The world’s biggest blog trip gets underway

The stage at Pole Pole - one of 19 in Ghent city centre

Dateline: Flanders, Belgium July 17

by Steve Keenan

Two weeks into the world’s biggest music and travel blog trip and all is very well. Nearly.

There was the Dutch music blogger who ranted about her access and interview demands not being met and refused to travel. And then there was the French travel blogger who complained that no-one spoke to her.

It was a bit of a conundrum for the organisers of Flanders is a Festival. Should they respond publicly to the complaints?

But while they pondered, other visiting bloggers unilaterally acted and publicly berated their complaining counterparts for their behavior and putting them right on facts.

Well, when you invite 100 diverse, worldwide bloggers to a huge party, there’s bound to be a few precious participants. Non?

Around 30 have already visited the festival, an annual two-month riot of live music across the country.

So I thought it time to catch up and this week visited Ghent, where the Feesten party lasts for two weeks.

You can easily see why it is the biggest free outdoor festival in Europe: there is live music on 19 stages across the old town, plus dozens more events in bars and clubs across the city.

On the first evening, @TineVdm showed me cool jazz in Hot Club de Gand before we drank jenevre next door at Ghent’s last gin bar, ‘t Dreupelkot. Then it was 1930s dancing at Swing Cite and acoustics in a pop-up Mirror Tent.

Other bloggers were in town: American @flyingknuckle and German music blogger @berlinerbeat who tweeted: “Interviewed J&A of @SCH00L_IS_C00L earlier today, then ran into them on the streets tonight. Rad dudes, playing a DJ set tonight.”

Next evening, I met a Colombian/German couple, @fiafexpress, who had won a competition to attend all two months of the festival. Together we went backstage at the Pole Pole stage to watch a storming set from Zimbabwean band Mokoomba.

A Dutch blogger, @croyable, was meanwhile settling in for the night in a pop-up hotel room hanging off the main clock at Ghent railway station. He was chosen as he only takes Instagram photos – and it was a very visual room (see photo, left).

You can see why bloggers are loving this event – and the thought that has gone into inviting the right people and giving them enough experiences to blog about.

And with 70 more bloggers to come, there will be plenty more stories to come out of Flanders.

Could this be the world’s most successful blog trip too?

* Read the background to the world’s biggest blog trip:
* Follow Flanders is a Festival on Twitter

Getting ROI from VisitEngland’s Fan In A Van

Towns and cities around the country have been visited by a brightly coloured VW campervan as part of a VisitEngland’s social media campaign to accompany the journey of the Olympic torch.

The Fan In a Van programme was dreamed up by the VisitEngland PR team headed by Rebecca Holloway who wanted to find a way to link the torch relay more closely with tourism.

The “ultimate English roadtrip” was one of a number of ideas the team considered.

“We looked at working exclusively with one publication to have quite an interactive map where we could feed content in about each relay destination but we had done something similar before. We wanted to do something a bit different,” says Holloway.

The team set up a competition to find someone to take the van on the roadtrip around the country and the team expected the winner to be a student with time on their hands. In fact, the winner was 30-year-old Rachel Kershaw who works for media company Bauer and who is now on a sabbatical while she takes the van on a 70-day all-expenses paid journey around the country.

Kershaw took a week-long induction course at VisitEngland’s headquarters in London when she met the organisation’s editorial team who taught her about the tone of voice. After that, Rachel is free to blog as she pleases on the way around.

Holloway says the campaign has a budget of £35,000 which has covered the cost of pimping a classic VW in a VisitEngland wrap as well as red and white bedding and crockery inside as well as the kit to help the Rachel tweet, blog and post about her experiences as she travels – two video camera, one handheld and one on the roof of the van, an iPhone, an iPad and a laptop.

The VisitEngland team is looking for a substantial return on its investment in Rachel’s trip.

“We would like to see a 10:1 ROI on the budget, so PR coverage worth £350,000. I think we will definitely reach that and then some.”

That return comes in different ways – coverage of the competition to find the person to be the Fan, content gathered along the journey and PR generated along the route. “A lot of regional radio stations and newspapers have got on board with the campaign and interviewed Rachel,” says Holloway.

There are no specific targets for Rachel’s blog but the team had a target of 2,000 followers for the @faninavan Twitter account by the end of the trip. She has around 1,000 now at the half way point so she is on track.

Holloway has some tips for tourist boards looking at doing something similar.

“Definitely do it - it has been brilliant,” she says. “What has been fantastic is how much the destination management organisations have got on board and really shaped her journey. They have organised VIP activities and behind the scenes tours. From an internal PR perspective it has been brilliant.”

What would they do differently?

