engaging in this space is not about money, it’s about real engagement.
Thorn Tree - we’ve been at this a very long time - we get community and how it interacts with our brand
very small staff dedicated people supportive community polices itself
get out there and play there are several hundred social networks there are thousands of social network tools there are millions of people who engage with them you need to concentrate your efforts but how?
Choose your platforms based on conversation where is it easier to talk to people? where are people wanting to talk to you? where are people talking to each other about you?
quickly decided to concentrate on 4 platforms
it’s not like any other space you’ve ever played in the audience is cynical the audience WANTS to engage
it’s all about the conversation silly this is what we do:
Homepage - now routinely points to bloggers outside LP Integrated facebook connect - bring your friends - tell your friends what you’re doing.
destination pages now contain links to non-lp content - scroll down the page
you can see the blogs here - this is called ‘blogs we like’ click on one of those and you stay in lp....
... but as you can see there are google ads there we give 100% of that revenue to the blogger (fair play) we increase their traffic via links
Groups - based on Open Social - google backed social media platform applications - run everywhere wave igoogle lonelyplanet myspace micro-social-networks niche interests
post images post photos invite your friends publishes to activity stream more apps coming
we’re also on twitter different strategy to everyone else we don’t ‘broadcast’ - we retweet
we’re on facebook - combination of homepage content, user content and things we find interesting
flickr - over 200,000 images posted to the group
youtube - marketing campaign with t-mobile customised homepage in partnership with youtube
it’s all about control give people a show everything must be 100% correct?
let people see who’s behind the curtain let them speak to you let them speak to people let them have a ‘real’ conversation
that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t measure it social networks are uniquely measurable decide what you want, and measure it’s success if it’s not working try something else
there are REAL experts out there there are a LOT of people who say they’re experts and they’re not go learn learn learn go listen to conferences and the people using the networks sometimes you have to write your own theory (twitter for LP)