As many readers of this blog may be Vancouver Canucks fans (or at least hockey fans), today – the AHA blog is going to provide some Canucks entertainment – Johnny Canuck entertainment, that is.
The video was by a fellow from Kamloops, BC for a very small budget. (There’s a communications lesson in that – a great video that resonates doesn’t need to take a huge budget!)
We hope you enjoy the video: MY NAME IS JOHNNY CANUCK!
The AHA office will close a little early today to get ready to cheer our Vancouver Canucks on to Stanley Cup victory!!!!
A Haka for AHA
A Haka for AHA from AHA Creative on Vimeo.
We’re enjoying our time in New Zealand working on the social media project for Tourism New Zealand. In our travels, we spent some time with the New Zealand Sports Academy. The students at the rugby school performed a haka in our honour.
AHA Team Heading to New Zealand for Social Media Campaign
Paul and I will be heading to New Zealand on Friday to produce TRENZblog.com. TRENZblog is a social media campaign that is a great example of identifying and targeting a specific audience in a defined time frame.
When we started TRENZblog in 2009, social media was starting to become prevalent. It wasn’t where it is today, however. As an organization, TNZ saw the value in investing in this social media campaign as a pilot project. Since then, the world has become more and more active on social media networking sites and online in general and TRENZblog has benefited from that. TRENZblog was initially created to connect with travel media (both trade and consumer) and travel industry professionals (travel agents, tour operators, wholesalers, etc.) who might not be able to travel to New Zealand for TRENZ, New Zealand’s largest travel trade show. While this is the largest audience for TRENZblog, we have found as we have gone along that quite a few travellers – people that don’t work in the travel industry, but are interested in travelling to New Zealand – began to follow TRENZblog. This secondary audience is also an important group for us – the traveller interested in New Zealand.
- TNZ saw this as a pilot project – they (and we) were open to taking a risk and to experimenting and seeing what worked and what didn’t. It was an opportunity to learn, along with our stakeholder group, as we all moved more deeply into the use of social media and online tools.
- This campaign had a clearly identified community that it was targeting. Our blog readership and Twitter followers are solid – in context of the target market we want to connect with. We don’t have a million followers – but we have a strong following of travel media and travel professionals along with some non-travel professionals who are interested specifically in New Zealand as a travel destination. This campaign targets an audience that has it’s own audience. For every one person we have that follows us, they may have their community of 100, 500 or 25,000 people. So if we tell them about New Zealand and they tell others, the reach builds.
- The campaign was given enough time (now three years) to build a community and to create momentum. Social media engagement takes time and effort. It doesn’t happen over night.
- This campaign was also given a specific life span – we start a week before TRENZ (May 22-25, 2011) and we end about a week after. TRENZblog and @TRENZblog on Twitter, with few exceptions, is quiet for the rest of the year. Our community knows that – it’s a little like we’re a friend that visits via social media once a year. We are always welcomed back – and we’re always sad to say goodbye!
For the week prior to TRENZ, Paul and I will travel on New Zealand’s North Island and experience some of the fabulous tourism products offered – from wine tours on a bike, to cruising Lake Taupo, to golfing, to experiencing authentic Maori culture. Then we head to Queenstown, New Zealand’s adventure capital, where we will ZipTrek, tour Milford Sound, check out more wineries (I know, it’s a tough job!) and even skydive!
Then we report live from TRENZ on all the news from New Zealand’s tourism sector. We’ll interview tourism operators (and are happy to interview specific operators on request!). We’ll be tweeting live, almost live-blogging and providing all kinds of photos and video clips. If you can’t be in New Zealand for TRENZ, this is the next best thing to being there!
Our blogs for the next two weeks will focus on this campaign – we want to showcase a real, live campaign – it’s challenges and successes – so that our blog readers who are interested can get a real sense of what can be done, when you do it right!
AHA Fast Take Friday – May 6, 2011
In today’s AHA Fast Take Friday, Ruth is in a beautiful Las Vegas garden talking about tending your campaigns.
Tell an Engaging Story About Your Organization
At our Vancouver PR agency, we use a range of mediums to tell the stories of our clients, such as: news briefs, news releases, articles, short videos for online use, guerrilla videos, video diaries, video news releases – and in some cases even longer documentary type videos, and Q&As (often paired with video interviews). We also use photos and other visuals to tell a story. And we share them; sometimes with traditional media, sometimes with bloggers, on social media networks, at events, workshops and other meeting venues, and of course, internally.