Vietnam tourism, social media and the Big Bang Boy

My head has been whirring this week – a mess of thoughts that, hopefully, once down on “paper” will start to make more sense.

First up is Vietnam’s tourism. Trashed by the Huff Post, defended in this laughable piece and with a new slogan launched I wonder just what does work these days. I remember assisting on a bid to brand Newcastle upon Tyne, slogan and all – always with Glasgow’s Miles Better as the good example – but now I’m pretty sure it’s a red herring.

In an age where we can share our travels so easily, being good at marketing isn’t as important as just being good. Vietnam shouldn’t look at ways to rid itself of the reputation for cheating and scamming – instead it actually has to get rid of the cheaters and scammers.

Don’t work out your excuses, reach the point where you no longer have to make them.

We’re less likely to be fooled by glossy mag ads or slogans or tv ads. We just want information. Malaysia Truly Asia may have rammed itself into our subconscious but does all that TV time equal that good a return on what must have been a massive investment?

Is advertising just an easy way to get rid of a budget in a way that the audience is easily measurable even if the effect isn’t? In the old days direct marketing (junk mail) was known to be hated by all but was kept on by marketeers for the exact same reasons.

At work my activities are split between heading the marketing communications for partnership programmes of the engagement and relationship bulding type and the cold hard challenge of sales, targets and all.

The days of leaflets and brochures are largely over but the future for advertising is less clear. If newspapers are not the future then are we better to advertise with Facebook? Or will all advertising never wield the power it once had?

Meanwhile, the picture above is the winning entry in an international art competition run by my employers. The story goes that the Vietnamese child artist spelled Big Ben wrongly but his “Big Bang” pic stole the hearts of judges. We released the story to the press and for some reason it has had legs like no other release I have ever written.

Boy’s mistake wins judge’s hearts. What did he really mean by “Big Bang”? Was he referring to a starter’s pistol, the fireworks of the opening ceremony or even Vietnam’s own breakneck development?   

Probably none of the above and yet this seemingly slight story now has 1,400 results on Google and counting.

Vietnam’s cut and paste journalism, scammers stealing copy for sites earning from Google ads, social media and a nice image – they were enough to see this story reappear time and time again. On Thursday – a month after we released it, it made yet another sizeable piece, this time in VN Express. I can’t imagine how much it would have cost to buy this amount of space and yet we spent literally nothing on it.

So, trying to make sense of all of the above….

We can’t even fool some of the population some of the time anymore. There are too many people who will happily undermine our claims if we try to. We can’t pretend what’s bad is good. We can’t change reputations when the evidence doesn’t support us.

Forget blackhat SEO, forget spam, forget cheating of all kinds – do what you want to do well and then help people communicate how good you are it. If you’re the Intercontinental Hotel and you want people to say how good you are – then stop charging for the WIFI and let customers tweet pics of their hotel rooms for free.

If you’re having to engage SEO experts to push you up the Google rankings then ask yourself why aren’t your customers doing this for you by talking about you online? A large part of SEO appears to be about trying to cheat a system based on genuinely trying to gauge just how popular you are. In the end, if you’re not popular then perhaps it’s not Google’s fault.

Let people spread the word.

Pssst…Vietnam… stop blocking Facebook.

Businesses don’t be dumb.  Buying Facebook or Twitter followers? Just how outrageously stupid is that? How does it make you look? Who are you fooling? You’re happy to have your brand associated with cheating?  Really?

When your product is ready invite others to try it, taste it, visit it – target those with their own platforms and following. New media, old media, social media, bloggers, tweeters and journalists. All those who shout the loudest to the most listeners. Real voices with real opinions.

Assist them by providing honest but, hopefully, entertaining content that they can link to or embed. Make the information they need easily available. Answer their questions. All their questions.

Be creative – stories, pics, movies. Use them to tell your story. Don’t worry too much about what platforms *you* use, create content that people can share on the platforms *they* use.

It’s time we learned that it’s the consumers that have all the power now. We can’t trick them any more.

More importantly of all, we can’t be seen to be trying to trick them either.