Henry The Seventh: Social media success

Do you “like”? Do you “tweet”? Do you tube? Does your business do any or all of these things and, if so, does it really know what it is doing with them?

Social media. Social networks. Once upon a time, social networks were just networks of people, doing what people do, i.e. being social, being friends, being business acquaintances. Whatever the type of network, the purpose is the same: to make contact and connections.

And that’s what it’s about. “Making connections.” The words of Seamus Cullen at No Frills Excursions when I told him I was going to be talking to his business partner, Toni Alenyar, about social media.

No Frills is a small business, but it is a successful one, and one reason why it is successful is that it goes about its business in a purposeful fashion. It plans. And among its plans is one for the use of social media. I have a copy: all fourteen pages of it.

Not every business can devote significant time and resources to social media, but most have come to appreciate that they are, as Toni says, “essential tools”. Many businesses have Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and the like, but do they really appreciate what they are doing with them?

No Frills is guided by a seven-step strategy. It is one that is partly specific to it as an excursions’ operator, but most of the steps can be applied to or adapted by any business. How the company uses social media is geared to meeting one or more of these seven steps. Crucially, they are not the company’s, they are the customer’s.

From the customer’s seeking of holiday inspiration and information to his planning and decision-making, to his taking action (making a booking and travelling) and to his sharing of his experiences, social media accompany each step along the way.

No Frills tests out any social media going. With some it is a case of learning what they offer and which may assume greater importance in the future. But with all its social media activity, there is a wish for the business to be visible, to enhance its reputation and to be seen as innovative.

Of the different networks, the most important to the company are Facebook, You Tube and Trip Advisor. The glowing reviews that No Frills attracts on Trip Advisor come quite obviously as a result of good experiences and good service, but the company actively encourages customers to review what it does, whether good or not so good, and spends time in responding to reviews which are posted.

The sharing of experiences by customers on Trip Advisor is the seventh step in the company’s strategic approach, but it can just as easily be seen as the first step. As Toni points out, Trip Advisor is that significant now that a majority of travellers consult it as part of their initial planning.

The attention given to the traveller’s information-gathering process is one that has led No Frills to be highly proactive and innovative. For example, it now makes short videos about hotels and posts them on You Tube. Why? Because someone interested in coming on holiday searches for information about specific hotels. No Frills videos give a short tour of the hotel and other relevant information about the resort, and relevance is a keyword in Toni’s vocabulary.

But how does this benefit the business? It’s not about selling as such. Of course, selling is the outcome that is sought, but it comes back to making connections. Someone sees a video about a hotel, it comes from No Frills, there will be some means of connecting to more No Frills information and the result … There may be a sale either online or in-resort. Critically though, trust and credibility are being created.

Actually quantifying the benefits of the company’s social media activity is nigh on impossible. Toni freely admits this. But then much promotional activity is hard or impossible to quantify. It is hard to place a value on the benefits derived from visibility, reputation and innovation, but social media, used well and planned well, will bring such benefits, and the importance attached to social media by No Frills is reflected by the fact that there is now a full-time member of staff who concentrates on the company’s internet presence.

There is way more to the No Frills internet story. I’ve not mentioned how Google search enquiries have helped to create a whole separate website, I’ve not mentioned that each of the four No Frills offices (three in Puerto Alcúdia and one in Puerto Pollensa) has its own You Tube channel, and I’ve not mentioned Henry the elephant. You might guess though that Henry has his own Facebook page.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

People Of The Year: Spain and Mallorca

Mark Zuckerberg is “Time Man (Person) Of The Year”. Good for him. He joins a distinguished list of those who “for better or worse” have most influenced events during the year. His name is now etched alongside previous winners such as Roosevelt, Churchill and The Computer. There was no person of the year in 1982, just a machine; neither Thatcher nor Galtieri could persuade the judges.

There has never been a Time Person Of The Year from Spain. There is arguably only one who might have been: Franco in 1936. Wallis Simpson won that year for some reason. He then faced some pretty tough opposition over the years of the Civil War; Chiang Kai-shek and his missus winning in 1937 and Hitler and Stalin in the next two.

If Spain has proved to be light when it comes to candidates for Person Of The Year, then Mallorca has been all but weightless. The island doesn’t really do “greats”. In seeking a person of the year, therefore, there is no alternative other than to forget global influence and to instead be inward-looking in considering Spain and Mallorca’s persons (sic) of the year.