She says, “We would look at the itineraries further in advance because they are very fiddly. We do them in week chunks and work on them a week in advance.”

Are there some areas of travel in which social media is helpless?

by Steve Keenan

Here’s a conundrum for you. Are there some areas of travel in which social media is utterly helpless? Where there is nothing that can be done to help change?

I paused to think at the AGM this week of The Travel Foundation, a fine body whose slogan is ‘caring for the places we love to visit.’

At the meeting, I heard that British tour firms have done well in recent years to clean up parts of the Mediterranean and make destinations sustainable.

The efforts by firms like Tui and Thomas Cook have been the results of hard work between themselves, resorts and the Foundation.

The collaborative projects have resulted, for example, in reductions of plastic bottle waste in Cyprus and local food being supplied to five hotels in Turkey. In all, the Foundation has helped projects get going in 20 countries.

This has all been achieved largely without social media: more down to hard graft, patience and face-to-face meetings. Remember those?

But now there is a warning that the next wave of Russian and eastern European holidaymakers may have, um, a different set of priorities - showering less or not using plastic bottles not being high on the agenda.

Industry legend Noel Josephides has spent 40 years in tour operating to Greece and is a shrewd observer of change.

“All the new growth in tourism to Cyprus is Russian,” he says. “And Russia is way behind us in any form of green perception. They act like we did 10 year ago and that is the challenge: the economies that have not had the privileges we’ve had.”

And this is the conundrum.

We have all become so used to using social media as a force for rapid, and generally positive, change that I’m completely stymied as to how to deploy SM in this context.

If, as Andy Cooper of Thomas Cook says, the Russians are ‘light years’ behind us in terms of green awareness, how on earth do the socially developed countries tell the Russians how to behave?

I’ve seen them barreling past queues in Dubai’s water parks and generally acting like school’s out. Which, as Noel says, they generally are – and as Britons did to excess across swathes of southern Europe in decades past.

On a recent visit to Moscow for WTM’s Vision conference, it transpired there is not even a proper accounting system in Russia to know how many inbound and outbound tourists there are.

The Foundation will continue to do its bit – and, indeed, has just launched a new public-facing website.

But how to get a message to the Russians to think responsibly and spend time sorting their towels out is an enormous challenge that defies me. Should we even be bothering at this stage – or is this exactly the time to use SM to get a message across before the damage is done?

I shall return to this theme in future. In the meantime, I would be delighted to hear any ideas….

The rise and rise and rise of video

by Steve Keenan

My campaign to put video at the top of any must-do list for a blogger or website editor is coming along nicely.

I have long been banging on about the need to have video to stand out from the crowd. Now it’s getting to the point of just keeping up with the Joneses next door.

A safari company boss I did some video training with is kicking himself that it has taken so long to re-launch his website (with video capability) that a competitor has stolen a march and posted several videos of lodges on his site.

And at least two other firms I met at the Association of Independent Tour Operators (Aito) conference in Madeira at the weekend are ruing not launching video earlier as competitors have sneaked ahead.

(To be fair, one is Inside Japan, which a year ago was planning to give video cameras to clients on escorted tours – and post the results on its TV channel. The tsunami delayed plans but managing director Alistair Donnelly assures me he’s back on track).

Video is now becoming mainstream, with YouTube the second largest search engine on the planet (good to see at least a dozen operators have their own channels). Video shows up better in Google search results, stands out in search results and keeps people on a blog or website longer.

Blog and website owners have always known it would be nice to have but now it’s getting harder to ignore as it makes the site easier to find online. Cost is usually the reason for delaying but as we showed at Social Travel Market last year, it doesn’t have to be that pricey.

And now I’ve heard of another way to get video out there, at an even lower cost. The clever people at Intrepid Travel, an adventure company based out of Australia but with offices in the UK and Canada, recently worked with US food bloggers The Perennial Plate.

The couple behind the blog who took one of Intrepid’s food-based trips in Vietnam and produced a high-quality video in return for the free trip and a payment for producing the video – which Intrepid has its name on, and can also use on its site.

Video: The Vietnamese food trail

The video was posted on their blog and picked-up by Vimeo, The New York Times and The Huffington Post, and as a result got over 300,000 views in three weeks. It has also been shared more than 1,100 times on Facebook.

An understandably happy PR manager for the UK, Nicola Frame, said: “We were pleased with the results - and are discussing further trips for them over the coming months.”

The company has also just run a competition challenging travellers to show how intrepid they are. It received 723 entries and seven of the 10 finalist entries most voted for in a public poll were, you guessed it, submitted on video. (See the winner here).

It’s the age of the video – and one that’s only starting in terms of how clever it will be used in social media in future.