I recently read in the Pacific Business News about the HVCB (Hawaii Convention & Visitors Bureau) Hawaii: A Thousand Reasons to Smile Campaign. It’s targeted at residents of San Francisco, who are frequent visitors here. I support the idea of reaching out to San Francisco residents – I have many friends there including Chris Heuer, Kristie Wells, Stowe Boyd, Susan Bratton, and Elyse Tager along with Charlene Li, Scott Simpson and Jeremiah Owyang, many of whom love Hawaii and come here wanting to meet the locals. They are generally smart, friendly, successful people who are used to spending money.
However, may I politely suggest that the way to attract them is NOT with a last century web site built on a 100% flash interface that loads s-l-o-w-l-y and is very controlling in its navigation schema, restricting how the user can (not) truly explore where s/he wants to go?
I would have liked to point this campaign to my San Francisco friends, who also happen to be active web users, who themselves have a large “following” via blogs, social networks, Twitter, et al. As it is, there are too many “last century” flags on this campaign, so instead, I am using it as a learning opportunity. GoHawaii/HVCB will get attention in any case!
Together, just those few friends mentioned above have over 75,000 followers on Twitter. Even if you don’t know about Twitter, this translates as follows: These people carry influence and are well known in the smart, hip, savvy circles of San Francisco. Exactly the kind of people this campaign wants.
There are also many people who live here and have friends all over, and who are also active on the social web like Neenz, Arleen Anderson, Angela Keen, Vernon Brown, and Ryan Ozawa.
This is a collective of natural communicators with large networks who represent a missed opportunity on this campaign because it does not take advantage of social media tools and practices. Instead, HVCB reached out to mostly newspaper editors and a few paid bloggers. Pardon me, aren’t newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, going out of business on a daily basis? I don’t mean to suggest either/or – new media or old media – they both can play. I do mean to suggest that this campaign is completely unfriendly to social media influencers. I do understand it is natural and easier to do what you know, however, that is no longer a viable or responsible option, whether using taxpayer or stockholder monies or not.
Let’s Get Real
Now take a look at the smiles picture above. It is not clear to me if these people are “real” people. I assume they are models, as they so closely resemble stock photos and because the associated photos such as “watching a cliff diver” also appear to be stock. I might as well add, as I suspect a commenter will mention it anyway, this collection of perfect smiles with special lighting looks more like an ad for dental work than an invitation to Hawaii.The San Francisco Bay Area is home to the Cluetrain Manifesto and the now decade-long march toward transparency in communication and marketing. Hawaii tourism officials would do well to read the book. I have several copies and would be delighted to loan them out to anyone who is interested. It is also available online for free. Email me.
Faking things up is not part of the mindset with the smart and savvy in San Francisco. Instead think living green, being politically and socially active, being at leading edge of technology, and setting the pace for change in almost every aspect of life today.
Having a Contest v1.0
There is a contest to upload a picture of oneself smiling, for a chance to win four nights hotel in Maui and 80,000 miles on Hawaiian Air. (Pay your own taxes, fees, and whatevahs.) The contest rules page is very last century. The judges are not disclosed; the photos are not posted anywhere. It is all happening behind closed doors.Why have secret judges when you can have the community on the internet get engaged, give you more page views, and do the judging for you? Compare this to the Queensland Department of Tourism, who created the World’s Greatest Job contest. Mind you, I still don’t like the slow and user-unfriendly flash interface as I have yet to find a way to re-locate or link to some of my favorite video submissions. But the concept and most of the execution is fantastic, and remarkably similar to an idea I had last year. 34,000 people submitted 1-minute videos from all over the world. They got buzz from all spheres of web users – geeks as well as tourists, news organizations and justified critics.
They are using the internet to talk to people who live, work, and play on the internet, and they willingly embraced the communication practices of the modern internet: transparency, simplicity (look at their rules/submission page), play nice with others, and embrace peer-to-peer power among a few. Sadly, GoHawaii and HVCB are using the internet as it existed 5-10 years ago. It doesn’t make us look as smart as we can be.
Why Are The Events So Un-Promote-Able???
