DMO Strategy: Technology or Inspiration?

I think the attraction to technology has a lot to do with our desire to get "closer to the sale" as DMOs. But I agree with you, we're in the inspiration business.

Hey Seth,

Thanks for the comment, glad to hear the perspective.  For me, the future is about curation for the destination.  Too many other companies are executing the data side more efficiently and quickly.

Happy to carry on this conversation.  I think it is only the start, not the end.  And we will be talking about it for years to come.

- Troy

I'm so distracted by all of this technology that I can't even operate from the right avatar from this forum. That last comment from Seaside, came from me. Grr. Thanks for the great article Troy. Enjoyed catching up with you and meeting you in person this past week.

My feedback during the last session of the conference should have been "The thing that keeps me up at night is....going through my notes Monday morning and figuring out what to add to my to-do list". Troy - It was great meeting you in person. It was my first time to the conference and I think there were a number of great speakers and good information shared. I think one of the hardest things is keeping up with the trends and deciding which platforms will work best for your destination.

Great post Troy - I do wish DMOs could take some time out to "think" and reflect on the real impact of all this technology. DMOs were traditionally formed to do what an individual business could not do - i.e, promote the destination through building awareness and more recently becoming bookable. Now it is possible for any small business to create a great destination site aimed at a niche market and there are so many third parties with resources,  manpower  and agility, getting into the destination guide and marketing game,   shouldn't DMOs be seriously considering where and how they add value? I believe that as we go forward, DMOs should "do" less and enable more - by that I mean that if a DMO were to concentrate on building up the digital marketing capacity of its member/constituents, the long term impact would be far greater than trying to be all things to all people with diminishing budgets.  Which destinations do you think are becoming most digitally literate as a community?

Great post Troy - I do wish DMOs could take some time out to "think" and reflect on the real impact of all this technology. DMOs were traditionally formed to do what an individual business could not do - i.e, promote the destination through building awareness and more recently becoming bookable. Now it is possible for any small business to create a great destination site aimed at a niche market and there are so many third parties with resources,  manpower  and agility, getting into the destination guide and marketing game,   shouldn't DMOs be seriously considering where and how they add value? I believe that as we go forward, DMOs should "do" less and enable more - by that I mean that if a DMO were to concentrate on building up the digital marketing capacity of its member/constituents, the long term impact would be far greater than trying to be all things to all people with diminishing budgets.  Which destinations do you think are becoming most digitally literate as a community?

Great post Troy - I do wish DMOs could take some time out to "think" and reflect on the real impact of all this technology. DMOs were traditionally formed to do what an individual business could not do - i.e, promote the destination through building awareness and more recently becoming bookable. Now it is possible for any small business to create a great destination site aimed at a niche market and there are so many third parties with resources,  manpower  and agility, getting into the destination guide and marketing game,   shouldn't DMOs be seriously considering where and how they add value? I believe that as we go forward, DMOs should "do" less and enable more - by that I mean that if a DMO were to concentrate on building up the digital marketing capacity of its member/constituents, the long term impact would be far greater than trying to be all things to all people with diminishing budgets.  Which destinations do you think are becoming most digitally literate as a community?

Great post. Like many of the other commenters, I came back to my boss and said "we either need more money or more people." I think that one thing we all fail to do is put ourselves in the minds of the traveler. We think like DMOs - that we have to be all things to all people, that travelers look for information in ways that make sense to us (i.e. they don't care about a list of "attractions," they want to know what to do when the come to your town). And travelers think in different ways when they are in different parts of the travel decision process. What they need when they are researching destinations is very different from what they need when they are actually in your destination. As DMOs, I think we need to find our place in that decision process and use the tools/technology that are appropriate.

Thanks Joe, always appreciate your thoughts and comments.

For me it is simple.  DMOs need to stop thinking like a technology company and start thinking (again) like a DMO.

Love the conversation.

- Troy

A quick thanks to everyone who commented on the post (so far).  I realize that thoughtful comments, such as these, take time.  And I truly appreciate your generosity.

- Troy

Great article and conversation happening in the comments Troy. 

Troy, this is something that you and I have rapped about regularly, between comments here on the blog, emails and our phone call a while back, and as you know, this is something about which I feel incredibly passionate.
 
Ultimately (and unfortunately), it feels to me more and more that the DMO industry has completely fallen away from AIDA and has instead shifted towards being everything for everyone under the sun … and that just doesn’t work anymore. Do you know who’s everything for everyone? It’s Google. A DMO will never be Google, and any fleeting possibility of such an approach being feasible has long since passed.
 
