“Stress is only bad for you when you don’t enjoy it.”

Those were the opening words of Kate Birch, a psychologist who came to talk to some of us at the SPCA last night about our experiences dealing with animals and how to cope with them. The evening had been organised by one of the Bay of Islands’ inspectors for members and fosterers, and Ms Birch was kind enough to come along for no cost.

I thought back to the numerous paying tourists that we shove off bungys, skydives, canyon swings and cliff jumps every year and did reflect that, yes, stress could be enjoyable. But then some stress certainly cannot. How can we make sure we only thrive under it and not suffer?

Ms Birch offered an understanding of two spheres known to psychologists as the sphere of concern, and the sphere of influence. We all have these. Our sphere of concern is those things that we are bothered by – poverty in the third world, war in the middle east, homeless animals in Auckland and terrorism in the west, some examples. Our sphere of influence is much smaller and hence harder to identify – but it is what we can realistically and effectively have some control over.

Take the jellyfish parable. A boy and his grandfather are walking along the beach when they come across a mass of jellyfish awash the shore. The grandfather picks up one and throws it back into the ocean. The boy asks, “Why did you do that? You can never save them all,” and the man replies, “Well it made a difference to that one.”

So like the man we need to recognise what we can help and what we cannot help, in order to basically stay sane… alas this opens a whole can of worms (unrelated to the jellyfish), for example, what do you save and why that one? But perhaps it those cases it can be better to train ourselves to not over question life. After all it leads us to why we were born and not some other being, why certain people were killed in the earthquake and others weren’t, and so on and so forth.

But for some people it is hard for them to recognise where their sphere of influence lies. My partner brought up the valid point that it is often those that go beyond what is expected from them that succeed in helping the world… but I think this sphere of influence spoken of is more about what you worry about, not what your actions become. You can still shoot for the stars and remain healthy if you teach yourself not to be distraught if you didn’t save the world.

Some would also argue that always trying to stick within your own sphere is selfish, but in fact if it makes you healthier and happier then it is for the best of those around you. For example, if you were injured and the ambulance men attending you had the flu it would be far from ideal.

Telling oneself that you should stick within your sphere is one thing, putting it into practice is another. It’s all about perspective. I look at the cats I have helped for the SPCA and become easily overwhelmed by the numerous other ones still out there. But if I have made one creature’s life that bit more pleasurable, even for a week, then from its point of view it was definitely well worth it.

Air New Zealand’s troubles yesterday got me thinking about social media and when it should be used. The airline has had two emergency landings within NZ in one day – which is never the best news for any flight operator.

As someone who is not the best flyer (thanks funnily enough to the Christchurch earthquake, long story), it does not comfort me greatly to see my favourite airline having technical problems. (Jetstar, of course, yes we all expect it after a guaranteed 2 hour delay and being hoarded onto the plane like sheep by bored stewards that don’t mind their Ps and Qs.) 

This aforementioned lack of comfort meant that today I went looking for some reassurance, i.e. I was keen to see what the airline’s response was. They have a reputation of being quick on the ball to address anything endangering their reputation (their video response to The Listener magazine became viral within hours of its posting). But this time Air NZ seems quiet. Their lack of acknowledgment via social media channels is almost an eerie silence, as if they are wondering anyone will notice. It takes 10 seconds to write a tweet and half an hour to publish a statement, but perhaps I am not giving them long enough in their response time?

It reminded me of NZ Ski’s lack of digital acknowledgment of the numerous deaths that occured on their three ski fields last winter. Every happy tweet during the week or so after July 13th seemed to insult the memory of the 56 year old mother that it ignored. She was the third person to die at Mt Hutt in a month. 

So should social media be used to address such occasions or not? If I was that lady’s daughter, I would feel enraged that they were acting as if nothing had happened. With Air New Zealand, after reading the news headlines I would like to be quickly assured that it was a complete coincidence two planes were prematurely landed and that they felt sympathetic towards anyone involved. Please.

But… that’s the key thing. I had read the headlines and the news stories that followed. For the sake of anyone who hadn’t seen it, perhaps companies do think they are better off keeping stum. Why create bad news for those who wouldn’t otherwise know about it?

