In parts one and two we discussed deciding who you want to talk to and what you want to say and monitoring mentions of your brand in social media.
But even with these steps completed it is still not time to log on and starting tweeting, updating and commentating.
Next you need to know more about your product and which segments it is attractive to.
Part Three: Start collecting data. All of it. Every single piece you can
To communicate effectively with customers you need to know that they like to do and what they want.
Social media opens up the chance to talk to every customer as an individual. Futhermore it also gives you the chance to talk to different versions of each individual (my EveryYou concept).
I was asked at a recent AsiaPac Aviation Conference to name a successful global social media campaign.
Someone quickly responded with the Queensland Best Job in the World campaign. I proposed that that the long term impact from social media campaigns are not around trying to replicate the massive effort involved in a Best Job-esque campaign.
Instead, it is the ability to develop one on one communications at scale. To develop micro-targeted deals and communications, but at a level that can be rolled out to a large number of people.
In other words: many deals to many people (a one-to-one approach) rather than one-campaign-to-many-people.
For a travel supplier to build a campaign around micro-targeting at scale requires having data. Lots of data. Data about everything that a consumer does in relation to a booking.
Where they click, upstream and downstream links, demographic details, email preference etc. I am talking about more than Ominture and Webtrends.
This is also about collecting data directly from customers’ pre, during and post consumption of a product. Data that can be used in targeting offers, deals and content.
Some examples:
- Hotel: Recording the checkin and pre-purchase habits of people that order room service or ask for restaurant advice. For example how many people who check in after 8pm at night order room service or ask for a restaurant. Collect data to find out how many as this will open up social media recommendation options.
- Airline: Complaints at check-in by time of day and customer characteristics (solo, family, business). Use this to try to find patterns of how external factors (time of day and nature of passenger) can lead to increases or decreases in complaints. Use that as a basis for determine communications and ideas to reduce check in complaints.
- Car Hire: where you have GPS units in cars, anonymously track the routes that people take. Use that to publish a “top routes” list or “favourite drives” list to customers and build up a touring network and conversation. Use staff profiling of customers (family, work, adventure) to build sub-categories of tours.
Arming yourself with data like this will be critical in finding the right targeting of the right message and therefore essential to a social media strategy.
Suppliers should go so far as to create an incentive structure around data collection. Staff should be rewarded for the amount of valuable customer information they collect.
It goes without saying that you will need to invest in the infrastructure to collect, sort and manage this data (and there will be a lot of data).
So now you have the target audience and what you want to say. You have started to monitor and are collecting all the data you can.
Next we will combine part four and five into a single recommendation - crafting product and content plans, and actually doing it.