available in each specific relationship, and it especially means being willing to take the next step and explore offline intersections that can create business opportunities for both you and the potential partner.

In order to see mutual benefits from expanding the relationship from a conversational basis to discussing business potentials, we assume that both we, and the company we have met through the social media interaction, are well aware of our own brand values and the platform it creates for ourselves.

Taking this step thus means sharpening our “why” before we venture down a narrower path than the wide open social media road that was so well suited for separating those first solid leads from a vast group of transient potentials.

But it also means honing in on business opportunities, and for a small destination management office like ours it means establishing links to the outside world that not only improves brand awareness, but it also improves the awareness among companies with a defined interest in adventure travel values, the Arctic, and maybe even specifically in values directly connected with Greenland.

This path is the slow road and very different from the power of the now practiced in traditional B2C social media marketing and engagement where “calls-to-action are about making a purchase, not about expressing interest.” [from the B2B blog]

The B2B strain of the activities that go beyond social media engagement mark a vital departure from the sense of urgency associated with social media, since, and again this is something we learned from the brilliant SocialMediaB2B blog: B2B buying cycles can be as long as 18 months of sustained dialogue between the involved partners, based on conversations that all began with more or less casual social media intersections.

So, now we are ready to follow up on the immediate success of the actual campaign. A campaign that helped put Greenland a bit more on the vast global map of adventures but which must now show its value in the long run by providing us with enough momentum to sustain meaningful conversations online and offline with those new stakeholders that we hope to do business with in the near future.

Once your content has been conceptualized, planned, created, and published the time has come to start learning from the online engagement and to use that knowledge to meet the goals of your work.Whether you’re seeking to improve the stakeholder knowledge of your brand, planning to convert content sharing to direct sales, or if your main goal is to start meaningful conversations with potential business-to-business partners, like our was with the Rough. Real. Remote. content, we suggest taking a step back from the deep immersion in the everyday social media conversation.

Looking at the brand in the context of social media conversations we found it important to take a bird’s eye view of what we were trying to achieve with the connections that the campaign started to produce.

For Greenland in general, and for Destination Arctic Circle more specifically, one of the main barriers towards building lasting relationships with international partners is to raise the level of awareness outside Greenland to a level where people take note of our existence.

As the videos started gaining ground with the travel community and spread outside the Facebook and Twitter communities, where we initially launched them, journalists, bloggers, tour operators, and people in the outdoor gear business started responding to our content with enthusiasm and positive feedback.

At this point we reached a critical juncture in the entire project, and even in the short life of the Rough. Real. Remote. brand, since now was the time to start acting on the basis of the value platform we had built with out branding.

This platform consists of both core destination values, our existing product landscape, and the profiles and needs of local tour providers. Taken together these made it possible for us to look for similar interests, values, and goals among those engaging with our content

In terms of the roadmap we had come to the part of the road where oncoming traffic was now so significant that we had to start slowing down and spend more time with each connection.

A part of this was the B2C element which was about engaging with both those consumers joining our contest and those interested in Greenland and Destination Arctic Circle. However, in this blog we won’t spend time with the B2C side of the project since many others have covered this topic extensively and well, including blogs such as Social Media Examiner, Mashable, Brian Solis, the B2C blog, and many, many more (plus, of course. hundreds of books on the topic of social media marketing).

From the outset we had decided that the B2B (Business-2-Business) intersections would be our first priority and this made it possible for us to start leveraging new connections to create meaningful relationships that will eventually lead to business for the tour providers in our destination.

One of the ways we did this was to keep track of the kinds of conversations generated by our campaign, and we registered every potential B2B relationship, including media connections,  in our MasterTracker.

Keeping a list like this proved invaluable since the assembly of potentials could quickly be reviewed and we could begin doing blitz researching along the road to capture info about people we met. This allowed us to quickly uncover what potential future partners might hold the most value for our brand and products.

The consequences, and ultimately also the end gains, of structuring your work this way is nicely summed up by the Social Media B2B bloggers:

“The goal for most B2B marketers is to convert prospects into customers. Because the sales cycle is longer, B2B companies need to focus on relationships as part of that process. Communication with prospects, engaging them, educating them and leading them towards purchase creates the foundation for a long term relationship. And in many situations, the social media relationship continues past the sale through support, updates and continuing education.”