Nevertheless I think this is wrong. We should not ignore our dirty laundry just because only a few of the neighbours can see it. Who wants to support a brand that only cares for the majority and not the individual?

SM is ultimately the most open form of PR, and PR is ultimately a relationship of respect and trust between company and public. So NZ Ski should have had the respect to have made a statement about those that died. And Air New Zealand should hopefully reinstate the trust from those bad flyers among us by informing us it was a freak incident that they are going to all lengths of addressing.

I titled this post as “Should we use Social Media to ignore bad PR?” but maybe the issue is how we should be using Social Media to positively address bad PR. 

Very proud moment today whilst having my morning coffee – Haka Tours is currently top of all New Zealand commerical tourism experiences according to Rankers.co.nz. Rankers is an independent review website set up by a fella called Cymen Crick (formerly Kaiteriteri Kayaks), aimed to promote tourism operators and New Zealand by allowing travellers to rate their experiences. 

Review sites such as Trip Advisor get a fair amount of jip for biased reviews and competitor forgery but from the experience I have had with the Rankers team, it seems that they are an honest bunch who have done their best to make the site fair.

Long may Haka Tours be a top-ranked experience! 

www.rankers.co.nz

A big part of my role involves Social Media – it’s completely impossible to escape on a day to day basis, even though sometimes I expect it takes over too much of my working life! Here are examples of way we have used SM to promote the company to potential and past consumers.

Snow Safari Facebook Competition (May 2010)

I doubled our Facebook Fans with a really simple photo competition. People had to upload a picture related to snowboarding or skiing and then encourage others to “like” it. The photo with the most “likes” won a place on our 7 day Snow Safari tour worth $1,699 NZD. They also had to write why they deserved to win underneath the photo. This ensured that when the photo came up on their personal wall, Haka Tours would get a mention – hence promoting us to all their friends. We also backed up the contest with Facebook advertising, which worked very well for our Australian market.

Ironically our winner had already been on a tour the previous year but he achieved 466 likes which was impressive! We went from 300 to 600 fans in 4 weeks.

Customer Blogging

I have kept a blog for Haka for the last couple of years as it is great for our SEO, but it can be hard to find time in my job to update it regularly! It was also a challenge to keep it fresh as I was the only author. So a great solution to this was to get the tour members to contribute – we now have a “Social Media Ambassador” on each tour who writes a short blog post every day and includes a number of images/videos. As we use Posterous, this automatically gets posted to Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter.

The customer of course gets rewarded with free internet, a free activity and Haka Tours t-shirt for their troubles, but this is really a small price to pay for such a great way of promoting the company.

www.adventuretoursnz.com

YouTube Competition

My first job with Haka back in 2007 was to promote them to university students in the UK. We did this by launching a nationwide competition to find “Britain’s Craziest Student”. Using YouTube and working alongside STA Travel, we invited them to upload videos demonstrating how “crazy” they could be – and the one with the most views won a trip for 2 to New Zealand on one of our 16 day Adventure Tours.

As we were an unknown brand at the time, it proved to be a difficult task to convince people to partake in the campaign, and so I decided to take a video camera and go direct to the students at a number of university unions around England. This allowed me to attain great footage on the night of students doing all kinds of things from drinking games to stripping, dance routines and dares. At the same time, I had some banners and flyers that were distributed everywhere and it really helped get our name out to those few universities that I got round.

For our first year of business about 80% of our customers came from the UK and were aged 18-30.

Facebook and The Future

I’m planning on jazzing up our Facebook page now that we have reached 800 fans. We want to encourage potential customers to interact more – so a tab dedicated to the top FAQs combined with a “Ask your own question” box (that in turn posts directly to the wall) would be great. 

I want to take the “Social Media Ambassador” idea further and have a tab that shows users what our current tour(s) are doing via content written by the customers alongside up-to-date images/video. This would hopefully a) encourage the tour members involved to share the page with their friends and family, and b) show potential clients just how good the touring experience really is.

Our new website will be due for release early 2011 and will enable to viewer to share a page directly on their Facebook wall at any time with one simple button.

