Today’s post is Part 2 of a 4-part series. If you’d like to read yesterday’s post about the Ultimate Thailand Explorers Application Period, click here. Today we’ll talk about the Semi-Finalists Voting Period.

The Semi-Finalists Voting Period

In mid-October, 2009 the Tourism Authority of Thailand selected 5 teams from each of 5 cities (Pattaya, Bangkok, Koh Samui, Phuket and Chiang Mai) to be voted on by Internet users worldwide. We were selected as 1 of these 25 teams from over 356 applicants in 59 countries. Internet users had roughly 3 weeks to vote on who they wanted to send to Thailand. They could vote for 1 team, from each city every 24 hours.

What I Learned

Whereas the application period was all about proving social media knowledge, the semi-finalists voting period was all about rallying votes. Rallying votes is tough work. It’s exhausting. It’s exciting. It’s draining. It’s always on my mind. It’s humbling.

Traditional Media – Our efforts started with sending press releases to local newspapers and television stations. We reached out to the editors of the travel, lifestyle and technology sections. We sent e-mails and tweets to the reporters. We didn’t have much success with this. I don’t know why. Maybe we were a small operation. Maybe we were competing against bigger news stories. Maybe we just weren’t interesting.

We tried every angle possible, our neighborhood paper, local papers, college newspapers and other niches. At the end of the day, we were successful in getting printed in the Somerset Spectator, my hometown paper growing up. We also were published in the Pattaya Today, in an online article. Our competition was able to get some pretty good coverage in Traditional Media. I haven’t asked how yet. I wish I knew.

New Media – Given that this was a social media competition we reached out to bloggers who might be interested in doing a story about us. We were mentioned on several blogs.

Content – To continue reminding people to vote we made a series of videos, blog posts and photo slideshows reminding people to vote for us. We promoted them on Facebook. Our approach was a countdown of the remaining days to vote. It kept us at the top of everyone’s mind. My parents filmed a few videos, as did a friend and my pets. The purpose was to ensure that people wouldn’t forget us, and forget to vote for us.

Twitter – I placed my bets on Twitter and lost. Don’t get me wrong, twitter helped immensely, but it wasn’t the most powerful tool. We used hashtags to participate in conversations about #travel #tourism #socialmedia and more. In just a few short weeks we had over 700 followers, which was incredible.

There were several passionate followers that helped remind people to vote. We thanked them by calling them out. It’s the courteous thing to do on twitter. That helped a lot, but most people don’t connect on twitter. I was hoping for word to spread like wildfire in Orlando, and it didn’t. I think it’s because not enough people use twitter and our message could have been lost among the hundreds of others. For twitter to be successful, you have to tweet all day long.

Facebook – Here’s where every other team excelled but us. We neglected to grow our facebook fan page. Most of the world connects on facebook. Our messages would have shown up live in their news feed, had we built this up. During the voting period we were in 1st, fell to 2nd and then to 3rd. It was around this time that things didn’t look good. Our competition was far ahead.

We changed tactics and started aggressively building a facebook following. We posted our messages and reminders to vote on almost 100 groups/pages. Everything from travel, thailand, pattaya and orlando sites. It was an incredible amount of work, but we saw a surge over the final few days.

Thew top three teams all had surges at one point. We were lucky that ours came towards the end. We had a many friends of friends voting for us. We don’t know where all our votes came from, but the repeated efforts of our friends on twitter and facebook helped propel us.

Facebook is about connecting in networks, and that’s what we tried to do. Find as many relevant networks we belonged to and beg for their votes.

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What started as an almost impossible dream, became a reality when our team was selected to blog from Pattaya, Thailand. I’ll say it again, we actually won the trip to Thailand. Regular people don’t win competitions like this. This wasn’t winning a T-Shirt or or CD, this was a trip to Thailand. What happened in Pattaya? What did we learn? Find out tomorrow…