I like the term "conversational capital." My friend Carmen Ciotola of Tourism Montreal first mentioned it to me when she introduced me to the book by Bertrand Cesvet (with Tony Babinski and Eric Alper. The book is called Conversational Capital, but with a subtitle that reads "How to Create Stuff people love to talk about." Thought the book clearly presents a framework to analyze something (or someone) from a conversational capital perspective, "create stuff people love to talk about" is easier said than done.-
Conversational Capital, according to the book refers to "a series of observations that can help generate and spread positive word-of-mouth." Examples in the book of brands/products/services that have generated enormous amounts of conversational capital are Cirque du Soleil, Apple, adidas, Red Bull, Schwartz's (smoked meat sandwich deli in Montreal). The book offers 8 attributes or engines of conversational capital, most of which must be present in your product, service, brand, artist or tourism attraction in order to create conversational capital. These engines are: Rituals, Initiation, Exclusive Product Offering, Over-delivery, Myths, Icons, Tribalism, Endorsement and Continuity. I won't go into detail about these engines here. Read the book in order to get the entire lesson. I am merely using Cesvet and friends' framework to talk about word-of-mouth (positive or negative) about a tourism destination and how difficult it is for destination tourism marketers to create word of mouth about their destinations, particularly cities.
-In my opinion, a city's tourism board per se cannot really create conversational capital for its destination (Let me interject here and mention that the book's website - ConversationalCapital.com - has a section on conversations where the book's readers can interact and debate about conversational capital - unfortunately every time I clicked on this section the browser freezes and I have to reboot it). A city's conversational capital (except perhaps for Las Vegas, Dubai, NYC and Paris) is created by what happens in the city. The city itself is nothing without its events, its people and its architecture (architecture is something that happens - e.g. the ROM's Crystal Gallery, Gehry's renovation of the AGO, the OCAD building). And this brings me to what happened yesterday, September 16, 2009 in Toronto.
-Three major events where happening at the same time last night in Toronto in and around the entertainment district. I drove into the downtown core to meet my wife because we had tickets to U2's 360 Tour concert at the Skydome (Rogers Centre for some, but for me it's always the Skydome). I heard on the radio what was going on downtown so I made a point to get downtown early. In addition to U2 performing, the Maple Leafs had their opening game at the ACC against the Boston Bruins and the Toronto International Film Festival had its ongoing shows and galas in the downtown core. Needless to say, the area was hopping. Front Street and side streets felt a little like New York City with people and cars everywhere. One could also feel the energy of hockey, music or film fans building with anticipation of their respective events. For tourism and tourism related businesses it was an outlier evening I'm sure. I saw line-ups at small coffee shops like Tim Horton, fast food places and restaurants along Front Street.
-These three events provide more visibility to Toronto than any ad campaign could (unless of course, Toronto places an ad during the Super Bowl). The challenge for Toronto tourism marketers is how to harness and encourage the conversation in order to increase the conversational capital. One Google search for "U2 Toronto 2009" comes back with 1.3 million hits and change. A Twitter search for "U2 Toronto" comes back with pages and pages of related tweets (you have to tolerate many spammers' tweets though - one problem Twitter is wrestling with). A Google news search for "U2 in Toronto" gave up about 62 results, many of major media outlets that covered the concert. Similarly if you search for "Maple Leafs" or "Bruins" you will get many hits. And the Toronto International Film Festival? Well I'll save you the time you could spend on searches about TIFF. TIFF is the single Canadian event (cultural or otherwise) that towers among any other in media coverage. Two years ago a study was mentioned in the Toronto Star revealed that TIFF is by far more covered by the media than Bay Street and it's light years ahead of any other Canadian event ( a Google search for "Toronto International Film Festival" results in over 26 million hits).
-When you look at the three events mentioned in terms of the engines converational capital all three have elements of all or most of the engines. A tourism marketer cannot create this. One of the tourism marketer's many obvjectives (but one at the top of my list) should be to look for those brands, events, personalities or businesses that create conversational capital about their destinations, support them and find ways to be a participant in the conversations and use them in the destination's marketing initiatives.
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Regards (by the way, Bertrand Cesvet will be the opening keynote speaker at next year's Canada-e-Connect conference in Montreal).
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Jaime Horwitz MBA
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