As I am sure you are all aware of, at this point, I am doing a couple “in the trenches” interviews with those people who are implementing & suceeding with the complex & changing world of social media. In my previous interviews with Shana from Tourism Queensland, and Susan Black from Black & Wright, we have tended to notice some dominant trends within successful social media, and my interview with Gregg was no different.  It’s reassuring that we are finding results and case studies to gel our operations and create success, across the board, for the travel industry.  A successful social media programs should have a plan, a direction, and should be about metrics, results, and goals.  As has been said before, you wouldn’t randomly use marketing or PR, why would use social media in such a random way?

Another trend that seems obvious is that most successful social media programs are not operated by these fabled “gurus”, but by industry veterans who have worked incredibly hard and somewhat tirelessly garnering the knowledge and connections that they now have at their disposal.  Gregg is in this category as well – orchestrating countless bloggers and travel industry experts / agents from all over the world, all from an office in Canada.

FLIGHT CENTRE

First, before we jump into the interview, let’s give a background to those unfamiliar with Flight Centre.  Andre Sammartino said it most concise:

“Flight Centre revolutionised the retailing of international air-travel in Australia by shifting to a model where profitability was driven by volume rather than margins. Initially they built a price advantage by bypassing ticketing wholesalers, seeking out less well-known airlines, and also by arbitraging price differentials across markets.”

A complex and somewhat topsy turvy history, Flight Centre has had multiple periods of growth and contraction since its 1981 inception.  It is now focusing on globalization of the brand, something you can safely suggest they will be successful with – they are already the #1 travel agency in Australia, as well as the largest Australian brand on Twitter.  All is not simple in travel, the online world, and brand evaluation, however – and disintermediation is effecting Flight Centre’s entire model of business.  There has even been a tumbling stock price since it’s 2002 peak; but rumors of their demise have been greatly exaggerated – they have scored quite well in recent months, however, showing profits that have been (forgive my pun) soaring.

MR. TILSTON

Some of these efforts and successes can be attributed to Gregg Tilston, who has a targeted, thoughtful plan to help with the further globalization of Flight Centre.  Gregg is the implementation & standardization gent for the overall social strategy for Flight Centre, and then loosely organizes and controls real world travel agents and gives them the ability to market themselves on different internet channels.

“We direct front line staff with the education that ‘once its online, it’s there forever’ – but we really want them to have the tools to promote themselves. These agents have their own business, and speak on behalf of their personal brand and physical storefront, but don’t speak on behalf of the corporation.”

It’s a very interesting model – Flight Centre can source viable content at their leisure, while still having endless entities providing meaningful content that can be used whenever they want, as well as allowing linking opportunities, and more.  It ends up being very powerful, because they are a content publisher, on some levels.

“We have multiple forms of distribution – Corporate, Brick and Mortar storefronts, as well as home based associates that work from within their communities, in their areas of travel expertise.  This has been the model in Canada, and now we are really opening it up worldwide.  What’s most exciting to me is that we are in that “cloud”, and that it is decentralized.  Taking from recent events, if a volcano blows up, the show still goes on.  Even in a worst case scenario, we will still exist in the real world, and because we are decentralized, we will also exist online.  At Flight Centre, we do not have one server room.”

By mandating that the worldwide network of travel consultants affiliated with Flight Centre use their personal voices to blog, engage, and expound the virtues of the company, it’s people, and simplicity of booking – they garner endless content, attention, and availability to get the upper hand in this rapidly altering field.  By being everywhere at once (be it Twitter, Facebook, Blogs and the peripheral “voices” worldwide), they create an accessibility heretofore unknown in the travel world, and garner an almost “hyperlocality” when it comes to being able to find experts for any region or vacation destination.  Going global means rooting yourself locally, a powerful lesson to carry with you into the future of your company.

Gregg started his professional career in Sales & Marketing IT solutions, but overtime felt detached from the field.  After reading about crowdsourcing, he stepped outside of his comfort zone to engage himself in something very fresh, cutting edge, and exciting – and took a job with a start up, where he learned about online content and messaging.

“I was tried in the fire”, admits Gregg.  “But it ultimately prepared me to deal with the fluid and changing world of social media.”

“I really owe a lot to Sean – we all do.  He is an amazing man,” meaning Sean Sutherland, Global E-Commerce Leader for Flight Centre [Twitter].  I had a conversation with him about Flight Centre; about the way they were moving the company forward, and about these very specific challenges that a brick and mortar company faced when trying to become this ubiquitous social company.  Every one from Flight Centre had worked in the front lines of travel, so it is a smart, experienced group of professionals.”