For Spain you probably have to look no further than Vicente del Bosque or Andres Iniesta for lifting the World Cup, but that puts them in Sports Personality of the Year territory. Influencing for better or worse? Well, does A.P. McCoy do this, other than influencing the betting habits of a nation? Discuss.

Does Zapatero qualify as person of the year? He has influenced relatively little other than his likely political downfall, but his real problem has been that he is influenced by other things. He has no real control of events, just as Mallorca’s politicians have no control, except in one area. A whole dock-full of them have influenced events for the worse – Munar, Matas, (Miguel) Nadal and their shenanigans with public money. Allegedly. People of the year might well be the more anonymous faces of the anti-corruption police and judges.

But Zapatero does qualify in one respect. He responded to the Pope’s accusations of secularism in Spain by saying that laws are not made “that the Pope wants”. His great achievement, not just this year, has been his challenges to the Church. He may go down in history as having presided over the collapse of the boom times, but  he also deserves a place in history for his social policies. He can’t be made person of the year because of his economic failings, but he would still make the shortlist.

As in Spain, so Mallorca has its sporting aspirants. Rafael Nadal and Jorge Lorenzo. Great achievements by both, but what have they really influenced? The greater achievement was probably that of a non-Mallorcan, Real Mallorca’s former coach Gregorio Manzano for influencing outstanding performances from a team that refused to be dragged down by a hopeless club. Even Manzano didn’t influence events that much though, not to the extent of ridding the team of Sid Lowe’s “no-fans” jibe.

Of Mallorca’s politicians, the ones who have kept their hands clean, that is, can anything be said? Not a lot. President Antich was and is a victim of circumstances, but he did one thing for the good – booting the Unió Mallorquina party out of the coalition when the corruption charges became a daily occurrence. The weakness of his position and that of his government was, however, exposed when he had to concede the environment ministry to the Mallorcan socialists (PSM) who promptly bared their political teeth in bunkering the Son Bosc golf course. The new minister, Gabriel Vicens, has form in influencing events for better or worse, depending on your point of view; he had previously managed to hack Alcúdia town hall off so much that the planned rail extension from Sa Pobla was scrapped.

Antich said in January that he was going to make tourism his priority in 2010. Heading off to Moscow to press some flesh may have been evidence of this, but did he influence tourism events? Not so as you would have noticed. As with most things, he showed how impotent Mallorca’s politicians are. They find it hard to influence anything that really matters, such as tourism. The real people of the year, as ever, are the bosses of Thomas Cook and TUI. It is they who influence events for better or worse, and so we can anticipate ever more all-inclusive in 2011.

No, there is no one person who merits the Of The Year accolade. Not a Mallorcan or a Spaniard anyway. The one who does is American. Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook influenced us, well many of us, for better or worse, and gave rise to subversiveness of the sort that saw Pollensa and its poorly maintained and littered streets being highlighted with shame and pro-duck campaigners in Can Picafort aiming to flout the law.

“Time” may have got it wrong with Wallis Simpson when it overlooked Franco, but it has got it right with Zuckerberg. Do you like or do you want to be a friend?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

Kissing With Confidence: Embracing Facebook

The Pope is to be confronted by a kiss-in – a “queer kissing flashmob” – when he turns up in Barcelona on Sunday. A gay and lesbian demonstration will involve two minutes of slobbering. “Avert your eyes, Holy Father. They’re using tongues and all.”

This is part of what is an ongoing collapse of Catholicism in Spain. The rearguard, die-hard Catholics are said to be outraged. Which is presumably part of the reason for the kiss protest. What the Pope thinks about it, who knows. Not that keen, one would imagine. He probably won’t be videoing it all on his mobile and then posting it on YouTube. Does the Pope do the internet in this way, do you suppose? Doubtful. It’s unlikely that he tweets or has a Facebook page. If he did, then he might have been invited to the kiss-in or been asked whether he liked it or to have even been asked to become a “friend”. The notion of the Pope being poked by some gay activists is really not something one should devote too much time thinking about.

The demo has been arranged through Facebook. Ah yes, Facebook. Where would we be without it? With a lot more time on our hands to do something more productive, like lying down or watching the telly. We would also be a whole lot less likely to be invited to demos or to partake in some action, gay, lesbian or otherwise.

