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BEST PRACTICES IN TRAVEL BLOGGING - WHITE PAPER The Best Practices in Travel Blogging M. Boecher O. Gradwell K. Jenkins J. Waugh & Four bgb in association with

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Page 1: The Best Practices in Travel Blogging - softVT...Bloggers Unite (TBU), an online community of 1600+ travel bloggers which hold international travel blogger conferences in a variety

BEST PRACTICES IN TRAVEL BLOGGING - WHITE PAPER

The Best Practices in Travel Blogging

M. BoecherO. GradwellK. JenkinsJ. Waugh

&Four bgb

in association with

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Meet The Authors! ! ! ! ! ! 2-3

An Introduction To Travel Blogging:! ! 4-5! What Is A Travel Blogger!! ! 4! What Is A Blog Trip! ! ! ! 5

Planning A Blog Trip, An Agency Approach:! 6-8! Defining The Objectives! ! ! 6! Planning The Itinerary! ! ! 7! Choosing The Bloggers! ! ! 8! Managing Expectations! ! ! 8! Think Outside The Box! ! ! 8

CONTENTS

Table of ContentsThis white paper delivers the best practices in travel blogging. A number of international experts deliver key messages and a selection of important case studies to help you gain a competitive advantage when working with travel bloggers.

Beyond The Blog Trip! ! ! ! ! 9-11! Travel Bloggers as Entrepreneurs! 10! Customer Engagement Specialists! 11! Travel Bloggers as Consultants! 11

Case Study - #LoveCapeTown! ! ! 12-13! Introduction! ! ! ! ! 12! ! !! The Results! ! ! ! ! 13

Case Study - BlogVille in Emilia Romagna 14-15

Case Study - Hosting A Travel Bloggers !! !! ! Unite Conference! ! ! 16-18! What Is A TBU Conference?! ! 16! ! !! Why Do People Attend?! ! ! 17 ! The TBU Conference Concept! ! 17! How Do Hosts Benefit?! ! ! 18-18!

Case Study - Hosting A Combined Blogger !! ! ! and Traditional Media Trip 19-21

Calculating Online Media ROI! ! ! 22-23

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THE AUTHORS

Meet The Authors

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THE AUTHORS

Meet The AuthorsMelvin Boecher www.traveldudes.org

[email protected] love to travel, to discover the world, to travel free & untroubled & still likes to be informed like an insider! These were the reasons why Melvin started Traveldudes.org. A homepage where travellers can exchange their passion and experiences. For Travellers, By Trav-ellers! Follow Traveldudes on Twitter  @Traveldudes

Oliver Gradwell www.travelbloggersunite.com

[email protected]

Oliver is the founder and director of Travel Bloggers Unite (TBU), an online community of 1600+ travel bloggers which hold international travel blogger conferences in a variety of destinations. Oliver founded the company after a career in the travel industry,

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Ruth Haffenden www.fourbgb.com

Four bgb is a specialist travel PR, representation and social media agency with over twenty years experinece delivering game-changing campaigns for clients across the world. Part of Four Communications, Four bgb works alongside in–house creative, digital, design, web and  publishing teams as well as events, marketing, sponsorship and me-dia buying services to deliver award winning integrated campaigns  

Jailan Yehia www.savoirthere.com

[email protected]

Our thanks goes to Jailan for her advice and help in compiling the whitepaper, including editing the whole document for us.

Keith Jenkins www.velvetescape.com

[email protected]

Keith Jenkins is the Founder and Publisher of the Velvet Escape luxury travel blog. Based in Amsterdam, Keith left his ten-year investment banking career to carve out a new career as a travel blogger and social media advocate. Keith often speaks at travel and social media confer-ences, and offers social media consultancy and marketing services via his Velvet Connect and iambassador.net brands.

Janice Waugh www.solotravelerblog.com

[email protected]

Janice is author of The Solo Traveler’s Hand-book, now in its 2nd edition, publisher of Solo Traveler, the blog for those who travel alone, and moderator of the Solo Travel Society on Facebook with over 8000 members. She has been a go-to person on solo travel for CNN, the Oprah Blog, the Washington Post, Chicago Trib-une, LA Times and USA Today.

