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.

Social media is just people being people online, but with better tools. Nothing has changed in their behaviour; it is their ability to be found and heard, and find others who think the same that is new and significant. Social media and the internet amplify the voices of those who publish content online, whether they love you or hate you.

Sometimes people will say things that businesses would prefer them not to. The internet has made it easier than ever to publish and spread this material. Sites like Facebook and WordPress make it easy to tap into an existing audience, or get indexed by Google and appear in brand searches. When a product or service has a branded social media presence or community, it can give them access to a highly relevant audience for their dissatisfaction, ire and angst, which can disrupt the business’ promotional activity and damage the brand.

It is hard to completely avoid this risk without losing the benefits from fostering conversation and building online communities. Here are a few ways a business can prepare to address these problems if or when they arise:

• Anticipate the negative responses and plan on how and how not to respond
• Make internal stakeholders aware of what can go wrong
• Communicate response plans and processes internally with key stakeholders
• Ensure that those with the authority to respond in negative situations are easily reached
• Make staff aware of relevant policies

If no thought is given to what might go wrong, there is a greater risk of the company responding badly, and inflaming the situation further. Planning for problems that may arise before the fact ensures that the business’ response will most likely be timely, articulate and appropriate.

In my example, each one can move people, but they all deal with different volumes, speeds, capabilities and efficiencies.  While the Space Shuttle might be ‘better’ than walking by a few degrees of magnitude, I won’t use one to get to the bus stop in the morning.  Should I wish to travel to Moreton Island, I would hardly use the advanced, cutting edge technology of a Segway to do so.  Despite its advantages, it may have some trouble with the water.

Comparing like with like is a good way to make a point.  Comparing two or more dissimilar objects or ideas can be just as effective, assuming that they are analogous.  As a technique of persuasion, it is used far more often than it really should.  The original author used a linear description of online modes of communication to demonstrate recent advances.  I suspect he failed to consider that most of the examples he chose cannot be compared in any meaningful way.  Open, closed, rich content, and text content channels were bundled together to create a linear progression of concurrent and dissimilar technologies.

However if you found that explanation of communication compelling, I would love the chance to explain, for a generous hourly consultancy fee, why bombarding Twitter users with adcopy from a business account is far better than putting resources into an SEO campaign.  After all, Twitter and SEO are both concerned with disseminating information online, and SEO is the older of the pair.

In a recent campaign using a third party list I observed something interesting. The mail-out was moderately successful in its first two days, generating a fair few hits and sales. What was novel was that the promotional code continued to be used over the course of the next two weeks, following a consistent sales and traffic curve over the course of the week. The traffic over this period took a sharp drop and roughly equalled the sales figures for volume. Over the post campaign period, almost everyone that visited the page, bought the product.

The creatives used in this campaign were all focused. They consistently communicated a single offer that was relevant to the list used, and from the creative to the single landing page and the cart, limited onsite leaks. While sales were limited to a small percentage of the people mailed, the value per customer was high.

The initial result, and the ongoing traffic and sales confirms that this campaign did deliver something of value to the customer. Like other good campaigns, this one was a success because it offered a targeted promotion that provides real value to the right customer.