Social media is an evolving area of PR practice and its profile continues to grow.

It is still quite an undefined communications platform but blogs are perhaps the most well-known example of social media. Other examples include podcasts, ‘wikis’ (e.g. Wikipedia), message boards, social bookmarking websites (e.g. del.icio.us), social networking websites (e.g. bebo, MySpace, Facebook) and content sharing websites (e.g. flickr, YouTube). Old and new media interact and reputation and positioning should be seen as one continuum.

A market has been created by the increasing consumer generated content and conversations that are happening online. Social media is not just another content distribution channel and direct sales attempts are not always appreciated by the online community.

The travel industry simply needs to join the conversation, not interrupt it!

How do we measure our success?

There is still a paradigm shift toward the use of social media campaigns and there is still much debate about measuring success.

Before any initiative is embarked on, we will ensure that there is a clear visualization about what success will mean for yor company.

The metrics that we have used in the past with clients are:Increase in online mentions: number of quality blog posts.Relationships with well known travel bloggers e.g. Travel Blather. Travelrants,Travel Insights, Tourism Tide.Qualitative assessment of the quality of the content being produced. Number of links from other sites to the brand’s URLs.Number of posts quoting or linking to the brand.Engagement and enhanced product knowledge of customers.

On a more quantitative basis, the tools that should be used when embarking on any media campaign are:Subscribe to Google Alerts for the URLs / words you want to monitorCreate a Technorati account (free sign up and simply a service to monitor blogs and posts)

Contact the team for more info on our digital approach.

This is an example of a successful viral game produced by Park Plaza Hotel.

Measures of success:

In its first six days, the game was played by over 130,000 people

Increased footfall in to the bar by 35%

Data capture

Brand recognition