Getting to the point where you are ready to identify and reach out to those intersecting with your social media road means laying down the foundation through translation of your brand values into content that can be shared online. And once that content is out there you start looking for stakeholders who, through their interaction with your content and this with your brand values, could become potential partners.

Some of those potentials will never be converted into strategic relationships, but while many intersections are only fleeting a few will stick. Throughout the Rough. Real. Remote. campaign we have learned that the most viable partnerships are those where both sides have brand values at stake and where those brand values provide mutual value enhancement.

In short: It has to work both ways or the intersection will soon lose value for one or both parties involved.

Or, as Chris Noble from World Nomads so eloquently says: What matters most is finding those that share your values and identifying what will resonate with them so you can make an emotional attachment to them. And in order to do so you must know the “why” of your existence and of why people will care about what you can offer.

This is the second of two posts about how and why we used tracking tools for the Social Media in the Wild project.

This time around we talk about website analytics, URL shorteners, and our selfmade tool the MasterTracker.

See part one for more on social media dahsboards and video stats.

Website analytics
This one was a no-brainer for us, since our main website is on a customized WordPress platform, and Google Analytics integrates so very well into this universe, it is free, and it is easy to pick through data sets and export them for use offline, that we never considered anything else.

You might be tempted to find a paid service that does it all for you, but remember that for us we had to always consider the costs for paid subscriptions in a world where most of the best tracking and monitoring services are free.

We used Google Analytics with care, since the options and data-combos seem almost endless, and before we started doing any analytics through Google we went over our project goals and used them to select only a few, but for us invaluable, data points, which ended up being:

• General geographical stats for all of arcticcircle.gl from the Map Overlay
• General stats from the Content Overview including Total Visits, Unique Visits, Pageviews, Pages per visit, Average time on site, Bounce Rate, and % of New visitors
• Top Landing and Exit Pages
• Drilldown stats for each film-landing page including Pageviews, Unique views, Time on page, Bounce Rate, % Exit, Direct Traffic, and Referring Sites

Bit.ly, ow.ly and all those URL shorteners
There’s a large and growing number of shorteners available and our only recommendation is to find one you like, stick to it, and use it consistently.

You can choose between the likes of ow.ly, fb.me, tinyurl.com, bit.ly, goo.gl (note the Greenland connection?), tiny.cx and so on and on, and for our project we went with ow.ly for all our Twitter links while we used bit.ly for everything else.

We decided to allocate the ow.ly shortener to the twitter links because ow.ly is a Hootsuite dedicated service, and because it made us able to see link stats specifically for our tweets when we were using the same long URLs for both tweets and FB updates.

Bit.ly was made our choice of URL shortener for everything non-Twitter because we really like it’s free (just create an account) custom-link service. But we particularly also like how the folks at bit.ly provide excellent tracking of the link performance even as far as showing how the link is used in tweets and shares on Facebook. And bit.ly can even pull in stats for remakes of the original bit.ly link when other users decide to tweak the link when sharing it so you get an stat overview of all editions of the original shortened link.

The MasterTracker
Here’s a tool we could find nowhere out there but which became our Grand Central for all things tracking throughout the campaign and in the analysis phase that followed: The MasterTracker.

We call it the MasterTracker because it is a fairly extensive Google Spreadsheet that holds all data we pulled from Vimeo, Hootsuite, and Google Analytics plus a list of all media mentions and intersections made that needed follow ups.

(Any spreadsheet software could be used, we just love Google Docs since it’s so nice to work in a realtime online environment when the team is spread out from Argentina via Denmark to Switzerland and Greenland).

The MasterTracker is our most valuable post-campaign tool and from the depths of the data collected here were are able to do analyses on different levels, feeding data from the tracker into small graphs or large infographics to be used throughout the reporting and documenting phase of the project.