Gregg was brought on in March of 2009, where he rapidly developed [read that: sank or swim] and implemented an intriguing, efficient model for their social media program.

“We use a ‘hub-and-spoke’ strategy.  There are the hubs, like the Flightcentre.ca website, or our blog.  The spokes are about all the content hosting sites all around the world.  It is incredibly helpful with linking, and getting more eyeballs on Flight Centre – without any cost for server space.  My mandate, because we were originally a brick and mortar business model, is to show the value and presence of the front line staff.  It’s obvious that we need to demonstrate precisely *why* someone should use a brick and mortar business –  we are a group of front line travel agents that really exist, and we are building a base that doesn’t always understand that benefit.”

By utilizing Flight Centre’s legions of travel agents throughout the world, the sheer volume of generated content greatly helps to bolster their online presence.  Some businesses are still incredibly concerned about allowing employees to represent the brand in an online space, while Flight Centre mandates that all agents must blog about their vacations.   By utilizing the powerful techniques of blogging, or social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and video services like Youtube, Flight Centre anchors itself firmly into an online space, while still representing what makes the brick and mortar brand so powerful – it’s travel specialists.

“When this new user base comes to us from a blog, youtube videos, etc., they start to realize that this real world business has real people that really care and are really *available*.   Our competitors are OTA’s, but we’re real and human.  There is also Carlson’s and Amex, but they don’t “get it”.  I am surprised they haven’t put more of an effort in this. It’s really surprising.  But our people work hard to “get found” on Google, and we have really smart ways of engaging our audience. The blog is split into many parts, which shows relevance, both online and how we exist locally offline, which garners solid SEO and content that generates interest and accessibility to Flight Centre. We have been proving the validity of this model all over Canada.  Now as the global social media manager we take stalk of other channels and see how to leverage these regions and begin our implementation.”

This model is very exciting, because it has been built, tested, and proven.  As they expand globally, Flight Centre will have a relatively simple implementation, especially in that it’s flexible enough to enter the complexity of working with multiple languages and cultures.

“We can lay a framework down, but there are so many nuances and idiosyncrasies it becomes important to engage the micro level because you have cultural and linguistic differences that can create a big disconnect when people are implementing top level strategy without understanding these issues.  Sometimes the “z” is “zed”, just to point out an obvious example.  You need to make sure to connect with your potential clients in a way that’s familiar to them, that’s obvious.  It also is an issue for SEO, when you have words that are used or understood differently.”

One key to Gregg’s success has been the dynamic between him and the executive team above him.  We see this in social media, quite often.  Part of social media is opening yourself up, becoming transparent, and letting go of control.  It’s not for everyone.  Conversely, the more you try to manage social media like it’s traditional marketing, the less genuine and earnest the brand appears.  Social Media is not a print ad.  The most successful businesses have been ones that allow a relative amount of freedom and fluidity in managing the “social hemisphere”, so to speak.

“The day to day at Flight Centre is a lot about improvisation, as well as being trusted. Without Sean, this couldn’t work. He trusted me enough to give up control – and it’s important to know I haven’t taken some controlled voice or impersonal brand persona.  In fact, I am cheeky and really having fun with it, while just being myself.   It seems to work very well. It’s fairly simple; don’t overpost, annoy, or frustrate people.  Simply engage them and act like a professional.”

THE BEST TRAVEL JOB EVER

In developing this job and contest for their social media channels, Gregg found endless lessons to pass on to other businesses, and he is currently working on wrangling a case study out of their findings.  For those that don’t know, The 
Best Travel Job Ever was a contest to engage social networkers into competing for a job as a travel blogger.  Some of the content that came out of it was AMAZING, as you will see with their contest homepage.

“We had a number of surprises.  The original concept for the contest was “The Faces of Flight Centre”, and simply trying to find people to create Flight Centre branded content with their blogs, etc.  I was in web development when I started – again this was all Sean; it wasn’t marketing, it wasn’t sales – it was just an idea.  It came together really quick – from brainstorming in December to our launch on the first of March this year.  We were looking at different contesting platforms – and nothing had what we needed, so we built what we needed on our own.  It was actually quite funny, because the contesting platform CEO’s would try to sell their product, and instead of being upset that we didn’t buy from them, they were curious and engaged because of what we did.  They were like, ‘oh wow that’s a great idea, and so’s that’, etc.  It was fun to watch happen.  Right after our launch, we were credited with doing a great job, and got a lot of positive feedback.  But we went up “against” a Doritos contest that was launched at about the same time.  Their contest was to upload a video to youtube in which they “named a chip” — and it was the bane of my existence.  Doritos knocked it out of the park, and I was left —  waiting  — asking ‘when are my people going to upload?’. I was incredibly nervous. But all the people I work with were saying, ‘Doritos is looking for people to submit a video to name a chip, we are looking for travel bloggers, people that wanted to travel and video blog their adventures’. It was different.”

