Conversations With Tourists: Social media

At the end of January last year in an article entitled "The Importance Of Being Erstwhile", I wrote about the resignation of Mar Guerrero, the then director of the Balearics Tourism Agency. Guerrero was greatly respected and her stock rose on account of her having done something most odd - resigning because, in her words (or at least an approximate translation thereof), she didn't wish to pull the wool over people's eyes. A point of principle. You don't get much of that in Mallorcan public life.

When suggestions are made that tourism ministers should be tourism professionals, they overlook the fact that those charged with truly implementing tourism strategies are professionals. Some of them are even quite good or very good. Guerrero was one of the latter. Her departure came as no great surprise, as the job wasn't quite as it said on the tin, but it was a departure that the former government and former tourism minister Joana Barceló could have ill-afforded.

There is no point in now dwelling on the past, but the present and immediate future are far less rosy in tourism promotion terms than they were when Guerrero felt it necessary to resign over how funds were being allocated. At least there were funds then. Now they have all but dried up.

It is against this background of promotional parsimony that what Guerrero had to say in a recent interview** should be considered carefully. Talking of the need for a reinvention of Mallorcan tourism, she was very clear as to one aspect of such a reinvention - the mode of marketing.

If one takes a quote from this interview, you will begin to appreciate where she is coming from. "Every day you could find ways of interacting with your target (market). A website is not now sufficient for being competitive." She was talking about the role of evolving technologies in tourism promotion. It was music to the ears. Mine at any rate. I have made similar points many times.

Social media have created the possibility to maintain a regular conversation with customers - tourists in this instance. This is a conversation in which the customer (and indeed others) are participants in the marketing process. Tourists are not marketed to so much as they are marketing with those who provide the social media. The thinking is totally different, but the thinking, promotionally and technologically in Mallorca, is largely stuck in the dark ages. Stuck in the past with websites stuck up that are essentially uninteresting, not interactive, passive and passé.

Sure, there is information to be derived, but that's not the point. Conversations through social media go way beyond the merely informative. They engage with tourists, they involve them, they show respect to them by making them a part of the promotional process. These conversations break down the "them-and-us" barriers of traditional marketing.

Not everyone is of course a Facebook, Twitter or other social media user. But neither is everyone surfing the internet or watching a telly ad. The reach may be lower, but it is a reach that is arguably far more valuable because of the bonding that occurs through social media. There is an inherently greater trust to the relationship, and it is one that can have a hard-edged commercial element to it; ways of up-selling and cross-selling, in addition to initial selling, are very much flavour of the moment among various actors in the tourism industry. And social media can be one of these ways.

The potential power of social media makes it even more inexplicable to understand why somewhere like Llucmajor, abandoning its tourism board, has also seemingly allowed its Facebook page to fall into abeyance. The point needs to be reiterated. It is not expensive to operate social media, even if it is necessary to engage those with a whole range of linguistic skills.

But an apparent inability to appreciate the role of new technologies in tourism promotion stems, one suspects, from the contrariness of social media's sexiness. They are sexy in that they are of the now, but they are not sexy in the same way as a telly ad with a celeb is. The dark-ages marketing mindset in Mallorca has been one founded on the egos of those in positions of authority who can sense some stardust being rubbed off by rubbing shoulders with a Nadal or a Schiffer and spending a fortune on advertising of questionable effectiveness.

The reinvention of Mallorca is not just a case of what is offered, it is how it is offered. To this end, all levels of the tourism industry should have social media strategies. And if they haven't, they should get them pretty damn quick.

** The full interview: Diario de Mallorca


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.