The tracking and monitoring tools we ended up using took us a long time to find. Seriously, a loooong time. We went from looking for the omnipotent master tool to fanning out over a number of smaller service before we settled somewhere in between on a few, solid tools that in the end had their ups and downs.In this post and the one that follows we have collected our thoughts about the tools we used throughout the Social Media in the Wild project.First up we discuss social media dashboards and video analytics, while we take a look at website analytics, URL shorteners, and a MasterTracker next time.

Social media dashboard
Ver yearly in the process, long before the content was properly conceived and planned we decided that we needed a dashboard from where we could all post, comment, and monitor our social media conversation – and so a long hunt for the ever evasive perfect tool began.

We tested things like Raven Tools, TweetDeck, Seesmic, Hootsuite, and Sendible while quickly dismissing enterprise sized solutions such as Vocus, Syncapse, Lithium (former Scoutlabs), Radian6, and Awareness.

The latter half were simply too expensive and big for us, but all of the first five soon became serious contenders for our social media dashboard, which we were hoping could become our shared publishing and monitoring tool for everything running through Twitter and Facebook.

Eventually we settled for Hootsuite, which proved not without a few hiccups along the way – including the well documented issue of no-images-in-posts problem, login issues (that always seemed to happen when we were on the road and the account administrator was unavailable), and (temporarily) botched tracking reports.

But even with the bugs Hootsuite brought along we found it to be a very valuable tool. From Hootsuite we published every tweet and Facebook update to the streams used for the push, and we could plan and schedule every post and tweet for the entire project through the built-in calendar function.

This freed up our resources to join the social media conversation once the campaign started rolling instead of having to make innovate updates on a daily basis, and on this account Hootsuite worked really well.

From within Hootsuite, as with several of the other services mentioned above, we could also what members of them had replied to a tweet, continued a conversation on Facebook, etc. This meant that we could easily see if something was left hanging in one of the channels, and any team member could move in and respond, retweet, favorite, like, or whatever.

We also decided to pay for customized tracking reports through Hootsuite in order to collect specified data sets from across all Twitter and Facebook accounts in use, and while the costs have been more than $120 a month for our customized level of reporting we have considered it a good trade-off since otherwise we might have never collected as much valuable data if we had to do it manually through Facebook and Twitter.

Video – the case of Vimeo
Here’s a platform and a tool we truly love. Not only is Vimeo a user-friendly, hassle-free interface, behind the scenes it is als geared towards providing easily accessible and highly customizable stats for users small and large.

This makes the stats module is a lot of fun to use with its flash-animated graphs and pretty colors, and while it may sound like we never got past looking at colored graphs, the truth is that the way the Vimeo stats are designed to work makes them all the more compelling to use. So here’s a tool we highly recommend paying for with a VimeoPlus account.

Our reasons above for choosing Vimeo are of course highly idiosyncratic and you could of course also go for YouTube. In fact, we chose not to exclude any of the two largest video sharing sites and therefore also posted all the vids in our separate YouTube channel once they went up on Vimeo. But our choice of main channel was Vimeo because we felt the look and feel of their platform and especially their embedded player worked better with the Rough. Real. Remote. brand.

Whatever your choice of channel make sure that it meets your needs, and check out the Plus, Pro, etc. features offered – there’s tons of goodies under the hood.

Tracking your social media campaign is vital if you want to understand how your content and activities perform both in real-time and in retrospect. Setting up a system of metrics is not just for the number-crunching lovers on your team, it is also an important framework for analyzing where your content goes and if those spheres of interaction could open new doors to going beyond social media engagement and help you create more business.Tracking can be done in as many ways as there are projects, and as we will describe in the next two posts about tracking tools to meet your metrics goals we went with a set of platforms and indicators that we felt would best serve our needs.

And needs is an important word: Why are you tracking something, and for what will you use the tracked data? Before you breathe life into a huge tracking monster, consider what core metrics will give you the best understanding of the goals you’ve set up for the project.

We would also suggest weeding out all the things that will only serve as extra layers of data, and avoid spending time with too many different metrics. Keep it simple and strictly defined by your project goals. That way you’re more likely to spend time during and after the campaign understanding the all the valuable information that lives inside the eons of data you will most definitely generate.

