The period between December and February is usually the peak tourist season in Queensland. Typically backpackers start to head north along the east coast of Australia as it gets closer to New Year. They usually stop in Byron Bay, the Gold Coast, Brisbane, and travel up through the Sunshine Coast and on to the Whitsundays, the Great Barrier Reef and Cairns. However, the period between December 2010 and February 2011 was a bit different.

Google Insights for Flood, in Australia

Tourism in Queensland’s Wild Weather

The Queensland floods (including parts of North Queensland, and the area around and including Toowoomba and Brisbane) and Tropical Cyclone Yasi affected the travel and tourism industry in Queensland. While the floods began in North Queensland in late December, affecting Rockhampton and the surrounding area, it was not until after the Brisbane River broke its banks on the 11th of January and started to hit Brisbane that the impact had a noticeable effect on sales and traffic.

With the state capital hit, media coverage and interest in the floods peaked. Google’s reported search volume for ‘flood’ and other related searches only really surged in that period too, and the same was seen on Greyhound.com.au, with organic traffic featuring ‘flood’ starting to be seen in volume.

Organic search including flood terms

Most flood-related queries were structured around destination, specific product and timetable or schedule terms. They were not a result of additional optimisation, as there was no targeted content or link development at the time targeting those searches. The flood related search traffic was the result of users adding flood terms to searches that the site would already appear for.

Site activity also changed during this period, with increased information gathering activity around travel times and availability for affected regions. With international media coverage and some countries issuing negative travel advice to their citizens, traffic volumes from overseas were also greatly reduced.

Skipping South East Queensland

With Brisbane affected by the floods, we found that a reasonable number of backpackers and tourists were avoiding South East Queensland, and rearranging their travel. Some flew straight to North Queensland destinations, like Cairns, while others headed south again. Destinations like Byron Bay started to receive unseasonal attention both in sales and in search.

Comparing 'Brisbane Byron Bay' searches

The above single phrase example compares the 2010-2011 period to 2009-2010 for terms including ‘Brisbane Byron Bay’, in that order. This was not the only abnormality observed in search referral during this period. In the aftermath of the floods, Tourism Queensland, along with a lot of other tourism reliant companies, started their ‘back in business’ campaigns as well, to combat the negative press. Whilst talk of floods, destruction and the political recriminations that followed might sell impressions, ratings and ultimately ad space, it does not do much for tours and travel.

Cyclone Yasi

Google Insights for Cyclone Yasi, in Australia

Threatening the parts of Queensland that largely avoided the floods, Category 5 Cyclone Yasi appeared off the coast of Far North Queensland – just in time for the backpackers and tourists who decided to skip South East Queensland in favour of the relative dry up there. Obviously the effect that  Yasi had on search, demand and sales in the north of Queensland was similar to the floods in the south a few weeks earlier.

Greyhound Australia and other transport companies responded to help with evacuations in the north, running services out of the path of the cyclone, including backpacker favourites Airlie Beach and Mission Beach. Regular services were also suspended in a number of places in advance of the cyclone.

After Cyclone Yasi the peak tourism season in Queensland was more or less over. There were still a lot of travellers in Queensland, but a lot of them were also coming to the end of their stay. This was a shame, because Cyclone Yasi did not cause too much damage to infrastructure and a lot of the local tour operators were ready for business soon after. Those that stayed almost certainly got to take advantage of some great deals.

Promoting Travel Against the Weather

The disasters in Queensland had a huge impact on the tourism industry, and it is an uphill battle to promote unaffected products when you are competing with non-stop coverage of floods and cyclones. Breaking through that kind of noise is hard, and would be prohibitively expensive to do through traditional media.

The Internet was no haven either. A lot of what made it ideal for coordinating and responding to the disasters for the people who were there also made it harder to talk about and promote tourism in those areas. The Internet does make it easy to provide deeper, more sophisticated content in a shareable form however.