Back to the Smiles Campaign. The Music Events Are Very Cool: they (we, from taxpayer money) are sending local musicians to play at Gordon Biersch locations in the Bay Area and I am thrilled my friend Mailani Makainai is among them. This is in itself a great gig for promoting Hawaiian music, something very dear to my heart for years!
But why is all the info stuffed into a flash file – not indexable by search engines or easily bookmarked much less read by humans? The page is also not printable and the scroll bar is hard to see. Why is this not on a blog with linkable pages, ratings, comments, Twitter postings, etc? Why is there not a Flickr group collecting photos of the musicians teaching folks how to shaka at all of these locations, getting cross-posted to Facebook, Twitpic, etc?
Nathan Kam is doing his best (and rocking his personal brand!) by posting photos of the (old school) San Francisco campaign launch on his personal account when this could and should be rolled under a more strategized web asset for the campaign IMO. Nathan – I love you and hope this post gets you more support as you are one of the precious few trying to learn and implement social media practices. Big {{hugs}} to you for going above and beyond to take, post, and tag the photos of the reception!
Why is there no tag so people can talk about this event using internet shorthand, and so search engines can aggregate all of the related content? If they had used the social web instead of a 4 flash pages, the HVCB could actually measure the effectiveness of the campaign not to mention generating incredible Google juice – done mostly for free by other people!
Does Share Mean Spam?
Just when I was about to give up hope, I decided to click the Share link, hoping to see links to my favorite social networks! Alas, it was just an email form with no mention of privacy or if those friends’ email addresses I might share go into a tourism database to be spammed from here to eternity. Do they? I hope not; in any case I won’t risk it. “Share” these days means using web plug-ins to tell your friends on Facebook, Digg, Yahoo Buzz or save to your own Delicious bookmarks! For people like me who like to share, these tools are much easier, faster, fun, and effective than trying to remember people’s email addresses and type them into a form, without their permission.
Even the URL is dated:
http://www.thousandreasonstosmile.com/?cid=09SFBlitz_prQuestion mark URL’s are not search-friendly and the name of this is “09 SF Blitz PR” – just another run of the mill PR campaign. The average web user may not look at URL’s, but the above average techies in San Francisco will do so at a much higher rate, I can assure you. HVCB owns the domain – why not put the site there? You can still link to anywhere you want from the flash pages.
I wonder if this blog post will offend some, and they will not speak up as is local custom. I would prefer you do speak up, and help me understand the logic behind this campaign – or at least let’s start a discussion here or at another location. I write this because I so love this land of Hawaii. I write this because I see tourism as an oportunity to improve relationships within our state and with our visitors. I’ve been told by a select few tourism officials that I care more about the state than those paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so. I write this because I find it so frustrating that our tourism, advertising, and PR leaders are still doing things in such old-fashioned, expensive, boring, and ineffective ways. There is opportunity all around us; we started the discussions at Podcamp + Wordcamp Hawaii, but I am impatient.
Before You Leave…
Please visit this web site, A Thousand Reasons to Smile. Compared to the SF Blitz PR, which one draws you in more? To some it is just plain old user-generated content but it speaks to me far more than GoHawaii’s polished, pretty, perfect, no-one-home, old-attempt-at-selling-the-fantasy Hawaii site. BTW, this blog came up #1 in a Google search for “A Thousand Reasons to Smile.” That is the name of the Hawaii campaign.
Hawaii, my darling, it is time to let go of controlling every aspect of the message. It is time to put behind the pretty flash sites in favor of messier and livelier blogs and social networks. It is time to bring new blood into your agencies. Your friends can stay, but they are not keeping up with the times. We can teach them – who wants to learn?
I have been giving free talks on this stuff since early 2005. I decided it’s time someone spoke up and mentioned that we, together, can do a much better job of spreading Aloha, of telling the world about these beautiful and imperfect islands in the piko of the planet. I hope you will tell me what you think!
Me ke aloha pumehana,
You can follow and connect with Roxanne on 
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Aloha Rox, I went to both “thousand reasons to smile” web sites. The green “Irish” web site really put everything right-in-front of your face (nice), engaging with lots of pictures and text. At first glance it gave me a sense of what the site was about. Good.