In recent times, Facebook has been used locally to try and arrange an alternative to the Can Picafort night party during the summer fiesta (i.e. staging it on the beach where it used to be held); to call to arms supporters of live ducks being thrown into the sea (also in Can Picafort, and a movement which furthermore featured a YouTube video with, coincidentally, a “Pope” enticing some Donalds from the Son Bauló torrent); and to post pictures of rubbish, graffiti and general unpleasantness in Pollensa and its port. I daresay there have been many others. Were I to spend my life hooked up to Facebook, I might be able to tell you about them, but I don’t. I am ambivalent towards it.

A touch of citizen participation agitprop seems a pretty good application of Facebook. I am all in favour. There are plenty of other benefits. What I don’t like is the controlling nature of Facebook, the control on time and the sheer impulse to use it. This stems from an irrational further dislike, that of having been steered in its direction by some nerdy geek who wasn’t much good at getting his leg over. I can at least take satisfaction in the knowledge that a time will come when we all hate Mark Zuckerberg as much as we now hate Bill Gates.

The rotten thing about Facebook is that it can be so useful. And not just to the summer-employed population of Mallorca, now with so much free time that they can to go into Facebook overdrive when not standing in the “paro” queues. No, it’s more useful than this and more useful than appealing to the agitating duck-fanciers of Can Picafort.

It has occurred to me to wonder quite why so many resources, mainly money, are piled into the creation of governmental and local authority tourism websites, especially as most of them are completely useless or are embarrassing in their use of English. Facebook’s free. And there are all manner of people knocking around who do pages which serve a similar sort of purpose. Like myself. At least I was doing so until I started to get bored with it all towards the end of the season.

But with the Facebooks and indeed websites that are privately operated, there is an enormous resource that basically does the job of the tourism authorities for them. Moreover, they often speak to the audience in a far more comprehensible and helpful fashion than the “official” sites.

Of course, these alternatives would never be sanctioned as being real mouthpieces because they might – and do – say things that the authorities do not care for. You are more likely to get information and opinion, warts and all. This doesn’t square with the default mode of websites and their descriptions of everything as “beautiful” or “paradise”, the sea as “turquoise” or the natives as “welcoming and friendly”. And you might also get, because this is the nature of Facebook, pages that are friends with or who like gays kissing in front of the Pope or illegally live ducks quacking in the sea off Can Picafort. Tut, tut, that would never do.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

A Load Of Bull (Ducks And Parties): Fiesta peculiarities

The power of Facebook. Possibly.

Some weeks after one Facebook group in Can Picafort emerged, comes another. The first was concerned with what used to be the “Auba” party that took place on the beach, but which was moved to the sports centre three years ago. The second has to do with another tradition that used to occur during the Can Picafort summer fiesta – the tossing of live ducks into the sea. Both groups want a return to the traditions.

In the case of the second Facebook group, anyone joining it should be slightly wary. The miscreants who have released live ducks, in defiance of the ban these past three years, have never been identified. The police are likely to be taking an interest in this group. As for the first group, this might also attract some attention from the forces of the law; an unofficial party in the dunes is being talked about.

While the aims of the two groups are different, there might well be common cause: the night party and the live ducks were the soul of the fiestas in Can Picafort. The move to the sports centre has done much to strip the party of its atmosphere, while the rubber duck substitutes are just plain daft. There is another aspect to be taken account of where the party is concerned, and that is money. It is doubtful that the organisers could stretch to a Carl Cox again in the current circumstances. But this shouldn’t necessarily be an obstacle to what once was the biggest and most anticipated of the fiesta parties. If Puerto Pollensa – Puerto Pollensa, for God’s sake – can have a party on the beach, why shouldn’t Can Picafort?

The Facebook group promoting the return of the live ducks makes precisely the point that I have – here and in HOT! – that by comparison with genuine acts of cruelty to animals, the release of ducks is not in the same league. It isn’t really in a league at all. The ducks were a soft target; unlike bulls and all the passion that they arouse on both sides of the argument. Bull traditions, in particular the bullfight, are far more deep-rooted in Mallorcan and Spanish society than those involving ducks, and one might also argue that they are not without Francoist connotations. El Caudillo was greatly in favour of the bullfight, given its “Spanishness” and suggestions of nobility.