[email protected]

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AN INTRODUCTION TO TRAVEL BLOGGING

An Introduction To Travel Bloggingby Oliver Gradwell

What Is A Travel Blogger?Travel bloggers are writers first. But they are also editors and publishers. Further, they are often marketing managers, sales representatives, publicists, spokespeople, bookkeepers, web-site developers and chief executive officers.

Through the personal nature of their experiences and of social media, travel bloggers create a sense of trust amongst their readers, in part due to the personal nature of their?

Travel bloggers are able to offer an extraordinary blend of pro-motional exposure when they travel. They can promote a trip prior to departure, through a series of “teaser posts” and con-tent items across their social media channels. This will sow the seed of interest amongst their readership for the upcom-ing trip.

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© Porto and North CVB

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During the trip travel bloggers can leverage their following on social media by producing valuable and influential con-tent, based on their experiences, and importantly this is all in real time.

Upon ‘returning’ home, the communication of their experi-ences continues with follow-up posts on their own blogs and those of others. Travel bloggers are enthusiastic photogra-phers and videographers, who often utilise these abilities to create engaging and meaningful content.

The content a blogger creates also has a long shelf life, remain-ing online until it is removed. The value this provides should not be underestimated, as Google continues to move towards a search experience that is more social than ever before.

What Is A Blog Trip?Press trips are tools that have been used to promote destina-tions for many years now. A writer will head out to the desti-nation and then write about their experiences when they re-turn.

A blog trip differs for a variety of reasons, with the triumvirate approach to promotion (as mentioned above), being the most notable and valuable difference.

Whilst most people could tweet, take a photo or video and up-load it using their smart phones, many travel bloggers are highly social media savvy individuals and are able to take this usage to the next level, to really make the real-time engagement they can offer effective.

Bloggers need access to Wi-Fi, not just at hotels in the evening or at attractions, but also when they are travelling around. Mo-bile Wi-Fi, or MiFi devices are often employed for this pur-pose and they are a very valuable component to a blog trip.

It should also be worth noting that travel bloggers are un-likely to be travelling on a paid commission from an editor, so their basic costs may be slightly higher as a result. It should also be considered that travel bloggers are providing a greater level of exposure that is really very valuable and has the po-tential to create a greater return on investment. Therefore the use of travel bloggers should not just be within the remit of PR staff in-house or at agencies, but also the marketing depart-ment of an organisation. To get the best out of travel bloggers, a form of financial recompense from the trip should be consid-ered.

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PLANNING A BLOG TRIP

Planning A Blog Trip: An Agency Approachby Four bgb

As the increasingly travel blogger-centric agenda at this year’s World Travel Market will attest, having the expertise to run a successful blog trip is now essential to deliver an effec-tive, integrated PR campaign.

Each trip will of course have individual objectives, and bring with it unique challenges, however there are a number of key tenets which, if considered carefully, can provide a useful model of best practice when planning blog trips. Here we ex-plore the pivotal points to be considered before detailing a re-cent blogger outreach campaign for Visit Sweden (stand EM140b) as a case study example (See page 19).

Defining objectives

Being aware of your objectives from the outset will not only allow you to target the most appropriate travel bloggers but will also mean you can effectively spell out what you would like from them during and after the trip.

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Is it increased traffic to your website? More Facebook fans? In-creased brand awareness online? To work to change the per-ceptions of your brand/ destination?

Planning the itinerary:

Don’t invite the guests and then plan the party. Ideally a full itinerary should be confirmed before any approach is made to potential attendees. In the same way as traditional media, bloggers are likely to accept an invitation based on certain hooks and angles that make the story right for their reader-ship; if the itinerary changes dramatically before the trip leaves – expect some drop- outs. Having an itinerary planned in advance not only means you can guarantee to secure blog-gers you know will be right for the trip, but you are far less likely to have to fill last minute places when would-be at-tendees are forced to turn down the new plan.

