Social Media - Building Your Brand From the Inside Out
1. STA TRAVEL MARKETING STATRAVEL.COM Social Media – Building Your Brand From The Inside Out
2. WHO WE ARE STA Travel is a global travel specialist with 30 years experience helping students, teachers, and young professionals travel the world. We offer a unique range of products with exclusive discounts on airfare, accommodations, tours, rail passes, and more. Globally we are present in 90 countries with 400 retail locations, sending over 6 million travelers away each year.
3. OUR MISSION To create opportunities for students and young adults to make the most of their time and experience the world face-to-face, in any way they choose.
4. LIVE OUT OUR VISION “ We believe that when we fully experience the world and all the wonders it has to offer, we connect with who we are and discover who we can be. ”
Manage Social Networks to Gain Employee Buy-in and Build a Positive Company Culture
Our marketing organization at STA invests in Brand Ambassadors “on the ground” AND we heavily invest in building online networks and organic search engine marketing. Why not leverage our employees across all areas of the company (who are already using this space) to become our Online Brand Ambassadors? These are the people that know travel and they know our brand Why not use this to help drive impact to the business, all while engaging and keeping it fun for the employee?
Develop Guidelines for Social Media Establish a comprehensive process that can coach your employees on everything from online etiquette, to types of use and examples, ideas and templates – essentially how to represent your Brand online We need to guide/direct, but not control Involve them in the process; solicit feedback, input and ideas Make sure to vary by experience levels – as most of us as marketers (and consumers) are very familiar with Facebook; people have varying levels of expertise and even the most savviest of users need to be balanced with type/style of writing and use of social networks that are inline with use for your Brand’s purposes vs their own consumer habits Share our process as an example Reviewing current social media status of all store groups, going through to make these uniform and consistent (groups vs pages) Choose a core group of key stakeholders and influencers to lead the charge (example: STA Paparazzi) Develop and Publish a Social Media Guidelines process and toolkit Show examples of… Events Product/Sale related messages Promotions User Engagement “ Market Research” Hosted Webinars as an Example “ It’s it own thing. It will take key strategic people who understand it. I have my foot soldiers in different departments. I have a full-time engineer who responds to requests and understands social media. People from events, PR, communications, advertising sit on social media group. It’s a nice handshake between traditional and emerging marketing models.” It’s working – Show Twitter followers and numbers
Many companies actually block or ban social media networks; but we will guide/direct this activities while keeping it fun (We get to “Facebook” for WORK!) For Travel related companies this can mean blogging about your travel experiences = additional SEO pickup and impressions you can track back to your site Use Travel Blog example Flickr, YouTube, FB and Twitter examples Get them energized! (if this means incentivizing and/or rewarding and recognizing just as you would around any other company priority or initiative) Put a face behind the brand Use FB media tab example of Store of the Month/Travel Expert features Also show personalities coming through on FB status updates, Twitter updates and blogs 6 percentage points Increase last year in overall employee ENGAGEMENT; indexing over 10% above industry/organization norms for ENGAGE results (surveyed by Kenexa_
Share results regularly on organic search results/rankings; revenue translated direct from social media networks; consumer engagement and impressions via retweets/Facebook engagement
Internal vs. external communities -? Should an internal social community be completely separate from an external one?
Videos, content produced for viral release/rich media for content display across our web site We continue to expand our library through our World Traveler Internship program and through employee travel experiences