NB: This is a guest article by Matt Rhodes, strategy director at social media agency FreshNetworks.
How do you represent a region or a country in social media? A challenge to many tourist boards and associations whose job is not to sell a particular product or service but to market a city, region or country.
You could serve as a portal for information and advice, offers and deals. Or you could try to engage with people who visit the area and build relationships with them.
But the real value for such organisations is finding a way to engage people earlier in the planning process, raise their awareness of why they should even consider South Tyrol in ITALY, as a place they might visit, for example.
This becomes a longer-term engagement and so is less about offers and the like and more about building an emotional connection with an audience.
Ultimately this connection should raise awareness of the area you are promoting and lead them to consider it for a holiday.
This is not easy to do. But since December 2011, Sweden has been part of a fascinating Twitter experiment to do just that.
Trying something different
The tourist authority and the Swedish institute developed a simple Twitter strategy – rather than talk about places to visit, things to do and events, they would claim the @Sweden handle and then let a different Swede represent the country on Twitter every single week.
Who better to immerse people in the Swedish culture and introduce them to the country than specifically chosen Swedes who will show people the real country and engage them in the story of everyday lives.
And over the last few months it has been a fascinating experience.
We’ve seen students talk about their days, mums share their experiences and people talk about what it really means to be Swedish and living in Sweden in 2012.
The Twitter campaign has slowly grown and been exciting to watch; raising interest in and awareness of Sweden, the country and the people.
A brave move – letting any member of the public take over the nation’s Twitter account for a week and say what they will. Even more brave when many people are Tweeting in English, a foreign language.
Leftfield
After six months of fascinating and illuminating Swedish people taking the helm, things went a little awry.
The person chosen to represent the nation in the social network is at best a little odd, and at worst hugely offensive. From strange messages and questions about Jews, to odd captions for photos.
These messages perhaps came across as much naive and bizarre as they did purposefully offensive, but it is certainly not the kind of discussions that the people behind the account intended.
This kind of disruption would be challenging for most brands. The natural reaction might be to pull the experiment; protect the brand, the country, and stop the Tweets.
Thankfully this is not what the tourist authority and the team behind @Sweden did.
Rather they let the week play out, they enjoyed the (no doubt sizeable) coverage that the account received, but more importantly they showed that the experiment was real and had real people behind it.
Diversity in all forms
We have all met people like this, who don’t say the right thing, make strange observations or have a different (and challenging) set of life experiences.
Here is a woman from a town in Sweden who has never met a Jewish person, that makes awkward observations or attempts at humour that others may find offensive.
We are learning more about the diversity of Sweden from this account that we do from the kind of bland official updates that some tourist authorities broadcast.
The worst thing that @Sweden could do would be to cancel the account, or even make it much more restrictive. We are all learning more about real people in Sweden, what they do and what they think.
We do not think that all of Sweden is like this, the messages have not damaged the country’s brand. Rather they have immersed people in an experience with real people.
Shocked many, educated some, but raised awareness of the country along the way.
Of course, the tourist authority might not want many more weeks like that on @Sweden, but they have shown how Twitter can be used to provide a direct connection between the audience and the country.
And experiment in tourism marketing that is both brave, and fascinating.
NB: This is a guest article by Matt Rhodes, strategy director at social media agency FreshNetworks. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattrhodes and read more of his thinking on social media.
NB2: Stockholm image via Shutterstock; Twitter grab via Mashable Storify.
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In the main, point taken, but I’m not sure that we needed this Twitter feed to know that the “diversity” of opinion in any European country includes clueless ideas about Jews or Jewish culture?
What I found most interesting about this incident was its author’s apparently wide-eyed wonder at the whole thing. I suppose it is worthwhile to have discovered that there are Swedes who cannot refrain from spouting half-baked thoughts regarding cultures they know nothing about.
As an aside, South Tyrol is in Italy. Though it certainly feels more like Austria.
@alex – will let Matt respond to your other points.
The South Tyrol in Austria thing is my error during editing. Will fix.
Luckily I make no claims to being a travel writer eh!!
clearly someone didn’t get the jokes of @sweden
brave indeed. You wonder why they didn’t give @sweden over to travellers to the destination with hints/tips from their experiences to encourage others to visit rather than snippets from Swedes
Because that’s what everyone else in the world would have done and they were clearly going for something different. Good on them for trying.
With any of the travel hints/tips, I’ve always found that everyone sees through the filter of their own culture. For example, when I was researching Iceland, I found so many comments and reviews from Americans that, rather than prove a failing on behalf of an Icelandic company, really just proved a culture gap.
Not that I will ever completely give up on this kind of info, it’s just inauthentic at capturing a culture.
I certainly think it has been an interesting campaign and I do think the right decision was taken not to pull the account. It “proved” the authenticity and attracted a massive amount of attention. The one thing it has shown is that the Swedish education system always held up as a role model for the world might not be all it’s cracked up to be!
I do think however that if the opinions had been expressed by a Swedish male of the no hair variety, there would have been a different reaction and it would be highly unlikely that the comments would be regarded as “naive” or “bizarre”.
This topic has received wide attention. The author here addresses it in an interesting way. Over at Socialmediatoday there is another take on it with some valid comments of interest http://goo.gl/PPdQ5
To me there is no clear cut and easy answer but despite the risks, I applaud visit Sweden for taking a fresh approach. Maybe some limitations along the lines suggested in that linked article could actually make it more relevant to tourism without compromising authenticity which I advocate strongly for any social media activity.
Sounds like a total car crash to me! It’s like handing your child to stranger to look after for a week and when you get a malnourished badly behaved child handed back to you thinking ‘oh well, slightly damaged, may be irreversible, but wasn’t I brave for taking the risk’.
An interesting idea and after yesterday, sounds strangely familiar. We were in Catalonia yesterday, visiting the villages around Barcelona with a couple of food bloggers. It was obvious we were going to tweet about the places we saw and experiences we had, but thought “these guys know much more about the subject, should we just log onto their smartphone as us and let them take over our tweets for the day”. So we did (you can check the posts on @TravelMagazine from 21 June) and it worked well: audience was engaged and they received new followers. Would be happy to repeat the experiment in the future.
The @sweden thing is a success. Here’s why: http://www.digitalmcgyver.com/professional/digital-pr/sweden-and-the-jew-tweets-a-huge-success/
Matt – not convinced giving a publically funded platform to a bigot, a rascist or (at best) a thick eedjit is brave. But Sweden is a democracy so their call. Wonder how the remarks went down in the States and Canada though. Not so much I reckon.
Jonas – from your link – “I think they reflect a quirky Sarah Silverman-esque sense of humor combined with a naivety that isn’t uncommon in Sweden, and they truly do show Sonja’s personality”
Really? Christ I thought those tweets were just clueless and pig ignorant. I also used to work for EF (a Swedish EFL company) and 99% of the Swedes I taught weren’t that thick – most super bright and lovely.
However I suppose by sheer weight of statistics that if you pluck 52 members of the public out of the air over a year, trying to show a nation’s diversity, then stick one on Twitter for a week, then one will shoot their mouth off and appear like a rabid frothing loon. This is where I question this experiment. Here’s hoping others don’t follow. Especially those guys downunder.
I also wonder what they’ll do if it happens again…
Once is a misfortune. Twice could be something completely different…