Be transparent. If something changes, let them know and plan around it. Ultimately, itinerary changes can be unavoidable, don’t cross your fingers and hope they won’t notice, this can lead to the lose-lose situation of a blogger being part of an ac-tivity they then can’t write about. For example, an itinerary change in a recent trip to Sweden meant that the group was set to stay a night and dine at the beautiful Ystad Saltsjobad coastal spa, a wonderful opportunity, though one that posed difficulty for budget blogger Kash Bhattacharya to credibly en-gage his readers. After an open and honest discussion it was decided that Kash would work on promoting the special mid-week offers available at the spa to try ‘luxury for less’ as well as being provided with a number of alternative accommoda-tion and dining options to try out in the area to ensure read-ers had an option for every budget.

My new BFF. Keep up regular contact before you leave and be flexible: Many bloggers are location independent so may be planning travel before and after your trip based on your tim-ings, so frequent reassurance that all is well and plans are moving forward is likely to be conducive to a trusting relation-ship on both sides. As a number of bloggers attending the fea-tured Sweden trip were arriving in London on connecting flights, overnight accommodation was arranged to bridge the gap between trips and ensure they arrived in Sweden re-freshed and excited about the destination.

Plan to plan nothing.With all that hard work securing influen-tial bloggers able to engage their readers across the world, it’s important to give them time to actually do this! A packed schedule may be necessary to show them the best of your des-tination but make sure there’s time for the group to absorb the atmosphere, talk to locals, take pictures, tweet, check-in, Insta-gram, write live blog posts. The more time they have to them-selves, the more digital collateral they’re likely to create; run them ragged and they’ll all be asleep before you can say #wastedopportunity.

Wi-Fi – to do or die by. Without Wi-Fi access, your group isn’t communicating their actions with their readers live. A blog trip without Wi-Fi is like a gig at the O2 without a mic – you can buy the album afterwards but it’s not really the same. It is understandable that certain areas of far-flung countries will not have Wi-Fi access, but plan the itinerary to include regular stops at Wi-Fi hot spots for tweets to be sent and photos to be uploaded. Alternatively a mi-fi can be worth its weight in gold. A mi-fi device is a portable Wi-Fi hotspot which blog-gers can tether their mobile devices to, which ensures they can have Wi-Fi access on the go. This not only means the group can promote your itinerary every step of the way, but

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it also means they won’t be hit with a large data roaming bill on their return, likely to keep you popular – and it will cost you less than £50 to purchase.

The power of planning. Don’t think that social media amplifi-cation for your destination is confined to your trip; send out the itinerary to the group before you travel and the likelihood is they’ll look to the travel community to discuss the itinerary and get hints and tips from other influencers, promoting your content before they’ve even left. Involve the group in deci-sions; give them options of activities, perhaps ask their read-ers to decide certain elements of the itinerary, discuss it on Twitter or Facebook. So much of the travel experience is dreaming and planning, online buzz is not confirmed to the here and now reporting.

Choosing and approaching bloggers – The horror of the #prfail

We’ve all seen it on Twitter, the hashtag #prfail seems to be bounced around all too often as travel companies and PRs get it oh- so-wrong. Avoid it with one word – research. Research-ing the bloggers you wish to approach not only means you know they’re talking to your market, but you also know their likes and dislikes and can tailor an invitation accordingly. Two minutes reading a foodie travellers blog will tell you they’re vegetarian and so your ‘Offal exploration’ isn’t going to impress. Similarly inviting a couple on a romantic escape when their last post details the horrors of their recent heart-wrenching break up, is not going to score you any points. Do your research, personalise your approach and it’s win-win – you secure a great blogger that you know is perfect for your

brand and they are far more likely to come back to you with an answer as they’ve cut down on their spam emails by at least 50%.

Just one post? Blog off! – negotiating outcomes

Traditionally it was easy, travel company invites journalist on trip, journalist writes article, travel company happy. Bloggers have a lot more to offer, be it pre-promotion, tweets, Facebook posts, Instagram, Pinterest, videos, podcasts and more. This is not to say they can/ should deliver something on every chan-nel, but it does mean it’s important to clarify exactly what you expect them to produce, and in turn, what they are com-fortable promoting. Before places on trips are confirmed, out-line what you expect in terms of coverage, make it an open discussion to ensure campaign objectives are met but the blog-ger feels happy they can deliver good results. A written agree-ment ahead of time means both parties can avoid disappoint-ment in the long run.

Get outside that box.