I have just begun to trial setting up private Facebook groups for each tour group so that they can say hello to each other before they depart. I have had so many of them thank me for this! It also provides a brilliant way of pushing more activities at them and encouraging them to pre-book things before the trip. Plus that extra bit of customer service goes a long way. The more personal you are to a client, the less likely they are to feel unhappy with you.

Twitter and The Future

Twitter is most definitely a Business to Business application for us. I have never had a customer ask us a question using a tweet, allow a handful do follow us. Most of the time any interaction will be from another company wanting to do business with us.

So I simply use Twitter as a newsfeed – I pass on other people’s news, I create our own, and follow the odd interesting person, brand or company. It’s like with PR, you never know how much it can potentially benefit you one day. The important thing is accessibility – making sure people can find you down as many avenues as possible.

Here’s another video I put together for Haka – purely using snippets of clips taken by tour members on their digital cameras. We didn’t have the budget to send someone out with a proper camera so I had to work with what I was given!

http://www.youtube.com/v/CQ2-UQ513-w?fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0&color1=0×234900&color2=0x4e9e00

Whilst I was at university (just over 3 years ago), we would have been shot if we had dared quote Wikipedia in an essay. However, it increasingly seems that more people, students and professionals, are now relying upon this resource without question. Is this a sad sign of our times or simply a mistaken form of social media?

I must confess: I am a Wikipedia snob. Yes, I will use it if I need an instant answer, biography of a celeb, or a simplified background into a complicated concept. But if I was writing a professional piece or essay I would not touch it with a barge pole. After all, it is a mis-mash of the general public’s contributions and anyone can put something up there. Who is to say it is entirely accurate?

Apparently a few people. In 2005 Wikipedia was declared to be nearly as accurate on science as Britannica (a study carried out by British journal ‘Nature’ – see more here). I guess that as so many people use Wikipedia (including editors who are experts in their fields), it gets corrected regularly and so the majority of errors are ironed out. Saying that, I do not see how there is a massive argument for using something 97%* accurate (Wiki) against 99.9% accurate (book).

But whether accurate or not, surely it is not right for us to quote Mr Joe Bloggs of 20 Unknown Road, Whoknowsville when there are 1000s of books and articles written by Dr Expert, a knowledgeable person who has studied a particular subject for years and worked hard to gain credibility.

Of course the popularity of Wikipedia comes down to accessibility and this is why many opt for the 97% – the people of our time do not want to go trawling through those 1000s books and articles when they can quickly type in several words to a search engine. Maybe they are lazy buggers; maybe they just don’t have enough time – I think we are all guilty of both. Nevertheless I do not believe that any student should be allowed to use the excuse of “not enough time”. Does studying now mean going straight to a single search box?

Our need for quick information stretches much further than Wikipedia and can open the whole web up for debate on reliability, credibility, and gullibility. As seen from other journalism (e.g. newspapers, tabloids, gossip magazines) there will always be those people that will believe anything they read, and so it will be interesting to see how the future generations go. Either we are going to become a lot smarter and wary of what we read, or it will reach a stage where anyone can stick up some nonsense and it might be “true” for a day. (I pity the celebrities in this case.)

Or who knows, perhaps one day it will come to the point where we have to have “internet police” who patrol and search out for misinformation, and fine the people who put it up there.

Now don’t get me wrong. I do agree that in many ways the internet has helped spread the truth – much of this through social media, e.g. reviews, debate and other situations where we express our experience and opinion. BUT it is important to note that Wikipedia is not a form of social media and I’m sure it’s creators did not set out to make it a compendium of opinions disguised as fact. So let’s define our definers before reading that they’ve taken “gullible” out of dictionary.com.

* I don’t know whether it is 97% – I am just plucking a figure for argument’s sake.

I’m afraid I’ve neglected the internet a little in the last fortnight as I’ve been gallivanting around the globe again. Here is evidence…

Yes there’s a lot of sand in the desert! We flew from Auckland to Dubai with Emirates (my second favourite airline after Air New Zealand of course) where we spent 4 glorious days basking in the sun and getting a wonderful tan… Not! Think more sweating buckets in the extreme heat (which is apparently “cold” according to many locals) and running from one air conditioned building to another.