At the core, when you get down to brass tacks, we’re still marketers. That’s why it’s in the name: Destination *Marketing* Organizations – and hence why I brought up AIDA. The industry has gotten so caught up in being such an all-encompassing entity that the sales process has fallen by the wayside, with the mentality being that you can go from Attention to Action while completely ignoring Interest and Desire. This is why it’s so absolutely crucial to move towards authentic content curation.
One of the e-newsletters that I absolutely adore is the Baltimore Buzz from Visit Baltimore. Tom Rowe (@thefrontrowe) is their Director of Web Marketing, and he’s one of my favorite dudes in the world, because he gets it. When you sign up for the Baltimore Buzz, you’re prompted to select your areas of interest: GLBT, shopping, sports, so on and so forth. And when you get that monthly email, it’s targeted to your specific interests, instead of it simply being a batch-and-blast message that launches the content equivalent of buckshot, scattered all over with the hope that some piece of it being relevant to the recipient. I LOVE the way Tom does his mailings, and he absolutely follows a lifecycle marketing strategy.
 
The other thing that needs to happen is a reduced focus on aggregate totals, be it Web, email, etc. People like to SAY “quality over quantity,” but very few actually seem to practice it. When you hear someone talk about their email marketing campaigns, what do you usually hear? Nine times out of ten, they’ll say, “Oh, it’s really successful for us, we’ve got a database of more than a hundred thousand subscribers.”
 
Let’s be blunt, here: That doesn’t mean a damned thing.
 
I beat the drum constantly, but we always need to be refining our data and our practices. Don’t look at your total subscribers, look at the engagement and health of that list. How many of that hundred thousand has opened (or, much more importantly, clicked) on an email in the last twelve months? It’s a lot fewer than 100K, I can guarantee you that. Target the engaged subscriber base, not everyone. To the unengaged, run a re-engagement campaign. And if you can’t get them re-engaged? Clean the list! It’s like what Henry Jones, Sr., says at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: “Indiana. Let it go.” Removing an unengaged subscriber from your mailing list is NOT akin to chopping off one’s own hand, but there’s still a mentality that once you have an address, you should never, ever let it get away. And that’s just bad.
 
I mean, if I’m going to go visit Florida or whatever, I’ll sign up for a mailing list from that DMO. But after my visit, the odds are I’m not going to be interested in hearing about art fairs or restaurant weeks down there anymore, because I won’t be back for five years. That’s why it’s so crucial that those mailings need to have a clear and easy unsubscribe option, but furthermore, that DMO needs to be willing to scrub its list.
 
In the era of Gmail’s Priority Inbox, which filters mail based on your behavior (and has been copied by Yahoo and Hotmail), it’s so much more important than ever – in all the spaces, be it our websites, our mailings, our social media -- to be delivering timely, targeted, relevant and valuable content to people who want to receive it, not casting as wide a net as humanly possible.

This focus on quantity over quality and frequency somehow reminds me of my days back at Switzerland Tourism, oh, let's say mid-1980's when I questioned why we were measuring success by the volume of phone calls received and amount of brochures mailed, without tracking any results of that costly activity. No conversion analysis or anything like effectiveness measurement. The dark ages. It seems to me some are still stuck there despite all the modern technology tools at disposal that we didn't have then.

Keeping immediate past visitors on the mailing list is akin to having a database of pregnant women and not removing them after they have given birth! You might want to mail them again in future but maybe after an interval of at least a year....

I think you're contradicting yourself a bit here...

"Where are the DMO websites that have integrated any of these tools,
which they are not able to develop themselves, and even if they could,
not at the speed required today? I have yet to see any and would be glad
to be proven wrong."

I don't know that integration of tools is what they need to be doing or why they're failing. Isn't the point being made here in this post and comments that it's time to "get back to basics" and let that drive the decision making to implement the new tools that can deliver on the "value add" DMOs have **always provided** such that it can be improved upon?

The rush to adopt IS the problem, is it not?

"Let's see... I've GOT to Tweet... an hour per day... and the gurus tell me... let's see... between 12 and 2 pm on Wednesday... yes, yes..."

Meanwhile eyes are taking off of the REAL goals... the goals that serve the bottom line, members and consumers.

Right? I'm just sentitive to criticism of slow adoption.