Now the other site…. I was confused as to what this site was really about (even with Rox’s explanation). I could not find a general info page and since it was flash text I could not enlarge the text for easier reading, nor could I copy any of the Event dates for later reference. The Events page was confusing as I did not understand if the events were in SF or Hawaii (the “Kauai” event did not have a city listed for the location). I did look at some of the faces however, I think there were a total of 10 different faces? The pictures behind the faces were quite interesting and beautiful – too bad they were “hidden”. The faces mean nothing to me, who are they? Why are they here? I would have much rather seen faces of local Hawaiians
and at least a brief explanation right up front as to the purpose of the site. The site feels stagnate and isolated to me.
Mahalo for your passion Rox. You have given me so much to think about and learn!
Rox, very well said. I just don’t get it either, all that money available for a campaign and while the flash site is very unfriendly I would imagine it took quite a few $$$ to put it together (think of what better things they could have used that towards).
In reality FREE publicity is readily available and with the increasing cutbacks on how to use money to promote Hawaii, I would think they would jump right on top of the user generated content and marketing. Yes the power of Twitter and other social media outlets is so much easier, friendlier and today more used, so why have they still been so slow to adapt!? Is it because they are still unsure of the type of results? Maybe they somehow think it is too risky? FREE risky? I think not. Just look back upon the Podcamp + Wordcamp that came together out of love and then most recently the Honolulu Twestival which brought several hundred people together united for one cause in such a short period of time. Could we not use those same people and more for the promotion of Hawaii? Wow what a massive resource just waiting to be unleashed! Think about it!
I indeed love Hawaii myself and because it has become my home, I try my hardest to promote the beauty and wealth of history, culture and music that these islands possess. And while I wholeheartedly support campaigns of Aloha to promote Hawaii, I do think that all the love and sweat poured into a campaign can be destroyed nowadays with so little inattention to the times that are upon us.
Rox, thanks for always stepping up and breaking the barrier of silence all for the love of Hawaii. I hope someday (soon) that GoHawaii/HVCB will be open to a roundtable to hear feedback from those common everyday people out there in the new age of social media who care nothing more than to continue sharing the beauty of the islands and everything it has to offer to the world.
We need to try now more than ever to be an example and good stewards of money and be able to use it in the most effective ways to promote our great land of Aloha.
What you said, Rox—I felt the same way.
I never understood the San Francisco message. The faces don’t look like the San Fran that I knew. It didn’t look like Hawaii either. There was nothing to indicate what the site was about, so I clicked on the text navigation above the smiles. The rest is written above.
When visitors don’t understand a site, they don’t come back. I never got three clicks in from the smiles until my second visit (prompted by your review) to find the very nice, informative sales videos. (However, the flash behind the video navigation wouldn’t stop following my mouse so I had to close the page.)
There’s obviously a lot of talent behind this site design. The State of Hawaii has so much beauty, culture, and unique experience to offer, but this site has so much standing in the way of effectively communicating that. A good example site for learning usability and web site design, but for all the wrong reasons.
I hope the follow-up site will give us more to work with.
Thanks Rox for sharing your concerns.
Great article, Rox! I am not a fan of the new gohawaii.com site either. It seems a bit contrived, and it certainly is confusing to navigate. Lots of talent, but they’re working with old media rules.
I can add my voice to those already posted – GoHawaii/HVCB are making a grave mistake in their current marketing program (which seems to be pointed at 1998).
Another salient point to make about the influencers that you focused on, is that they also have jobs, income and the means to promote Hawaii tourism in their communities of more of the same. In this economy – they should be welcomed with open arms.
Travel and tourism have turned to social media as a way of engaging consumers in an era where the competition for every discretionary dollar spent in this tough economy includes a lot a everyday necessities. GoHawaii/HVCB need to realize that each obstacle that they put between themselves and the consumer by static and ineffective messaging is, in fact, literally channeling tourism money away from Hawaii and directly to the competition.
Aloha, indeed.
Arrrgh! I hate Flash sites. They make me feel so manipulated. They’re a PR person’s idea of “professional”, I guess. I think they’re done by people who only know TV advertising. It’s got to be like a commercial. Everything’s got to be perfectly designed, color coordinated, nothing left to chance. They don’t get that a web site is interactive, apparently. Now Rox, just sit there like a good little consumer and passively be “impressioned”. Oh by the way, they can also charge an arm and a leg for the one-off flash development.