Of course, this powerful new tool of social, and engaging your branded audience, isn’t apart from, or polar to, traditional marketing tactics.  In fact, it’s vital to create parity between the two.  They might be two entirely different things, but as we have seen time and time again, they buttress one another, and enhance each respective goal.  Not only that, even social media can be “made” by traditional media – there are many ways to get something to go viral.  In this case, a print ad led to a TV spot:

“In the end, it was the traditional 6 pm and 11pm news.  We got the spot from the news guys at global because, on what I assume was a slow news day, they saw a print ad with a “blurb” about the Best Job in the World.  They contacted Henry’s Camera, who suggested they contact me at Flight Centre.  That became the tipping point, and catalyst, to jump start our campaign. We got a TV spot that gave us endless press that we didn’t expect, then we spread the news content and shared it with everyone. Our goal was 100 contestants, and we thought we would get around 35 who would opt-in.  Well, we had 110 contestants, there were 178,000 google searches, and we ended up with a page rank of four out of ten on a net new zero site.  Contestant’s friends and networks were promoting their friends content that was also *us*. We obviously did our best to offer viral components – when people saw uploaded travel videos, the egotistic element of ‘I can do that so much better‘ came into play.”

But again, it comes down to the community pushing the content, and that viral component of a meme – the idea that a good idea simply spreads organically because it is a good idea – took off.  It’s often that social media “gurus” take credit for what is simply the network effect – but there’s a certain aspect of the momentum completely out of your control. It’s vital to understand it’s not your plan, your interactions, or your implementation that is responsible for your success…. it’s the network.

“I give the community, the community contestants, the followers, and the friends all of the credit — they did it. It wasn’t [Flight Centre] at all.  Our demographic – we knew it was going to be 18-25 year olds – that was our target.  When we went to look at the database, 50 % of opt-ins in the database were 30 year old and plus, meaning that we actually got the aunts and uncles and families – the actual, “viable” consumers – per the more “traditional market thinking”.  For us, all these groups are vital!  Our initial thought was that we would brand these 18-25 year old contestants for life –  and then we ended up with this HUGE database of REALLY important consumers.  The overall contest has some fantastic hard numbers – we have the ROI for the skeptics and it was of obvious benefit.  But it was more about the ‘magic’ for lack of a better word. The ‘je ne sais quoi’ – about why these new communication tools are so powerful. The tools aren’t always perfect, but it’s huge.”

One of the exciting aspects in experimenting with social media’s online channels is that sheer immensity and overwhelming, awesome humbling that happens as it takes off.  For Flight Centre, everyone in the organization felt it – you realize you are part of something much, much bigger than your brand, or your idea.  The other curious bi-product of social media campaigns, and all of social media, is that people utilize it in ways that are never to be expected, and connections happen in the least probable of ways.  It’s the nature, and strength, of weak ties.

“We actually got three new hires for Flight Centre – because of the engagement these people identified with us more than the contest, and actually connected with us, our culture, and our ideas.  They got excited to be part of our company, and they came to us.  ‘Backchannel’ connections and conversations among contestants and the public were happening, and ‘connecting’ happened, not because of their entries or the contest, but because everyone was excited about the common interest of travel.  Even though she didn’t make our final selections, one of the entrants, Alicia Taggio, became a brand advocate and hosted a tweet up in Ontario, and we skyped our official selection of the winners.  The community was way, way bigger than we ever could have hoped, and they all had endless depth.  It was humbling, and it denoted that we were doing things right. It’s really moving, and very exciting to think about. It’s the cheapest tool we never realized we had.”

