Social media case study: Visit Dallas

Company Profile

Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau (Dallas CVB ) is the Official Visitor Information service for Dallas, Texas. The independent, not-for-profit organisation of 60 full time employees, aims to promote Dallas as a business and pleasure destination.

The Challenge

Dallas CVB wanted to launch a campaign around Super Bowl XLV to promote the city. They linked with social media tourism specialists Think! Social Media with the aim of using social media to get people talking to each other about Dallas, in effect marketing the city via word of mouth.

The Solution

The agency planned to send a ‘Mystery Man’ to each of the cities of the teams who had made it to the Super Bowl with a secret phrase. The idea was that the first person to find the Mystery Man and tell him the phrase which was ‘Have you been to Dallas lately?’ would win a 4 night travel package to the NFL experience with tickets to the big game.

Daily clues to the whereabouts of the mystery man in each city would be seeded by “Exclusive Bloggers”, selected for having strong social media presences and very engaged readers. The bloggers would be key to engaging with local communities and driving awareness of the campaign.

Clues printed on photos were connected to imagery and facts about local areas. The images were easy to share via Facebook, Twitter and via blogs. Anyone who wanted to find out the secret phrase would have to ‘like’ the Visit Dallas Facebook Fan Page. A campaign Twitter account @DallasSBHunt helped to coordinate all activities, share updates and answers to queries. Two addtional hashtags helped facilitate the discussion.

Results

Following the conference finals on Jan 23, the contest was set to run in the cities of Green Bay and Pittsburgh. Blog posts went out the following day announcing the contest and the contest tab on the Visit Dallas fan page was activated – at this point the page only had 600 fans.

By the end of Tuesday, the fanpage reached 1,000 fans

By Thursday, awareness of the campaign had reached local media and more than 3000 people had ‘liked’ the Visit Dallas page.

At 9am on Friday, the day of the actual contest, the Exclusive Bloggers announced their first clues. In response, the streets of both cities filled with people looking for the Mystery Man. @DallasSBHunt was trending in both Pittsburgh and Green Bay. Many were tweeting as they went and were following along on Facebook –  the aim of having two cities out and about talking to each other about Dallas was reached.