Thursday, March 26, 2009

A Twitter Summer Travel Stimulus Package

With apologies (not really) to Congress and President Obama, if you really want to read about an alluring stimulus package, you've come to the right place.

Actually, the idea is the brainchild of a friend and industry colleage, Susan Black, who figured out an easy, effective and cost-efficient way to stimulate summer travel.

Susan's simple solution: Since your travel company must get involved in social media and because some members of your team may be slow to grasp the etiquette and culture, then just go out and hire a summer intern or two who "gets it" and let them tweet-up a storm.

Susan advises that your company needs to find a summer intern who is passionate -- not only about Twitter or whatever medium you choose -- but about your company's sweet spot. In other words, if your company operates a ski resort, then find a college kid who knows the difference between a a mogul (the snow-related thing) and, well, a mogul (the person who calls the shots in the boardroom).

The intern's salary won't break the bank, and your company may find a Twitter-savvy future full-time employee who might one day become your company's mogul (the CEO variety). You never know.

Susan mentions that you should also hire a "strategic consultant" to give the intern direction and to figure out how the Twitter plan fits in with your company's broader goals. Susan just so happens to be one of those aforementioned strategic-consultant types. But, this is not an advertisement for her services. For that, she would have had to pay for an exhorbitant banner ad in a column alongside or below this post:) Hire whomever you want or don't hire anyone to get your social media act together.

But, I know one thing: Within certain limits, of course, you have to give this intern some free rein. You have to let your tweeter flex his or her stuff in the 140-character per-tweet world.

If you make our ski buff tweet all corporate-speak, you lose. If you are just going through the motions for the sake of being involved in social media, the effort will fall flat and the Twitter Summer Travel Stimulus Package will end up as stimulating as a complex derivative instrument.

1 comment:

Jim Kovarik said...

Sounds like some sage advice as Twitter use is exploding these days. Likely to last well into the summer, and college students would probably jump at the chance to spend their summer using this 'cool' technology.