Greyhound Australia’s response to the floods and cyclone in Queensland was done for two different purposes: informational and promotional. The Internet, both on the company’s main site, email and search engine marketing and through our social media touch points, was used to keep existing customers aware of changes to service availability, and in the case of Cyclone Yasi, evacuations. The same touch points were also used to promote travel deals and tour partners in Queensland.

Keeping Customers Updated

Service information is useless if it is out of date, so it is vital to ensure that only the most up-to-date information is findable, thus reducing the risk of customers finding and making decisions on incorrect information.

To achieve this, the majority of on-site and social media activity on Facebook and Twitter aimed to keep our customers informed was focused on directing them to the service update page on the main site. This ensured that the information they saw was current, something that is harder to do fast by repeating the information across multiple sites.

Additional links to the service update page were added to the main site on the front page and across a few product pages to ensure that customers could find the information easily, and to take the pressure off the call centre. An AdWords campaign was also run just before Cyclone Yasi cut services to various North Queensland towns to maximise bookings and make it easier for people to find a way to head south should they want to. PR also played a role in keeping customers informed through articles posted to a number of news and online travel news sites.

Debunking Queensland Armageddon

Queensland Back in Business

Promoting travel and tourism in Queensland between December 2010 and February 2011 was challenging. The biggest challenge was the perception that most of Queensland, an ‘area as large as France and Germany’ was a desolate wasteland of water, debris and disease. While a lot of the state was declared a disaster zone, not all of it was completely out of business.

Tourism Queensland took a lead on this issue, proactively engaging with tour operators and backpacker organisations to demonstrate that Queensland still looked nice. Greyhound Australia and a few of the tour partners also provided a number of specials to encourage travellers to start to move again.

Online the promotional effort was focused on using the main website and social media, in conjunction with existing search engine marketing. Greyhound Australia got a number of tour operators to  send in current imagery of customers using their products. These were both hosted on the main site and promoted through Facebook.

Tour Operators

Content generated by other organisations was also retweeted and promoted, and more was generated using Flickr’s search tools, to show recent crowdsourced content, proving the location (eg, Airlie Beach) was still ready for business.

Email marketing was used to promote tours with specials, as well as any travel specials Greyhound Australia had available at the time. Other material promoting Queensland was also disseminated in this way too.

In addition to Queensland, Byron Bay and other southern tour products were also promoted during this period. All locations were advertised in parallel, though the Bryon Bay and southern tour campaign was promoted mostly through social media.

Going Forward

In the wake of the earthquakes in both New Zealand and now in Japan (donate here) Queensland’s problems from the start of the year now look trivial. The floods and cyclone have affected thousands of people’s lives as well as the livelihoods of businesses and the tourism industry in Queensland, but at least the loss of life was minimal compared with the two earthquakes. From here the biggest challenge for the tourism industry is how Queensland is seen.

People make their travel decisions based on the experiences of others. Most of this information is not found through Twitter or Facebook. Travel blogs, travel forums and photo sharing sites account for the majority of this ongoing online travel conversation.

As long as the tourists in Australia right now have interesting and compelling stories to tell and engage with other travellers planing their trips, there is no reason that the backpackers and the travellers won’t be back next year.

Brisbane Roar Season Crowd Average

*Not counting rescheduled games played at Skilled Park.

Brisbane Roar is through to the Grand Final, and the tickets for this game are selling very well. The crowd numbers have not always looked so good this season though. I wrote a blog post near the start of the 2010 – 2011 A-League season, about Brisbane Roar, and their crowd numbers. Now that the regular season is over, I can compare the 2010 – 2011 season fairly to previous ones. The crowd figures from the season don’t flatter the team, especially considering their unbeaten record, and just how well they played.

Even ignoring the two games played at Skilled Park due to the floods, the average is less than other seasons that featured only mediocre performances on the field.