The annual bullfight during Muro’s Sant Joan fiestas, due to be staged on 20 June, had looked as though it might not go ahead, owing to the need for certain improvements to be made to the bullring and its facilities. These have been made. The town hall, in addition to the nearly half a million euros it paid to acquire the bullring, has forked out a further 30 grand to effect the improvements, using, it says, money that was held over from last year. The equivalent of the RSPCA is none too impressed with the town hall. It has been denounced to the ministry of the interior on the grounds that it has, in effect, financially supported the bullfight, which seemingly is in contravention of a law that disbars it from doing so. The society has also made reference to the demonstration against the bullfight that occurred last year.

The bullfight will go ahead. Even before final sign-off, due to be given today by technicians, doctors and vets, the programme for the fiestas had been published, with the bullfight and the matadors listed. Meanwhile fiesta organisers in Can Picafort will be arranging the acquisition of rubber ducks.

Something isn’t quite right.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

This Is My Four-Leaf Clover: Internet advertising

I find myself increasingly and variously intrigued and infuriated by internet advertising.

Let’s take the infuriation first, if we may: the invasive pop-ups or the things that somehow float across the screen or some video demanding to take me away from what it is I actually want to look at. I’ll give you a good example. The “Diario de Mallorca”. Good paper and pretty good website. Better than its main Mallorca-based competitor, “Ultima Hora”. It’s easier to navigate and is better laid-out. However, it has this regular tendency, once you’ve clicked on whatever it is you want to read, to take you to an advert – often for some Seat or Peugeot you have absolutely no interest in. This obliges you to either unclick it or wait till it goes away.

There does of course have to be advertising, which opens up the whole discussion about newspapers, their ad revenues from the web and whether they should be free online or not. But this is not something for here. There is advertising, which is a business necessity for a website to function, and there is advertising – of the intrusive variety. To what extent is this intrusive advertising counter-productive? Out of principle, I refuse to click on it, and only have done so by mistake. Out of principle, I would never buy a Seat, if it’s being forced onto me when I have something better to do, like reading about what shenanigans such-and-such a local politician has been up to. And when it takes an age to load a page because of the damn floating ads, or whatever they are, there is further counter-productivity. I go somewhere else. I may not like “Ultima Hora” as much, but it doesn’t hack me off.

You have to presume that this intrusion doesn’t come cheap and also to presume that it works, even if referrals may be a low percentage and actual conversion (assuming this can in fact be measured) far less. But the potential to alienate readers cannot be underestimated, and then there are those, like myself, who form a negative image of a brand because it’s getting my back up.

Web advertising is a curiosity because it is an experimental work-in-progress. Unlike TV advertising, the model of which has remained pretty much unaltered since the first days of commercial television (in the UK at any rate) in the mid-1950s, advertising on the net has been in a constant state of flux since it was first realised that here was the brave new world of promotional opportunity. The cost can be high, but it all depends what is being advertised and how. The “how” is arguably the most interesting aspect, especially since the inception of social networking. Facebook and the rest may not be for everyone, but its potential – cheap promotional potential – is significant.

In Alcudia there is a bar, Shamrock. Facebook has transformed not only the bar in terms of its income and profitability, it has transformed the bar completely – in terms of its market and product. Yes, there have been, and are, other promotional tactics, but it is Facebook that has driven the change. I’m not going into detail, this may be for another time or place, but if there is such a thing at Harvard Business School as case studies on the role of social networking in marketing, then Shamrock might well form one of them. To emphasise – not just greater success but also a change in the business itself, all stemming from Facebook. It’s fascinating stuff.

The essential ingredient with the Facebook approach is that it is a form of push marketing – or poke marketing if you prefer. It is proactive and can create a rapid response. But this proactivity isn’t aggressive, as with so much unwished-for promotion, because of the very nature of social networks and their built-in likemindedness. Moreover, Facebook is without pretension in its marketing style. Some advertisers, or so it has appeared to me, have a kudos mentality that demands they pay fairly substantial amounts to appear on a particularly grand site. This may be beneficial to them, or it may not be, but for many, a complementary approach using social networks would almost certainly be beneficial, if not more beneficial. It does rather depend on how broad the marketing scope needs to be and therefore how much the initial contact or interest via the internet needs to be made, which is where paid-for representation can be, and often is, important.

What we’re moving towards is businesses adopting a bundling approach, of different types of site, with different styles. The only fear with the likes of Facebook is that its success, and that of those who use it creatively, will result in the sort of intrusive advertising that can deter. I, for one, hope not.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.