It’s taken a bit longer for me to get back into the blogging routine, I’m slowly working up to where I was, but a well-deserved break was needed and the reality of life has taken it’s toll on my time. My poor car is slowly dying and I’ll be searching for a new one as soon as this post is published.

I wanted to spend some time capturing my thoughts about participating in the Ultimate Thailand Explorers Competition before they flee from memory; Partly because I want to have a record to refer to in the future, and partly because you might be interested in learning about it. Who knows, maybe this advice will come in handy someday? The whole purpose of entering the competition was to learn about social media and travel in order to better this site. You can be sure that these learnings will make their way into this blog soon – if they haven’t already!

Today’s post is Part 1 of a 4-part series. We’ll start with the application period. Let’s see what I learned…

The Application Period

The application period ran from early September to mid-October. Applicants had to create a 1-minute YouTube video explaining how they would use social media to promote their chosen destination (1 of 5 cities in Thailand: Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket, Koh Samui and Pattaya). Out of the submissions, 5 semi-finalists for each city (25 total), would be selected by the Tourism Authority of Thailand to be voted upon by Internet users. More on that tomorrow… Videos were chosen on several criteria, including knowledge of social media, creativity, energy, etc.

What I Learned

Plan Your Video – If you have any hopes of winning you have to have a decent video. And by decent it needs to be easy to understand. Ideally it should be memorable and have some sort of cleverness to it. I’ll be the first to admit that our video wasn’t special or unique. I don’t have that creative spark. I knew that. What I lacked in creative video skills I was hoping to make up for two-fold with my knowledge of social media and content creation.

I was proud of our video. We scripted it ahead of time. It wasn’t put together at the last minute. We were smiling, peppy and thorough in our sharing of social media in the allotted time.

The video, for many, would be their only exposure to Brian and I. So we had to make it decent. It did the job.

Apply Early – Since the strategy was to demonstrate our social media skills, we applied early to give us enough time experiment, build our networks and prove our worth. Many teams mentioned social media in their video, but never did anything about it.

We chose Pattaya for a number of reasons. Should we ever visit Thailand on our own, we’d most likely visit the well-known cities – Bangkok and Phuket. We literally had never heard of Pattaya. This would be a great opportunity to go somewhere we wouldn’t have considered in the past. Pattaya also had the fewest applicants at the time. And while I’m not going to critique the quality of our competitors, I felt we had a pretty strong video for our category. It also didn’t hurt that Pattaya had the least amount of applicants. At the very least, this could have helped our odds at being selected for the semi-finals.

Register Your Names – If you’re going to enter the social media world you have to register your name across all platforms: flickr, twitter, facebook, YouTube, google, etc. It’s a pain in the butt doing all those logins, but consider this the protection of your brand. You don’t want someone to usurp your name and confuse your voters do you?

Whether intentional or not, I don’t know, but in our video we referenced a twitter hash tag, #ultimatethai we created for people to add to our conversation. What we didn’t do was register that twitter username (we chose benandbrianthai instead). Another team, who’s video appeared just a short while after ours used our hashtag as their username. We didn’t end up using the hashtag all that much for other reasons, but lesson learned.

Content, Content, Content – Every blogger will tell you that content drives everything. And they are absolutely right. I still think, after the application, semi-finals and finals periods we were the only team with the most comprehensive blog. Maybe it’s boasting a bit too much, but we directed users to view our photos on Flickr on a routine basis, watch our videos on YouTube and contribute to our conversations on Twitter. We also had a small, but growing Facebook Page.

We had never been to Thailand before so we were challenged with creating content that was relevant. We went out to Thai Restaurants, created videos sharing why we should go to Thailand and getting to know you videos. We posted them on this blog, on the facebook pages of the competition site and on twitter.

I don’t know since I was never told, but I think that this played a major role in our selection as semi-finalists.

I was surprised early on that some of our posts appeared at the top of Google searches.

Opportunity Favors the Prepared – Our content enabled us to build a following that, should we be selected as semi-finalists, would hopefully vote for us. We had also become savvy with leveraging the technology so that when we really needed to use it, we weren’t learning it.

Since I was in South Africa on business when the announcement would be made for the teams that were selected as semi-finalists, a lot of our promotional content was created ahead of time. We had press releases, e-mail drafts, photos, media pages and videos that were ready to go live at the touch of a button. And once the announcement was made it was sent out immediately.

Were we being too sure of ourselves? Absolutely not. Any organization will tell you that they have all their communication content produced ahead of time and that they are just waiting for the “go for launch”. The reality was, I wasn’t going to have time to produce in Africa, so I did it ahead of time. Call it…insurance.

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As luck would have it, we were selected as semi-finalists for Pattaya. Our city had the least amount of applicants and the least amount of video views. An observation that, I think, would become critical later on. Now that we were officially on the ballot, the real work could begin. What happened? Find out tomorrow…