Roar Crowd Average by Team

But is it enough information to get an idea as to what will get people to come to the games? A quick look at the average attendance by opposing team and by day would suggest that Sunday games and games against the Gold Coast team bring in the best crowds.

Brisbane Roar Average Crowd by Day

Small Dataset Problems

Unfortunately the dataset is pretty small, and as it turns out, the higher averages for Sunday matches and Gold Coast United are both due to single games. There is only one game on Sunday from the regular season, and the crowd was above average. Gold Coast United was also the team with the single highest attended match of the season, at over double the average for the season. The only reason Saturday did not average higher than Sunday was because of a number of below average attendances for that day.

Average Crowd by Team and Day

A Rebound

The Brisbane Roar have certainly improved their crowd figures from the previous season, but have not yet been able to match the 2007 – 2008 crowd numbers. Considering that this is the club’s most successful season on the field in its short history, this is unfortunate.  With a higher percentage of home games being held on Saturday night this season, along with the team’s great performances on the pitch and a substantial reduction on ticket prices, the club seems to have started to rebuild match day attendances.

Queensland State Government

Over the last few weeks, Queensland has been hit with a number of serious floods. These floods have affected locations in Queensland from Rockhampton down to the New South Wales border and even across it. The flood waters are only just now starting to go down in my city, Brisbane, and there are still more places at risk.

The value of the work of the government, emergency services and all of the volunteers who took it upon themselves to pitch in and help out any way that they could is obvious, and deserves recognition. I am not the best person to talk about their work; that has been done far better elsewhere. But I did notice a few ways in which the local internet community and social media platforms have helped a lot of people, especially those not immersed in the social media and internet marketing echo chamber.

1. The Queensland Police Media Service’s Facebook page
   • Managed brilliantly with regular updates, a great series of mythbusting posts dealing with the more common rumours going around Brisbane and live streaming of the government’s press conferences. All of this was available through their Facebook page. They also have a twitter account: @QPSmedia
2. Facebook
   • Quite simply, the size of Facebook’s audience made it the go-to platform for many people wanting to reach their friends quickly. The social media platform was used for communication and sharing information, such as photos and status updates for those in the affected areas. I have seen a few Facebook events started to help out those who lost their houses and more within my circle of friends, and I expect that this is far from uncommon.
3. Greg Lexiphanic hosting flood maps
   • A Brisbane-based Community Manager took it upon himself to host Brisbane flood maps as the official sites started to go down under the weight of traffic they received. Thanks to massive retweets, phrase matched copy and a few links from media websites, the page quickly reached the third spot in Google (fourth if you count the news insert) for ‘Brisbane flood maps’ and reached a large audience of people who have never posted a tweet through direct links and search traffic.

I think these are the sites and platforms that helped the most people during the last few days, aside from sites hosted by a government or a media organisation. Twitter deserves a mention as an information source, and it along with other sites and applications like Twitpic, yfrog, Flickr, instagr.am, YouTube and so on all provided a richer picture of the situation than what would have been possible a decade ago. However, most of these are not as accessible, and don’t provide the kind of information or have the audience in Australia just yet to have as broad an impact as the ones listed above.

Queensland Flood Search Engine Result Page

It is also worth mentioning this page that Google put together, as well as their recent alteration of the result pages for flood related queries with important phone numbers and links listed at the top.

If you are from a flood-affected area, what did you see used by those around you? From overseas, where did you get the best information?

Want to help? Donate here: http://www.qld.gov.au/floods/donate.html

Often it is the club’s name and NSL era history that are blamed for the football public’s absence. Last season’s off-field dramas and the raised ticket prices, since reduced, are also blamed. The problem is that people did turn up to watch the club play in orange and under the name ‘Queensland Roar’. The club’s last links to its NSL past only ended last year with the departure of Queensland Lions management. These are not new developments and did not stop people from coming before now.

