3sixtyfive

Case South African Tourism Early 2011 3sixtyfive joined a pitch for South African Tourism. The question was to pitch for two campaigns, but we proposed a social brand program. And won the pitch!

 Why a program?

If a brand wishes to stay relevant throughout the year, it has to think in programs, not campaigns. South African Tourism understood that it needed a continuous presence and was looking for an agency that could help on a strategic level. Throughout 2011 we’ve implemented this program that resulted in the first travel gamified travel community. But it all started with listening. Step 1: Brand Monitoring & Influencers In order to retrieve strategic market insights on which we could build a solid strategy we started with a Brand Scan. We scanned the social web for a few month and got thousands of conversations that were travel and/or South Africa related. Drawn from these conversations some of the most important conclusions were that people were very positive and passionate about South Africa. And that Twitter was a medium that couldn’t handle all the stories and adventures of South African holidays. Besides monitoring, we also identified the most important influential persons and places on the Dutch social web, so that we could involve them later on. Step 2: Strategy & Concept We found a lot of great South Africa experiences, scattered all over the web. And a lot of questions as well. All this led to a strategy in which South Africa experiences would be shared on a specific community: Mijn Zuid-Afrika

Stimulate Word of Mouth with Gamification

We wanted people to share their stories, photo’s and video’s about South Africa. After all, who could tell them better and more passionately then the people who went there? But we also wanted people who didn’t visit South Africa yet to be inspired, to ask questions  and get in touch with locals. And of course, when interested, it should be possible to book a trip. How could we stimulate that? The answer was gamification. Each upload, answered question, comment and review was to be measured and rewarded. Based both on quality and quantity users could earn Plakkers (South African for Badges). Step 3: Develop After working out the specifics of the community it was build on an open source platform that was fully Facebook Connected. Check out the community here. Step 4: Embed The people of South African Tourism were very motivated and eager to make Mijn Zuid-Afrika a success. During this phase they were trained in Radian6, the monitoring solution we used, in the site CMS itself and a specific social media workshop for the employees and the PR-agency was given as well. Step 5: Outreach It’s nice to have a brand new community, but without promoting it, very little will happen. So we proposed a very innovative outreach program that would last for several months, possible to be continued forever With Radian6, we would be able to spot every South Africa related upload in (nearly) real-time. We can find every upload and react instantly. When somebody places South Africa related content on the web, we can thank the person for sharing, compliment him/her and ask for some more sharing of the same content on the community. The launch was the right moment to involve the influencers as the first group to enter the community, letting them be the first explorers of Mijn Zuid-Afrika.

Some results after three months.