Regardless of the heat, we had an amazing time. Dubai is certainly about money, glitz and glamour. The people can be divided easily into the rich and their servants (whether house help, shop/food assistants or laborers). You aren’t accepted if you don’t have a Porsche in your driveway or a couple of designer labels in the wardrobe.

It is a very exciting place to visit and experience… I love how much money they invest into work and play. Nevertheless it is as fake as it appears and every person we met who lived there seemed to be desperate to escape. A very transient city with perhaps not too much depth between the fake grass lawns and the sand underneath?

“Concerns over international perceptions of the accommodation situation in New Zealand during Rugby World Cup 2011 were highlighted at a meeting for tourism organisations in Wellington this week.  Rugby New Zealand 2011 Chief Executive Martin Snedden said that feedback from international rugby media showed that people were worried about a perceived lack of capacity in New Zealand and price gouging during the event.  Mr Snedden said he planned to talk more to international media to try and overcome those perceptions.  He is also planning a meeting of accommodation representatives to develop joint strategies and messages.”

Perceived price gouging?! Excuse me, TIA, but you need to open your eyes and realise that this is exactly what is going on!

The bigwigs in the NZ Tourism Industry really need to buck their ideas up and do what they should have done to begin with – set clear guidelines and boundaries to stop this happening in the first place. We are about to give rugby tourists such a bad taste from their visit here from over-pricing that no one will come back. Certain accommodation suppliers have not doubled but more than tripled their standard prices (I’m not about to start naming names).

But it’s not just accommodation. A well established car rental company has increased their camper van hire from around $30 per day to something like $135 per day. The only people who don’t seem to be changing their pricing are any activity operators, which is the right thing for all of us to do.

We’re only getting something like 60,000-80,000 extra visitors in an already low time of year. (To put this in perspective, New Zealand gets 2.4 million or so per year.) There is not going to be a shortage of beds.

It has also be stated that as a country we are going to lose money from investing in this tournament. So the only way to make a reasonable ROI is to do a really good job so visitors will be encouraged to return. If I was a rugby fan getting charged these ridiculous amounts, I wouldn’t be impressed with New Zealand. In fact, I might just stay in Ozzie and pop over now and again.

Disclaimer – although I know many others share this view, this article is of my own personal opinion. I am not writing on behalf of Haka Tours or anyone else in the company.

1. Marks and Spencer’s food. In particular their lunch section. In fact, any British supermarket really. I’d settle for Tesco if I had to.

2. The fact people care about current affairs and what is happening in the world. (In New Zealand, the part of the news that involves the world lasts all of 5 seconds and nobody is interested in politics unless it involves the environment.)

3. Clubbing, the way it was meant to be. “Clubs” in NZ are half-arsed mini dancefloors at the back of bars.

4. Real chocolate. Galaxy. Even the Dairy Milk here is crap.

5. Evidence of fashion. That doesn’t involve a surf t-shirt, board shorts and jandals.

6. Cheap technology. Especially: free mobile phones when you get a contract.

7. Being able to save money and not always spend my entire income. Kiwis seem to think the UK is expensive, but really it is the other way around.

8. Central heating. In the winter here it is f*cking freezing without it.

9. Being able to do 70 mph (120kph) legally on the motorway.

10. Cities. New Zealand thinks they have them when really they just have big towns.

One resident’s permit = $50 per year. Time spent ringing council begging them for permit = 1 week. Not too bad… However, for the 6 spots there are, the Christchurch City Council sells 12 permits.

Now I can deal with this during the week – most people will take their car to work during the day, and then after 5pm we can all use other spaces on the street for free.

But - does anyone out there not need to park their car outside their house during the weekend???

So today we were forced to leave the car over the other side of the road, in a metered space. Of course we are not going to put $7 into the meter every 2 hours throughout the day – we have a life and that would be $28 per day. So we got fined. Yes, we have a residents parking permit and we got fined outside our own house.

Dear Council. Buck your bloody ideas up and do the maths – ask yourself if you were the resident would you think this situation was reasonable?