Hosting a successful blog trip can be a great addition to any integrated PR campaign or as a standalone social media pro-ject. What’s more, with new social media channels and digital innovations springing up almost daily, the opportunities to bring your brand into the digital sphere are endless. There is no longer a template approach to working with bloggers; the possibilities for collaboration are endless. So consider your ob-jectives, do your research, and think outside of the box –and of course, come and talk to us over at Four bgb @fourbgb

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BEYOND THE BLOG TRIP

Beyond The Blog Tripby Janice Waugh

Professional travel bloggers are publishing entrepreneurs. They take responsibility for all aspects of their business.

In the publishing business, the first priority is to serve the readership. Without readers, there is no business. With a blog and readership in place, it is necessary to build a business model that supports the blogger so that they can continue to operate at a professional level.

“I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn't really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become an entre-preneur in order to keep my magazine going.”

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Sir Richard Branson

Every travel blogger who takes their venture seriously quickly learns that they must become entrepreneurs.

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© Porto and North CVB

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Travel Bloggers as EntrepreneursAs with all entrepreneurs, travel bloggers develop creative so-lutions to market challenges. Many innovative projects have come to light thanks to their outside-the-box approaches to the market.

4xfour

4xfour is a multimedia project that encompasses a six-part television travel series and editorial and video content on LiveShareTravel.com and Traveldudes.org. It also brings into the equation the power of their social media platforms and tra-ditional public relations. Produced by Sarah and Terry Lee of LiveShareTravel and TV presenter Cheryl Gibbs, it will show-case destinations and brands to 12 million people as the team travels to four continents in four months.

Luxury Hostels in Europe

Luxury Hostels in Europe is a real-time blogging project by Kash Bhattacharya of BudgetTraveller.org. The project is de-signed to inspire people to discover a new generation of hos-tels that combine the comfort of a hotel with the passion and social element of a hostel. Hostels are pre-selected and pay a fee for a personal review, social media coverage and inclusion in an e-book that will be distributed free through the project’s sponsors and other channels.

Career Break Travel Show

The Career Break Travel Show is produced by Jeff Jung of CareerBreakSecrets.com and will be distributed globally by ConvergTV. The show focuses on various career break experi-ences from around the world and is supported by the Career Break Secrets blog and social media platforms.

The Traveler’s Handbooks

The Traveler’s Handbooks (thetravelershandbooks.com) is a new series of travel books that focuses on how people choose to experience the world. Launched in October of 2012 by six bloggers, the first five books in the series are The Career Break Traveler’s Handbook, The Food Traveler’s Handbook, The Luxury Traveler’s Handbook, The Solo Traveler’s Handbook 2nd edition and The Volunteer Traveler’s Handbook. More handbooks on other travel styles are planned for 2013.

Meet Plan Go

Meet Plan Go (meetplango.com) is an annual event and on-line programme for those planning long-term travel. Launched in 2009, it is now in its third year. The event takes place each October and in 2012 included ten cities - nine in the United States and one in Canada. The online Career Break Ba-sic Training programme inspires and guides people through the career break planning process.

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Travel Bloggers as Customer Engagement SpecialistsIn addition to entrepreneurial projects, travel bloggers work with travel organizations to increase customer engagement in a variety of innovative ways. Travel bloggers can: 

• Support clients with expert content for client newsletters and blogs. 

• Act as travel niche experts in online webinars, hangouts or on Facebook pages.

• Host Twitter chats sponsored by clients. 

• Share posts from their clients’ Facebook fan pages on their own Facebook fan pages.

Travel Bloggers as ConsultantsTravel bloggers know their niche, their readers and travellers. They also understand the social media channels they use to reach their audience. As entrepreneurs, they often approach travel companies with innovative promotional projects but travel companies should also be encouraged to approach travel bloggers with a challenge they are facing. Identify the challenge with the right travel blogger/entrepreneur and you will be on your way to an innovative programme/solution.

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#LOVECAPETOWN

Case Study - #LoveCapeTown by Keith Jenkins

Cape Town Tourism launched a new marketing campaign in November 2011 that aimed to promote an in-depth look at the many natural, historical and cultural facets of the city. iambassador.net proposed a campaign whereby four blog-gers, in collaboration with Cape Town Tourism, would mobi-lise Capetonians to talk about their city via social media. The main objectives of the campaign were to uncover hidden di-mensions to the city by crowdsourcing tips from locals, and creating global exposure for Cape Town’s diverse attractions.

