Qube recently ran a benchmarking survey into Social Media use, attitudes and budget in the travel industry.

With nearly 100 key players in the industry taking part from travel organisations large and small, Qube has gathered key insights into how this sector views and engages with the challenges and benefits of Social Media.

Social Media Benchmarking

81% of marketeers and directors in the travel industry say they use Social Media due to pressure from customers. And despite the fact almost two thirds of respondents felt Social Media was important for the future of their business, nearly 50% still use non-expert staff to deliver Social Media marketing.

Platforms

Bebo and MySpace, perhaps unsurprisingly, were the least popular social networks for marketing activity within the travel industry, while Twitter is by far the most popular tool in use for this sector.

Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Whilst there are many ways to measure Social Media activity and quantify ROI, difficulty in measuring direct impact of sales was far and away the greatest reason cited for not engaging with Social Media marketing.

Interesting, a large proportion of respondents don’t actually set any Key Performance Indicators for any of their current digital marketing activity.

Round table event

Qube will be releasing and discussing the full benchmarking report at the Social Media for the travel industry round table we’re holding on the 17^th February.

This is a chance for people in the travel industry to discuss the findings of the report and talk to each other about the particular challenges travel companies face in this ever-evolving digital era.

If you work in the industry and would like to attend, you can find more details here.

We’ve written a new White Paper in our Social Media in Action series.

Download the Online Thought Leadership leads to Sales White Paper (pdf).

Read more information about the Social Media White Paper in the Social Media Reports section of our website.

The basic principal of social media marketing is to engage people.If charities engage more people, more money will be donated.

But fund raising is only part of the picture for charties – they also have a cause (eg stopping cruelty to children, protecting animals, supporting victims of disease, providing supplies for those in need.)

So whilst raising funds is fundamental, there are other considerations like:

• service delivery
• membership engagement
• providing space for peer to peer support
• recruiting volunteers
• raising awareness
• behaviour change
• lobbying governments and so on.

This is where social media excels over other types of marketing. Used properly, it can reach millions of people and more importantly, engage them.

The great thing about charities and not for profits is that they have what it takes to engage people by their very nature and people want to be involved with them.

A recent Social Media for Social Causes study published on Mashable indicates that major donors aged 30+ want to be involved with their charities conversation about the following:

• organizational impact
• success stories
• learning more about the organizations they are participating with
• want information on causes they care about
• want information on financial accountability

The study also showed that donors want to interact with organization experts and with other donors.

This post is co-authored by Qui Diaz, Beth Kanter and Geoff Livingston, authors of the Community Philanthropy 2.0 survey and they state that:

“ What we found was a tremendous opportunity for nonprofits to participate as trusted providers of credible information and ultimately cultivate the next generation of major donors through the social web”

Pretty powerful stuff and quite compelling?

OK so there’s the theory and the research but what about non profits actually using social media successfully? Here are some examples I found from around the web, but please feel free to add to the list and spread the word.

Let’s start big with the seemingly over used example of Barak Obama’s presidency campaign using social media to gain votes and raise funds (I say seemingly ‘cause it was so successful I don’t understand why the whole world hasn’t jumped right on the band wagon) Check it out:

http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/12/04/felesky-rahaf.html

Charity : Water has successfully raised $10 million (most of that last year alone) from 50,000 individual donors. This case study outlined by Mayank Dhingra explains how they use social media for relationship building, maintaining transparency, experimenting with new things and stakeholder involvement. Great stuff

http://mayank.name/2009/07/26/social-media-case-study-charity-water/

And here Qui Diaz lists a myriad of ideas and ways to donate time and money to charities. Really good for ideas and getting a feel for how the not for profit sector can benefit from using social media.

http://mashable.com/2008/12/17/digital-charities/

My Starbucks Idea

Starbucks fortunes have been a up and down a bit over the last few years. To tackle this they decided to jump into the arena of crowdsourcing and build a community of customers to help them improve Starbucks.

They created a special website separate from their main corporate site, My Starbucks Idea which works in a similar way to a real-life suggestion box, only it’s much better.

They invite users to ‘help shape the future of Starbucks – with their ideas’. Basically users are able to add suggestions on ways to improve Starbucks.

They are able to read all the latest ideas and vote for their favourite. The most popular ideas rise to the top. There is also the opportunity to comment on and discuss any of the ideas.

Starbucks’ aim is to implement the top suggestions where possible or use them to inspire new ideas.

They’ve set up a team of ‘Idea Partners’ who review the ideas. They keep things transparent by feeding what they’re doing with the ideas back to the community through the Ideas in Action blog.

Has it worked?

To date they have had nearly 77,000 ideas submitted since March 2008.

Ideas that have launched include:

• Treat receipt
• Free Wi-Fi for Apple iPhone users at Starbucks
• Reintroducing Yukon Blend coffee
• Reusable bags

The spin off marketing benefits through increased exposure of Starbucks online has been vast.

Starbucks have successfully shown that by engaging with your customers online you can not only improve your product or service and quickly resolve any problem areas, but you can increase positive awareness of your brand across the web and encourage your customers to become your advocates.

Take a look at our Social Media for Research services to find out more about how you can improve your business by engaging with your customers online.