Brisbane (formerly Queensland) Roar Crowd Numbers

Crowd figures have taken a hit in previous seasons, but 09/10 was one of the most dramatic drops. The stadium staff and lack of home wins are often blamed, but the club’s on-field performance has been patchy through its history and the stadium staff have always been controversial to some fans. Adding higher ticket prices, on- and off-field drama, too many Sunday games and a few poorly managed personal problems seemed to be just enough to push many supporters away. Once they left, the decline seemed to accelerate.

Social Causes

Fans do not attend games as individuals.  They come as a part of a group. The crowd is not just a homogeneous whole, but a loose collection of small groups of varying sizes. For members of large groups with loose ties, it is enough for the members to know that there will always be others they know there when they attend matches. Supporter groups can maintain their cohesion outside of the match day experience too, through social interactions both on and offline away from the stadium, and shared experiences relating to the sport or club itself.

Even if they miss a few matches, the fans are still a part of the group, and will meet up again at the next game they get to. As long as the group as a whole maintains a viable presence at the games, the group supports and encourages attendance, because there will always be someone there you enjoy spending time with. It is the stability of the group’s membership that ensures its cohesion (Group Dynamics, 2009, Donelson R. Forsyth, p 123-124). As long as there is a consistent level of attendance, then the group will remain stable.

Group Cohesion Death Spiral

With the latest drop in the match day crowd, I suspect that a lot of the groups passed a tipping point. The drop in numbers created a disruptive breakpoint (Poole, Marshall Scott. (1981), Small Group Development Theory), altering how the groups behaved, fragmenting some and obliterating others. The social scene around match day that kept people coming fell apart for a lot of fans. You were more likely to go if there were a few people you knew, than if you were going to be alone.

Friends can keep you watching a losing team team playing ugly football, but watching a win all by yourself can be very boring. There is utility in the size of the groups. The Network Effect, or Network Externality describes how the value in some networks increases with the number of participants. The same is true as a network reduces too. Myspace and other online social networks, some defunct and some hanging on to niche audiences, have seen this as users spend more time on other sites.

Watching football is social, and like social events and social tools, it benefits from the Network Effect. As stated above, crowds at football games and other events are not a homogeneous group, but a collection of a number of smaller ones, built from strong or weak ties. Studies on group decision making and cohesion hints at a number of fan behaviours that can affect the group as a whole, and either diminish or dissolve it. In any collaborative exercise, from supporting a team to creating a Wiki, there is a point in a group’s decline where its dissolution will accelerate, even as some members remain engaged.

Update: 10th March, 2011.

A follow up post, with an updated graph of the whole season is now available.

A company’s public face is controlled using tools like advertising, public relations and community and social engagement. Some organisations go beyond media and actively use every point of contact between a customer and the brand. These companies treat every interaction with themselves and the rest of society as a form of marketing communication. Often a football club has limited control over the actions of contractors like stadium staff. Unfortunately these people have a direct impact on the product experience of all customers, both casual and loyal. Through both their impact and the minimal control the brand has, this can be a real critical point of failure.

The A-League has been promoting itself as a game of passionate fans. Imagery of large crowds standing, shouting and cheering has filled the advertising material in print, outdoor and on TV. As a brand, it has promised that the A-League can be as exciting and intense an experience as any of the international leagues. Rivalries between clubs have been fabricated and promoted and a lot of photos taken of packed stands and fans wearing a lot of merchandise. To stand out in Australia, the A-League has chosen to become the fan’s game, crammed full of passion and excitement.

But you won’t find passion and excitement in the crowd at Suncorp Stadium. Thanks to the over-zealous activities of stadium security and a muted home end, the match day experience watching Brisbane Roar fails to deliver on the A-League brand promise. At the most important point, the money spent to market the Brisbane Roar and the A-League is wasted. The product is not the same as the one promised.