A week-long blog trip to Cape Town was planned, followed by speaking engagements at the Getaway Travel Bloggers Conference. The social media campaign was launched a week prior to the trip whereby the bloggers invited Capetonians to suggest things to do and see. The bloggers also invited their readers to follow the bloggers around Cape Town via the Twit-ter hashtag #LoveCapeTown.

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Cape Town Tourism utilised their media channels to an-nounce the blog trip and the #LoveCapeTown campaign, en-couraging locals to participate and generating interest throughout South Africa.

On the first day of the blog trip, a ‘Meet The Bloggers’ Twitter chat was organised by Cape Town Tourism. Capetonians re-acted with great enthusiasm, submitting hundreds of tips. During their week-long stay in Cape Town, the bloggers fol-lowed up on some of the tips and tweeted about their experi-ences, often including photos and short videos.

In addition, the bloggers attended various media events such as a meeting with the local press. Radio/newspaper inter-views were also arranged. At the end of their week-long stay in Cape Town, the bloggers each spoke about their area of ex-pertise at the Getaway Travel Bloggers Conference. Topics cov-ered included how to work with bloggers, travel writing and leveraging social media. The bloggers presence at the confer-ence drew a record-breaking number of attendees, with blog-gers and tourism industry representatives from around South Africa.

The Results of #LoveCapeTown1. The campaign generated hundreds of excellent tips from lo-cals. These were collected by Cape Town Tourism and pub-lished as a guide. For a sample, see: http://ow.ly/ebjIB

2. A highlight of the campaign was the impressive level of in-teraction between the bloggers and locals. 33% of regular

tweets generated a response. 88% of the tweets were re-tweeted.

3. Hundreds of images were produced both by the locals and the bloggers, and these were fed through to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.

4. The social media campaign reached 1.2 million people around the world via 37 million tweet impressions. Thou-sands of ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’ were generated. Press coverage of the campaign extended beyond South Africa to Europe, USA and Asia.

5. The huge success of the #LoveCapeTown hashtag resulted in various spin-off campaigns such as a photography contest.

6. Cape Town Tourism billed #LoveCapeTown as their “most successful social media campaign to date”.

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BLOGVILLE IN EMILIA ROMAGNA

Case Study - BlogVille in Emilia Romagnaby Melvin Boecher

BlogVille was developed by co-founders Melvin Böcher (Traveldudes.org) and Kash Bhattacharya (Budgettraveller.org) together with the Tourist Board of the Italian Emilia Romagna Region.

The motto was:

“BlogVille Emilia Romagna: eat, feel and live like a local in Italy”

To support BlogVille an official Facebook page and Twitter ac-count were created in order to promote the project and inter-act with the bloggers.

In addition videos presenting the project have been pub-lished across various websites.

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A few hours after the first presentation of the project, the Emilia Romagna Tourist Board has received more then 90 bloggers requests from all over the world.

For the first time ever a DMO hosted 50 bloggers from all over the world for 3 months to enable them to discover the destination and live like locals with total freedom. The partici-pants were hosted in two apartments in Bologna and Rimini, provided free of charge bythe Emilia Romagna Tourist Board between April 23rd and July 14th 2012.

The average stay of a blogger was between 4 and 7 days and the and the apartments came complete with information about the Emilia Romagna region, including a survival pack with typical products from the Emilia Romagna area. The bloggers were able to discover both cities and live like na-tives, with free access to events, museums, sightseeing, and other touris highlights. The Tourist Board helped each blogger to build a personalised programme but in order to give more structure to the project and ensure they covered the whole region, once a week an organized trip was held by the Tourist Board .

During the 83 day-long project the bloggers took part in live blogging coverage -the Tourist Board helped them by provid-ing portable Wi-Fi devices - and presented the Emilia Ro-magna region to all of their online followers and readers. The results of BlogVille, including exposure through Media Part-ner Traveldudes.org, was over 250 published blog posts, in nexcess of 75M (page?)impressions, over 8M people reached on Twitter, and more than 2,500 photos and videos shared by the bloggers taking part. For the live blogging,the production of blog posts, photos and videos the bloggers used the #BlogVille and the #EmiliaRomagna hashtags.

