E-tourism Marketing Intelligence

I hope you are all well aware of the Facebook phenomenon and the power of social-networking platforms to promote your brand. Well, I would like to share with you a very special little story.

In March last year, I was visiting Auckland, NZ and found myself at the top of the Auckland tower just about to jump to the bottom (don’t ask!). This is where I met Stu (a bar manager) and Ollie Childs (a guitar song writer, singer and amazing artist, 2 mates that had just freshly landed from the UK.

We all jumped for our lives from the Auckland Tower (except for Ollie who for some reason had managed to get out of it because of photography duties…) and instandly bonded! My friend Michelle and I ended up spending 3 days with the boys and did all sorts of fun activities - Canyoning, Bungy Jumping, Busking (just to see if Ollie was as good as we thought he was!) etc. Auckland is just the place to be for adventurous wild fun!

We developed such a great friendship that “the boys” (their official nickname by then) visited us on the Gold Coast for 10 days in exchange of Guitar Lessons. This is when I experienced my first musical “ah ha” moment and I realised that I really was a hopeless guitarist and the Online Marketing field was definitely a great valid choice. However, Ollie was just pure pop magic and there was no doubt at all that fame was just around the corner…

You have read that far, but what is there in common with Ollie Childs and Online Marketing? Well, you have all heard about artists who got famous via the web right? Ollie did even better - he did not only use the web as a crutch or medium but made it a crucial part of his art. Check out for yourself:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFVPv2xGmT0[/youtube]

147,229 views on Youtube so far. I am eager to check the increase every day! Ollie also has a MySpace page (which works very well as online marketing for Musicians and other artists) where you can listen some of his originals: http://www.myspace.com/oliverchilds. And to my knowledge, he is still single…;-)And just to prove you that I am not just one of Ollie’s Facebook Friends, here is a little memory from our Auckland moments!

Feel free to forward this article and direct your friends to Ollie’s video and experience for yourself what the web could do for your brand and your business. Ollie - if you ever read this - you Rock!

Talking about e-marketing, e-business, e-booking is a given. But could we talk about e-behaviour? If I compare myself with my mother, the first thing you could differentiate us is the tightness in my upper back, neck and shoulder area. 90% of my day is spent at a 90 degree angle sitting in front of my monitor. My remedial massage therapist even added “computer” under the “what sports do you play” questions of her diagnostic card.

It made me think…

First thing my mother does in the morning is makes herself a nice cup of coffee and has a chat with my dad and brother around the kitchen table. First thing I do in the morning is unlock my computer (notice how it was not even turned off to gain time) and chat to my friends on Messenger, Skype and Facebook.

Mum then potters around the house, runs some errands, maybe reviews her cookbooks and calls a few friends. I clean my desktop (which has by now become my home), google anything and everything that comes to my mind and eventually sign up on online dating services as it seems to be the natural thing to do since I already do everything online.

My daily activities made me realise that is it not only the traditional services that have switched from offline to online but that the change is at a much bigger level: humans are turning into e-humans and their behaviour has been e-altered.

How does that relate to your business? Well, imagine a customer that had a great experience with your service. He will have a positive e-behaviour and e-brag in social medias all over the Internet. Fantastic free advertising for your company. 10 years ago you would have not dreamt about reaching such a large audience. Now, imagine a very angy customer with a negative e-behaviour. What could he do? Write a nasty blog post? The Web 2.0 offers way better revenge opportunities… such as recording a phone conversation, broadcasting it via on youtube (because when you are angry a blogpost seems too docile) and ruining your business before you even have the opportunity to realise what is e-happening. This is a true story: Mr Vincent Ferrari has a blog. He also happened to want to cancel his AOL account (which is harder than getting out of prison in the USA apparently). Unhappy with the response he got from the AOL customer service representative, he recorded their conversation and eventually broadcasted it on his blog via an audio file, asking his readers if they had experienced a similar situation….
His webserver crashed because it could not cope with the thousands of downloads of the audio file…. AOL had to intervene and the rest is history.

Read more about adapting to the influence of a Social Media Internet on the Search Engine Guide website