Did they at least not have auto-play music?
JoeC
Rox,
HTA, HVCB and McNeil Wilson are very familiar with new media and the web 2.0 approach, but I have to wonder if they care.
According to the rules we can all enter, so perhaps we should inform all of the residents of Hawaii to upload their pictures and those of their families for a chance to win. I wonder, since the judging is vague, if they would reward a local resident?
In the meantime, HTA, HVCB, and McNeil Wilson are welcome to contact me. Together, I guarantee we could make more than a thousand smile.
After posting earlier, I began thinking how difficult it is sometime to “be you own guinea pig”, especially if you are unfamiliar with social media tools. After revamping our business web site to a blog format I had a client ask me what those “dig this / technorati” things are for… honestly I said that I didn’t know what they were – and he laughed at me. I was so embarrassed that I disabled those features on our blog and I haven’t turned them on since.
I was critical earlier of one of the web sites as not being “helpful”... but now I’m wondering if my own site could be more helpful to the viewer
So, I’m turning those features back on again and I’ll try to learn how and why other people use those tools. 
Mahalo nui nui Rox for the discussion!
Interesting observations and I agree with your points. When I read about the campaign, my first reaction was “huh?”. I got a lot of questions in my head which you eloquently put into words. I am glad you mentioned that Nathan Kam is doing his best because he is (good job Nathan) but I am not familiar with others involved on this campaign.
Just an example, when Jeremiah Owyang came to Maui recently, he twitted a lot about Maui and I believe that did a lot to good to the Maui tourism. Free promo! (he’s got more or less 39,000 followers on twitter as of now).
Neenz is so gracious to offer help when they contact her. I am sure the Hawaii Twitter community will are willing to help promote Hawaii, as we are already doing.
Just my 2 cents worth
Liza
A Maui Blog
I was very concerned about what you had to say,. Rox, so I went to the HVBC’s new site, and found it slow to load, confusing to navigate (why did all those people swirl when I moved my mouse), and articificakl – I too do not believe that “Walter” is really from Santa Clara and is exploring a lava tube. For goodness’ sake, the flip sides were more interesting and more Hawai`i than thos posed headshots.
I While the site looks slick and professional in the superficial graphic look of the sight, it is amateurish and old-fashioned in terms of being a top-quality searchable site with an easy to navigate system. It turns a blind eye to Web 2.0 tools like Twitter, which makes it hard to promote to a tech-savvy demographic.
The sad part is that this site will probably not be as successful as its developers envisioned, and the blame will be put on the web as a promotional tool.
you can lead a horse to water…
Rox – I understand your frustration, its similar to mine when I was trying to get my local tourism and economic development people to pay attention to the web down in Miami in the mid 90’s… Eventually, I just moved away, realizing I couldnt make them drink, or think for that matter, no matter how hard I tried.
Don’t beat yourself up over the old school’s misunderstanding of the changing market for travel online (market for everything as the case may be). They will not change until they are forced to… I wonder where they came up with all that money though… funny thing is, the total costs are about the same with the old school approach as it is with what we are suggesting. The difference is that less money is spent on media buying up front and more money is spent on people engaging – sounds a lot like the old relationship selling model really, doesnt it…. with less advertising dollars and more feet on the street.
Now, there is a real opportunity with the musicians and special menus at Gordon Biersch – best photo contest from each location and each band, best video clip created…. could also be partnering with ustream.tv or someone else to broadcast each show live…. QIK even! They could extend the reach of the event way beyond the bay area, but the same activities would also deepen the connection between the bay area and the islands.
While we support you, at the same time I have to wonder if you are ever really going to get through to the decision makers… despite having some great smart people on your side, it just doesn’t seem that they care enough… even this free advice you are giving them is likely to fall on hearing aids that are either turned down low or have dead batteries in them….