We set up tracking well before the campaign started, both to have a set of benchmarks that we could use with key quantitative indicators relating to visitor stats on the main website, and to benchmark the amount of followers, comments, likes, etc., on Facebook and Twitter across the three team member organizations.

But the pre-campaign tracking was also a way to test our ability to manage and analyze the incoming data and to get rid of overkill elements.

As we felt more and more assured that we had the tracking parameters needed for our metrics we sealed off the tracking compartment in order to avoid a slow data creep throughout the project.

If you don’t use the same data sets, or if you start adding new sets along the way, you will run into trouble at the end of the road once you want to use those numbers to for instance help you make the case for sponsor ROI, funding for new projects, data reporting, etc.

In the next two posts we will go into more detail about the specific tools we used and the tracking parameters we chose from the huge array of potentials out there.

In our previous post we talked about how to define and reach influencers through your social media channels. Moving on to ambassadors it is worthwhile distinguishing this group of people from your influencers.While blogs like Mashable has suggested finding the socalled 1%, which is more an influencer strategy, we suggest grounding your ambassador identification work with your network of friends and business partners across all your active social networks.

We treated our potential ambassadors like we’d treat any influencer – with personal, customized emails, tweets, and Facebook messages, and our ambassador goal was to find a group that would likely inspire others in their closest network to listen, learn, and engage.

For the ambassador group we also used parameters such as geolocation, age, sex, network size, number of Twitter followers, response rate on profiles, types of friend engagement with posts, etc. to single out a core group of roughly 30 people.

We then contacted each of the ambassadors with a brief outline of the content we were about to start sharing through their chosen social media channels. And we added personal encouragements to share the upcoming films, photos, and stories, and to give all shared content a personal spin that would personalize the outgoing message.

This produced a group of strong ambassadors, all of whom we knew personally and were connected to in our immediate networks, and they helped us spread each film to a much larger audience than we could have hoped to do on our own.

While this may sound purely focused on the quantity of views, shares, likes, etc., the wider goal was to use that quantifiable reach to create a platform to spread content beyond the borders of Greenland, hence improving awareness of the Rough. Real. Remote. brand.

Once we had the films circulating in the social media sphere we found it much easier to identify potentially valuable connections that we had not seen before since people and companies we had not reached before were now engaging with our content.

In our attempt to make the online conversation around the Rough. Real. Remote. campaign about quality over quantity we adopted a dual focus on influencers and ambassadors from even before the publication of the first video.We decided that finding the right people online could greatly help boost the spread of and potential engagement with the six videos. Our goal was to move away from marketing oriented campaign activities and work more directly with the power of the same social networks in which the project was embedded.

But how do we define these concepts, and what lies beneath the terms? Let’s begin with influencers, which we found a bigger challenge to identify and reach than the ambassadors which we will describe below.

Brian Solis says of influencers that “while it’s important to have a large network to spread a message as wide as possible it’s even more important to have a smaller more concentrated network to make things happen. It’s the age old axiom of quality versus quantity.”

The next step is to narrow the field down to a group of people who will have specific interests in sharing your content in ways that will simultaneously strengthen their social capital and generate engagement based on the same social capital that draws users to their blog, website, etc.

We found this to be a challenge since reaching influencers is not done through presswires or a “write once, distribute to thousands” approach, but through careful selections of direct interaction with people who we thought likely to share our interest in adventure travel, short films, and Greenland.

This trio of factors helped us sort through potential contacts as we worked our way through bloggers and media people, Facebook groups, tweeters, and industry connections, and ultimately we settled on a short list of people we hoped would pick up and retell one or more of the narratives told through the six films.

From our experience, what matters most in the process of identifying and reaching out to influencers is to always use your branding platform and its values to evaluate who would be the right people to engage with, and then to single out the pieces of quality content that will fit with each targeted influencer.

Each influencer is a stakeholder and a potential market booster, even a possible buyer of your products or services, and you should treat them as valuable, personal connections that are indifferent and may even hostile to spam and impersonal messages.

In the next post we’ll cover the topic of reaching out to ambassadors as a group of stakeholders different from influencers.

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.

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.