The hashtags helped the Tourist Board to estimate the total numbers and stats of the project, and enabled the Media Part-ner Traveldudes.org to retweet and share all the content on-line and via social media.

The aim of BlogVille was to promote the Emilia Romagna re-gion using web 2.0 and to initiate a long-term blogger-DMO partnership, as well as to make the bloggers’ followers and readers (and future tourists) aware of what the Emilia Ro-magna region has to offer.

BlogVille succeeded in gaining great press and media cover-age, both in national and international newspapers and maga-zines and on TV, being fearured on Corriere della Sera, La Re-pubblica, ANSA, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Lead Digital, RAI, and Tele San Marino.

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A Travel Bloggers Unite (TBU) conference is an innovative and unique way for a destination to leverage the influence and reach of travel bloggers. We leverage the strength of our brand amongst our 1600+ members and our connections within the travel industry, and combine these with our knowl-edge of ‘selling’ travel for the past 12 years.

What Is A TBU Conference?A TBU conference is a four day event conference experience that combines unparalleled learning and networking opportu-nities, in an interesting destination. We bring together be-tween 120 and 150 travel bloggers, the majority of whom are the world’s most influential bloggers within this market.Travel industry delegates are also present and they typically come from various PR & digital agencies, travel brands and tourist boards.

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© Kirsten Alana

BLOGVILLE IN EMILIA ROMAGNA

Case Study - Hosting a Travel Bloggers Unite Conferenceby Oliver Gradwell

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Why Do People Attend?Travel bloggers attend the conference for a variety of reasons. They love to travel and so we take our time choosing a desti-nation which will excite them. They love to catch up with their fellow ‘digital nomads’, who they often only see at events like ours. Travel bloggers have an insatiable desire to learn new skills and improve upon their existing skill set. They also value the opportunity to network with industry delegates too.

It is only recently that travel bloggers have become an impor-tant and effective part of a firm’s marketing and communica-tion strategy. Therefore it is vital for PR firms, travel brands and tourist boards to attend a TBU conference so that they can stay current and up-to-date with the travel blogging commu-nity.

The TBU Conference ConceptWe are proud to be the influencers in our industry and our ability to innovate is at the core of this influence. Over the past two years we have introduced many new innovations to travel blogger conferences and ?

We like to say that ‘everybody knows your name’ at a TBU conference. We strive to keep numbers low, to ensure a more personal experience for all delegates. This allows for a more relaxed conference environment, of which all delegates are a part of as soon as they arrive.

From the moment a delegate arrives until they leave a host city, we plan every aspect of our conference programme to en-sure we create as many valuable networking opportunities as possible,from pre-conference meetups and official evening events to our popular ‘Bespoke Networking’ concept.

We are also proud of our reputation for providing an unri-valled learning experience. We spend a lot of time planning our popular series of “How To” Talks for bloggers, which cover a wide variety of important topics, from beginner to ad-vanced level.

At TBU conferences, we also hold a full series of talks for our travel industry delegates, enabling them to make the best use of the contacts they develop at the conference. Previously these have covered such topics as “How To Find The Right Travel Blogger For Your Brand”, “How To Create Added Value To Your Blog Trips” and “How To Measure Travel Blog-ger ROI”.

How Do Conference Hosts Benefit?The hosts of a TBU conference are typically tourist boards from a local, regional and national level. The concept that we have developed provides multiple opportunities through which our host partners and their destinations can benefit.

Our second conference in Innsbruck generated an ROI factor of 37.5 to 1, based on an approximate hosting costs of just £25,00

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Pre-destination:

• Our brand, Travel Bloggers Unite was chosen due to the popularity of abbreviation names online. Therefore we are more commonly known as TBU. A conference will become known as TBU Innsbruck, TBU Umbria or TBU Porto for example.

• Conferences are branded accordingly with a hashtag eg #TBUIBK (Innsbruck), #TBUMBR (Umbria), #TBUPOR (Porto). This is tagged to all content related to the conference on twitter and a destination benefits directly through name association.

• We build a conference website to communicate the details of the conference. This also provides us with an opportunity to strategically promote a destination through blog posts, photos and videos.