CHALLENGES IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Even now, Gregg is dealing with the complexity of the power of social media.  In a recent PR opportunity / experience, social media demonstrated it’s dark side (also proving most internet users are panicky and reactive without needing any real information).  In this case, complaints about the treatment of elephants in Thailand created collateral damage to Flight Centre when it was mistakingly attributed that they had something to do with the treatment of the elephants (marketing collateral depicted some people riding Elephants on vacation, which is apparently a “no no” in that elephants are not treated very well by those business owners). You can read more about that situation here: Flight Centre fends off social media attacks.  It was exceptionally well handled, to the extent that the petition that was started became moot within a couple days of Flight Centre’s response to the concerns, even getting the Executive GM to add a response on their Facebook Page. It gave Gregg an opportunity to show how Flight Centre is listening, and was a fantastic moment of brand management and perception.  They were able to recover from that problem with grace, accountability (even if it’s not supposed to be yours to take), and interactivity.  By being engaged, it changes your corporate culture, but it also, humbly, carries you into the future of business.  A little less heavy is this quaint example from our interview,

“Recently, a popular “mommy blogger” in Australia, commented on our logo “Captain”, and his hat.  She said something like, ‘I don’t know if he really is the captain, but I think he’s drunk, and the passengers are screwed’.  The cap on his head was at some ‘jaunty’ angle, and it was a harmless comment that did negatively associate our brand with drunkenness and lack of safety.  Harmless, but serious. So we photoshopped a jaunty cap on top of her avatar on Twitter, and sent the picture to her, saying ‘We promise we’re not drunk, but the hat is fun at that angle.. see?’.  She thought it was adorable, made it her profile picture, and did a whole blog post on the engagement we had.  Her blog is “Not drowning, Mothering“, so through our legitimate, interested, earnest – and a bit cheeky – engagement, she’s a life long fan.  One of my favorite things, earlier in my career, was cold calling, because you take this potentially annoying, negative relationship or expectation, and change it – and own it – and control it.  That Mommy Blogger is an honest evangelist, and it’s created new relationships; what started as a somewhat harmless, humorous knock on the brand is now a friendly, positive relationship.  Again, this is Sean giving up control, and giving up control is not easy. One thing I love about it  – first in Canada, now in this global role – there are endless opportunities to take something and really run with it. It’s Sean, but it’s also baked into the culture of Flight Centre.”

GOING GLOBAL

“We spent last year building and testing this model, and now it’s mature enough that we are evangelizing about what we are doing, and how it can work for other people.  We are starting to put case studies together, with Hootsuite, and I am getting ready for my world tour! [laughs]  We are getting ready to deploy what we built in Canada and implement with every region across the world, looking to get the support from, and connect with, the staff – it obviously benefits them as well. Scaling is vital, and it will be interesting to see this template layered into place after having practiced it and standardized it from Canada.  The regions need someone in place that supports it, and I am getting a great response so far.  The challenge of building a global strategy is about the speed of the internet, to some extent; we can be incredibly nimble as soon as something begins to trend, but a big part of “nimble” is having this global team in place – which means we can be online 24 hours, you have to be online 24 hours.  Now we have Australia that gets 8 hours, U.S. 8 hours, Canada, etc, so we can cover the entire net, engage people, and never lose a beat without losing our sanity.  Brand Nirvana is 24 hours by 7 days around the clock monitoring so that we can pick up on these trends and manage them the best we can.  Right now, we are monitoring twitter out of Canada, and that gives us a lag time; it’s sort of funny being the Top Australian brand on twitter – in Canada – and 12 hours out.  Next on our plate is our “2nd honeymoon” contest; we are reaching out to an older demographic this time.  It’s been a challenge to reverse engineer the best travel job. Part of it came together in the last few months, end of May. I was looking at “Zoomer” mag on my parents table, a baby-boomer magazine.  The idea is engaging, and creates a small partnership between families – kids and extended family vie for their own family – it’s a natural network to tap into.  The challenge is still, ‘How am I going to help these ‘zoomers’ go out and crowdsource the 18-30 olds’, but it may happen naturally.  The biggest challenge is that I have had to build a lot of the strategy on a shoestring budget. I haven’t done *one ad*, at all.”

Gregg Tilston will be a speaker at the the Eye For Travel North American Travel Distribution Summit in Chicago, the 13th& 14th of October (next month), 2010.  You can look at the agenda here, and a list of all the speakers here.  It includes 4 separate focuses within one conference:  Online Sales & Distribution, Revenue Management, Mobile Travel & Tech, and Social Media Strategies. Register here, or contactrosie@eyefortravel.com for more information.

In ending these interviews, I am always intrigued why people take the time to connect, network, and share the information that ends up at these conferences.  As busy as Gregg is, I am sure there are other ways he could efficiently use his time…. so I asked him about the draw of Eye for Travel’s conference:

“What I like about Eye for Travel? It’s a great mix. I have nothing but love for these other conferences, but a lot are consultants simply pitching their wares. But this event is a mix of panelists that are really implementing and DOING IT and working in it. It’s very legitimate, and it’s a lot of do-ers.”


Well said – See you there!

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