It is here in the grounds where the Brisbane Roar lose control over the brand and the product. It is not the club, but the actions of the stadium staff that have the greatest control over the product. Though they are not tied to the club directly, they become its public face every home game. This is where the dissonance surrounding the advertised message and the actual experience really sets in. You cannot build a brand on the imagery and language associated with European football club culture and then have security tell people to sit down and shut up. As long as stadium staff behaviour is at odds with the marketing message, the money and effort taken to get passionate fans into the grounds is wasted at the point where reality does not meet expectations.

What you don’t get is people in the same field as you to bounce ideas off. This is why there is a Brisbane Online Marketing Meetup. Getting people in the same field together for an informal meetup is a great way to exchange ideas, gossip and come away with some new things to try.

What this means for the club and it’s relationship with it’s fans and the community is still unclear. For a few groups, the stated rational behind not supporting the Roar was the clubs links with the Qld Lions Football club from the NSL. With the last of the ties, barring the tenuous link from the name and the colours, will this change? At first glance, yes, with the departure of Lawrence Oudendyk, the club has no real current links to the Lions and the history that has put off so many. Personally, I doubt this will make a difference, at least without any positive action on the part of the club.

Brisbane vs the Gold Coast

It is the inclusion of a Gold Coast team that is the most likely cause for innovation on the part of the Roar. With a rival team so close, and the unattached nature of the fanbase, both clubs will need to work harder to maintain and expand their fanbase. With Palmer and his money backing the Gold Coast football club, the Roar will need to be smarter to compete. There is one positive to come from this however, and that is the existing rivalry between Brisbane and the Gold Coast, but as is seen in the NRL, this can only carry a club so far.

Every weekend this season I feel like I am closer to just not going, and this is with the sunk cost of a season ticket too. There are really only two things that keep me turning up.  I have no Foxtel so I can’t watch it from home and I like the guys I hang out with at the game.  Obviously if a few of them stopped going, then I probably wouldn’t either, and I am sure this would apply to a few others too. So potentially, should three or four of the regulars stop going, potentially twice as many will not show up the next week. This is only a small group, but how many of the rest of the crowd are made up of the same kinds of social groups?

Unfortunately for the clubs, this is something that cannot be reliably tracked through watching for trends. It is the unpredictable failure point which can lead to a response greater than anticipated that is the issue.  So how do you measure for the failure point of a crowd?  Quantitative data, qualitative data?  Guess or try to gauge the opinions of the loudest members of the groups through their preferred social networks?  It might just be easier to provide them with what they want in the first place, and just maybe, play a few less games on Sunday.

From the start the A-League and the clubs involved have targeted the family market at the expense of existing football fans. Most of the targeted demographic did not already follow a foreign team, or have any interest in the now defunct NSL. As many of us had suspected, and as has been demonstrated in the crowd figures, this market does not stick around when there is a losing streak. The league and some of the teams have failed to align themselves with the hopes and desires of the football public.

Briefly some of the main issues I have seen in Brisbane with the Queensland Roar have been:

• Support of a fan group that has polarised the community and slowly imploded.
• Neglecting to connect with existing football fans and players in Brisbane.
• Lack of effective promotion efforts both above and below the line.
• Released PR that represented the club’s attitude to its fan base in a negative way.
• Mismanaged stadium security due to a ‘family friendly’ ethos.
• Misalignment with expectations of what a football club should be.

The Queensland Roar in particular and the A-League in general have failed to capitalise on the opportunity that they had in an environment without competition. The Queensland Roar have failed to build a solid base of fans who will come to every game, regardless of ‘entertainment budget’, and are now in a position where something has to change.

The biggest issue facing the Queensland Roar is that it has not been a part of the community long enough to build a performance resistant supporter base. To deal with this the club needs to provide another reason or rationale for supporters to follow them regardless of the results.

The message that the Roar has been able to communicate is not one that a lot of fans are interested in. I suspect that the club, based on its behaviour, has forgotten that it has no natural right to its audience’s attention. To go all Seth Godin, no-one has to care about a brand. Ultimately it will be about what the brand has to offer the customer.

I think the Roar has acted as if this is not true.