• Conference hashtags can be tracked and aid in measuring the ROI factor from the conference.

During The Conference:

• Pre-conference city tours give delegates the opportunity to discover a city, to take photos and to learn about it’s history.

• Pre-conference photo & video workshops are taught by experts from industry and allow bloggers to brush up on their photography & videography skills. These are following by a ‘walk’ around the city, where the bloggers put their new skills into practice and create content they are more likely to share, given the learning curve involved.

• Travel bloggers are very keen to share what they are discovering. Be it a snippet of information from a seminar or the history behind a city. So the use of the branded hashtag persists throughout the conference

Post-conference:

• Once the conference is over, travel bloggers will then begin to edit photos, videos and write their blog posts. This content is then shared online, over a period of time and promoted via the conference hashtag.

• The content is valuable to a host destination because all the travel bloggers have a community of enthusiastic travellers who follow them. These people are potential visitors and the personal nature of the content a blogger shares is more likely to appeal to a reader.

• The content also remains searchable for as long as it is online.

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In December 2011, Four bgb worked with the region of Skåne in southern Sweden to host a three day trip alongside Visit Sweden and the regional tourist office of Skåne. Its purpose was to bring this largely unknown region, which had just been made more accessible by a new flight service from London Stansted to Malmö, to the attention of the UK market.

With travellers no longer needing to fly to Copenhagen and take the train across the Oresund Bridge to Malmö, the region was now just 90 minutes away and keen to be promoted as an alternative weekend city break. In addition to this, VisitSwe-den had also just launched a five year campaign to promote the country’s extensive culinary offerings and position the region among the world’s leading culinary nations, whilst a brand new ‘supper club’ concept - A slice of Swedish hospitality was also launching in Malmö in the coming spring.

Consequently a number of messages needed to be conveyed to a variety of audiences at differing times throughout the campaign, and so the decision was made to capitalise on the advantages of both traditional and social media channels in an integrated appraoch to meet all campaign objectives.

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BLOGGER AND MEDIA PRESS TRIPS

Case Study - Hosting a Combined Blogger and Traditional Media Trip

by Four bgb

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The new flight route launch was imminent – an ideal hook for bloggers able to disseminate information immediately and engage with real time stories, be it blog posts, photos, videos, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook. Meanwhile the repositioning of the region’s culinary attributes was a long term strategy, and so ideal for a traditional, longer-lead glossy magazine journal-ist. Looking at both long and short-term messages in this way created a sustained dialogue with consumers over extended periods of time, ensuring Skåne was front of mind for travel plans across the seasons.

Another key driver of the trip was to communicate the di-verse appeal of the region, from adventure, food luxury and shopping to design and architecture, city breaks, romance and family holidays - to mention but a few. Planning a varied itinerary for a diverse range of travel bloggers enabled the destination to convey key messages to a number of markets in just one trip. Consequently travel bloggers were approached who spoke influentially to a range of markets.

Consequently a number of messages needed to be conveyed to a variety of audiences at differing times throughout the campaign, and so the decision was made to capitalise on the advantages of both traditional and social media channels in an integrated appraoch to meet all campaign objectives.

The new flight route launch was imminent – an ideal hook for bloggers able to disseminate information immediately and engage with real time stories, be it blog posts, photos, videos, podcasts, twitter, Facebook. Meanwhile the repositioning of the region’s culinary attributes was a long term strategy, and so ideal for a traditional, longer lead glossy magazine journalist.

Looking at both long and short terms messages in this way meant we were able to create a sustained dialogue with people over extended periods of time, ensuring Skåne was front of mind for travel plans across the seasons.

Another key driver of the trip was to communicate the di-verse appeal of the region, from adventure to food and luxury to shopping, design, architecture, city breaks, romance and family - to mention but a few. Planning a varied itinerary for a diverse range of travel bloggers meant we were able to convey key messages to a number of markets in just one trip. Consequently travel bloggers were approached who we felt; spoke influentially to a range of markets:

Kash Bhattacharya (@budgettraveller) Europe Budget Guide – Highlighting that weekends in Sweden can be achieved on a budget.

