Blogpost 3

Social Media Marketing

This video was filmed last year. It was during the European Cities Marketing (ECM) annual conference held from June 9 to 12 in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. The main topic of the conference was “Social Media”. This video presents a study about the Success Factors in Social Media Marketing – state of the art. The presenters gave hands on advice about how to best apply social media marketing in order to achieve the goals set according to according to one’s business objectives. Social media are the new most important phenomenon of web 2.0. It provides customers the opportunity to share information. However it also provides supplies businesses to increase their sales volume, their profits and attract customers. It’s a new way to promote destinations and marketing tools could help them to reach this goal.


The study which was presented, investigates the success factors of social media marketing. Firstly the presenters define the study framework based on 14 interviews. The study participants are from different countries such as: Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Austria, Germany, Croatia, Iceland, Sweden and Switzerland. This study shows Social media adoption by CTOs. Several questions from the interviews give some answers about motivators to engage in social media, types of social media platforms used or the time spend by CTOs in social media marketing research. The main motivators to engage in social media are the interaction with customers, also all feedbacks, get a modern image, share information and the most important is the fact that hence social media we have a direct contact with customers. Social media platforms which are used are various. We have the basic social media platforms: “Facebook”, “Twitter”, You Tube”, and “Flickr” and some others such as “Own Blog”, or “Tripadvisor”. Usually CTOs use in average 5 tools and spends more or less 10 hours per week in social media marketing research. So presenters conclude this session with three different levels:


· Level 1: They invest up to 2 hours per week for social media marketing research and they are experimental social media users.


· Level 2: They follow a predefined media social media strategy and invest up to 10 hours per week for SMM (social media marketing)


· Level 3: They invest more than 10 hours per week and use social media strategy in line with the overall strategy. This is the highest level.


Secondly a Social Media Controlling Framework has been developed to measure the indicators of success. It helps us to understand the progress toward reaching organizational goals and thereby business objectives. The presenters in this session make a distinction between “Manageable Success” and “Success beyond Control”. The first one means that it can be directly influenced by the management contrary to the second one. Manageable Success provides several opportunities: we can deliver information for a very specific target market, build a relationship and get a direct contact with the channel dis/reintermediation. The concept of “Success beyond Control” integrates recommendations, Buzz Building, Image creation, Opportunities caused by natural events or circumstantial factors. Furthermore the presenters give more details about the implementation of strategies or scenarios in each of the three previous levels.


To conclude, they tried to answer at the following question: Social media, what’s next? And the main idea was about more integration. We have an example with new generations of social media like the augmented reality.

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Social Media Integration

Nowadays the number of cyber surfers doesn’t stop to grow up, and social media have consequently an impact stronger than few years ago. The two sites I’ve chosen to analyze are the website from St Moritz and the website from Graz.
Firstly the site from St Moritz tries to integrate social media. I think it could be an advantage to use social media, because most of people use them to find information, videos or pictures etc… And it could be a link between past and future travelers for St Moritz. On this website cyber surfers can find a link for the facebook page or the twitter page. For example on these pictures we can see the buttons to have the link. And I think that the small logos are a good idea because it’s easier to see or find them.(Picture)

However the website of St Moritz doesn’t have some buttons or widgets to directly share pictures on our own facebook page, and I think the city should think of it. The best part of this website was the fact that it integrates other social media than facebook, in particular “Tripadvisor” or “Flickr Photo”… On these platforms travelers can share ideas, photos, videos, advices. I mean Tripadvisor is a famous platform to get some comments or personal advices. And the fact is that all these social media are easy to find because their logos (links) are in the bottom of the home page. (Next picture ).

 My point of view is that social media could be advertising for the cities that use them. Moreover on St Moritz website travelers can use their mobile phone to get information, because there is a mobile version of the site. And it’s called “Mobil Portal”. For example on the following picture we can see the Mobil Portal page.

This site stands out from the others sites because one of the social media used on it is the social media “Delicious page”. This site is the only one which purpose several social media platforms links.


I think that the integration of social media is linked to the new trends and the image of the town perceived by travelers. I mean for example St Moritz is known as an attractive and active city so that’s why the website needs to integrate social media, to get the attention of young people and also future tourists.


Contrary to St Moritz site, the website of Graz doesn’t really integrate social media. On this website cyber surfers can only find a link with the facebook page. I think that only one social media isn’t enough and Facebook is so different than Tripadvisor. So it could be better to have both. But the good point on this website is that cyber surfers can share pictures or etc and print them in real time hence too the facebook widgets (following picture).

I think it’s beneficial for the website because if people share it all their social media contacts can see it and so on.
To conclude, in most of my sites social media aren’t integrated as well except facebook or twitter pages links. I think it’s essential to have social media links in these sites because we know that nowadays electronic world of mouth is the most popular influenced factor to choose a destination.

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