One day your people will see the possibility, until then, relax and keep doing the great work that you do…
Aloha,
Chris
I agree with Chris Heuer. When it comes to matters of social media, I have stopped trying to convince people who don’t get it. They’re the ones that are losing out. Eventually, they will come around when one of their slightly more adventurous friends reports some success. People have to feel that someone who is like them and shares their experience approves, then they’ll make the leap. For some reason, social media is as big an adoption challenge as the computer has been. People have nothing in their experience to compare it to.
Wow people I really appreciate these comments. I am not yet so disheartened though – as apparently I come from a long line of optimists.
Your comments have made me more than one lone voice in the wilderness and I am confident we will have a meeting of the minds sooner rather than later.
And yes, the more I think about how much money must have been spent on this campaign, including the IMO completely unnecessary junket to send a bunch of people from here to there and entertain only the old media elite instead of having an event on the ground for the people, the more angry, no creative (!) I get about how we can do better. Together.
Great post Rox. I don’t think you need to worry about offending the HVCB. Along with the critique, you have given them much strategic direction and encouragement for moving in the right direction. Hopefully, they will be willing and interested in listening to at least some of it for future marketing activities.
Best,
Elyse
It’s a tough one. I’d agree the site is awful. No SEO positive links, over use of frankly confusing flash. It’s stuff that looks “ooohhh prettttyyyyy” but smacks of the design being done by graphic artists rather than web designers. Unfortunately it seems a fair number of the small to middling sized advertising companies do not realise the difference between a fancy site and an effective one, and seem to continue to get graphic designers to do a web developers job. Reality is you need both. Graphics designers and artists have good ideas, lots of them, and they’re often great, but you need the web designer to temper those ideas and make them practical.
It’s like the difference between a designer and an engineer at a factory. The designers job is to dream big dreams, and the engineers job is to turn those dreams into something practical, making changes where necessary in the name of safety and function.
I would, however, point out a slight disagreement regarding Twitter. It is still only a growing tool, and I think at the moment people are putting too much of an emphasis on it’s value. There are way more people that don’t “get” twitter than those that do. Those of us who get it and use it (I’m @twirrim ) rightly love it, but people do tend to perceive it with rose tinted glasses. To me I think of Hawaii in terms of neenz, v brown, alohaarleen et al. Speak to the majority of the people here, though, and they won’t even have heard of most of them. I do feel sorry for those that haven’t and haven’t yet had the pleasure of spending time with them.
From the best guess I’ve seen Twitter has maybe 3 – 4 million users, all over the globe.
San Fran’s Bay Area has a population of 7.5m (according to wikipedia)
Even if we take the (highly inaccurate) position of twitter only being used in the US (population of 303,824,640) Twitter accounts for not even 1.5% of the population. We know its much lower than that as twitter is a worldwide thing not local. 1.5% of San Fran bay area population would equate to just 75000 people.
I’m not saying that population is negligable, but when you’re creating a marketing campaign you target the bigger groups rather than the small fringe groups. That said, advertising on Twitter isn’t exactly hard though
@P Graydon – thanks for your comments and useful distinction between a graphic designer and a web designer. That is a useful part of this discussion, based on the comments above. (And I agree with you – for a data point of one.)
For the record though, nowhere in my post do I suggest this campaign should have been solely or even “majorly” on the back of Twitter – I simply reference twitter as one of many markers of both influence measurement and social media tools.
SF is a trend-setting place. It’s people are trend-setters. I would bet good money there is one of the highest concentrations of Twitter users there (and bloggers and internet users) given that Twitter, Blogger, Google, Apple, (need I go on?) were all conceived and nurtured there. So far, none of those companies has picked up and moved to greener pastures. Instead, they are defining how we create and communicate, even if it takes a few years to make its way around the world.
Bleurgh.. I didn’t meant to imply people were aiming at Twitter. Call it over-exposure or similar, I’m just getting a little frustrated with the number of news articles and the like that tout Twitter as THE way to advertise your product, as if it is the be all and end all and the only way to effectively communicate these days
For all the potential it has it still is in a neophyte stage.
I’ve gotten a report from Dan Leuck of http://www.techhui.com that comments are acting poorly on this post. We’re working on it!
Thanks for letting me know Dan.
I agree about everything you said about their website .
and I did not like the idea of building it using flash
By the way i met Nathan Kam before as well in USA last year.
This comment was originally posted on TheLetterTwo.com