Abigail King (@insidetravellab) Inside The Travel Lab – In hope of a characteristically thoughtful insight into what makes Sweden unique, quirky and inspirational alongside some stunning photography

Chris Richardson (@theaussienomad) The Aussie Nomad – To promote short breaks in Europe to the ex-pat market, with a fun, light-hearted approach

Monica Stott (@TheTravelHack) Commissioned by syndi-cated travel advice blog Travmonkey, - To raise awareness of Sweden within the travel blogging community with a young dynamic writer, likely to be keen on promoting messages of style and ease of travel.

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To guarantee we were able to maximise live coverage to best effect, a mi-fi device was purchased to accompany the group, ensuring that Wi-Fi was available every step of the way, whilst significant ‘me-time’ was planned in for bloggers to explore alone, reflect and produce additional collateral.

The trip was pre-promoted in Twitter and Facebook discus-sions with the group whilst bloggers were also encouraged to write pre-travel posts, building anticipation for the trip with their readers.

This progressive, integrated approach to campaign planning resulted in significant interest from the travel blogging community, with a full article write-up in key industry outlet Travelllll.com, whilst the trip hashtag was seen by nearly 400,000 consumers in the first seven days alone, with would-be travellers discussing the destination across four continents.

The campaign did not stop when the bloggers touched down back in London, with each blogger producing a number of posts on topics spanning food, spas and Christmas markets to shopping, design and architecture over the coming months as they sought to draw new content from the varied itinerary. One year on, continued integration and a consistent relation-ship with involved bloggers teamed with a schedule of traditional print publication features, means that the destina-tion remains front of mind with both the blogging commu-nity, and the consumer.

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CALCULATING ONLINE MEDIA ROI

Calculating Online Media ROIby Melvin Boecher &Keith Jenkins

It’s a question we’ve heard countless times:

“Should we choose to work with you, what ROI can you deliver?”

We would reply by stating the number of blog posts we would plan to write and the social media exposure we would deliver across multiple platforms.

“Yes, but what is the value of that?”

We had no answer for that. It was a frustrating process for both parties so we decided to do something about it. We talked to bloggers in other sectors and social media experts, but no one had quite figured out a way to calculate the ROI of blogging and social media. There were various attempts to measure someone’s ‘influence’ on social media but none were conclusive. We then looked at how ROI is measured in tradi-tional media and studied the workings of AVE (Advertising Value Equivalent), a widely-used model.

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AVE basically looks at the size of an editorial and compares that with the price of an advertisement of a comparable size in the same publication. We were skeptical in the first in-stance. There were no values in that model that actually showed how many people had read an editorial in a newspa-per or magazine or how much time they spent on that page. The model was too vague for us to take into consideration.

We then looked at our blogs and our stats, and realised that the values missing in AVE calculations for traditional media were indeed present in online media. We could see how many people had read a specific blog post, how much time they spent reading it and where they came from. The powerful Google Analytics tool provides this information.

We can also see how many times a specific post has been tweeted (on Twitter), liked (Facebook), stumbled (Stumble-Upon), +1 (Google+) and pinned (Pinterest). This prompted us to take another, closer look at the AVE model. We applied the model to a variety of blogs and included traffic stats of in-dividual posts.

An important component of online media is the exposure that can be generated via social media. Again, there are as yet no conclusive models that calculate the ROI of social media, i.e. the value of a tweet or a Facebook post. We decided to apply the same AVE principles to social media by researching the prices top social media influencers charge for a sponsored tweet. We created a basket of top influencers (using four differ-ent influence measuring tools) and gathered their prices. We then compared our reach and influence scores with this bas-ket of top influencers and determined our prices on a pro rata basis.

ROI = Ad value of online content + ad value of tweet and facebook posts

By applying the AVE model, we found a way to calculate the perceived ROI of the two pillars of online media – hosted con-tent and social media reach. It can be used in a pre-campaign partner selection process as well as during the post-campaign phase (when detailed campaign-specific stats are available) to calculate the ROI of a campaign.

This method is by no means conclusive, and it will continue to grow, but it provides useful guidance to the perceived value of online publishers/bloggers. To us, this method’s big-gest merit is that it puts a number on the value of online me-dia. By doing so, it offers a degree of clarity in our efforts to understand the complex and rapidly evolving online world.

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