This article is part of an ingoing project about social media used within hospitality and travel industries.  Purpose of this project is defining social media and looking for examples of companies which successfully implemented social media in their marketing efforts.

One of the major cruise companies worldwide is Miami-based Carnival Cruise Lines. Carnival Cruises is part of Carnival Corporation & PLC, the world’s largest cruise company with over 80.000 employees and about 13 billion U.S. Dollar revenue recorded in 2007. Carnival Cruises is operating 22 ships which are expected to carry over 2.6 million passengers this year.

Already following Carnival Cruises through microblogging service Twitter for quite some time, we already got a taste of how Carnival Cruises is implementing social media in its marketing activities. In this article we are elaborating on what specific social media Carnival is using and learning how Carnival is interacting with consumers through social media.

Blogging
With close to three million visitors already since 2007, Carnival is having quite a popular blog, written by Carnival’s Senior Cruise Director John Heald; John Heald’s Blog. The blog, which was started to give insight to the behind-the-scenes activity in the life of a cruise director, originally was a one month project but due to its success continued and is still growing strong.

Besides the enormous amount of visitor traffic and brand exposure, the blog is also stimulating consumers to be part of discussions, resulting in over 25.000 comments. Due to the tremendous success of the blog, earlier this year John Heald hosted his first blogging cruise, to which over 800 enthusiastic blog visitors took part. Preparations for John Heald’s blogging cruise 2009 have already started.

Social Networking
Carnival has set up its own social network and community for their customers, carnivalconnections, featuring several social functionalities such as photo and story sharing, scrapblogging, cruise and trip planning, event organizing and a message board forum.

Ofcourse carnivalconnections enables customer’s to connect to friends, invite friends and share experiences of previous cruises and expectations of future cruises with eachother. Also, the social network provide customer’s to write reviews about cruises which they can share with the public.

Not having exact numbers of members available, we would have to conclude from the amounts of topics and posts on the forum, over 5000 topics featuring 30.000 replies, that the network is quite successful and a great example of how a travel company can interact with its customers. Only image the amount of knowledge Carnival is getting from communicating with customers through this channel.

Virtual Tour
Carnival has created a complete virtual tour of it’s Fun Ship Island at FunShipIsland.com, featuring social elements such as sharing and personalization, which enables customers to view all parts of the ship online. Other features include a downloadable content such as wallpapers, ringtones and mp3 music.

While interacting with this website, quick, optional questions and individual preferences are collected for each visitor, which results in tailored recommendations for ofcourse carnival cruises.

Microblogging
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters in length. A minority of companies are already monitoring the conversation on twitter, some are even participating. Discussing how twitter can be used for business purposes is one thing, actually using it is another.

Using twitter already in May 2007, Carnival can be seen as an early adapter of twitter. Since then, carnivalcruise features over 300 updates and managed to get close to 500 followers. Carnival is using their twitter account to monitor their brand, listen to questions from customers, communicate promotions, share news about carnival and wish customers a safe journey. Also, people are asked and stimulated to use other their social networks to share their cruise experiences.

Photo Sharing
Flickr is an image hosting website and online community platform around images, being one of the earliest web 2.0 applications. Since 2004 Flickr has become the most popular website for everything related to images and after having been acquired by Yahoo in 2005, the service continued growing.

Carnival Cruises has its own photo stream on Flickr, a location where all images uploaded by Carnival can be found. Having uploaded close to 250 images on different topics such as their ships, locations, interiors, crew and construction sites, carnival is providing an interesting insight into the brand Carnival. Images of John Heald, together with crew, is giving a personal touch to the Flickr account.

Online Video
You Tube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips, owned by search engine Google. Carnival has its own ‘channel‘ on youtube, where it publishes its videos, coverage and presentations.

Measuring succes
Although it is hard to measure the success of social media without data on costs and revenues, it appears Carnival successfully implemented social media. Brand awareness, customer services and customer intelligence through social media is difficult to measure.

By February 2008 both carnivalconnections.com and FunShipIsland.com managed to record over one million visitors. In terms of transactions, the only number available we could find is 20.000 transactions through carnivalconnections.com, which is significant and expected to have increased since 2006.

About a month ago innovation insight had an interview with Carnival’s senior manager for interactive marketing strategy Jordan Corderra and social media strategist Stephanie Leavitt. In this interview both explained the outcome and objectives of their social media efforts.

Interesting, when Corderra and Leavitt were asked how they measure their efforts in social media; “Because each site and each component of our social media strategy has different objectives, they each have their own success metrics. We definitely track engagement, satisfaction, and leads/sales. But to have a truly successful social media strategy sales shouldn’t be the number one measure of success”.

Corderra and Leavitt continued; From launching a new site to simply opening a Facebook fan page, each and every one of these initiatives involved in depth discussions with our interactive team. For some brands it doesn’t make sense to participate in every social networking site available, so we definitely tend to ease into new applications. But the great part about social media is that you learn something new just about every day, so you shouldn’t fear it.

Using social media
Carnival has introduced a general audience with all comforts of long and short term cruising and is successfully using social media to spread their message and increase their brand positioning. Although the numbers of followers on twitter and members on youtube are not even significant, the efforts of Carnival do illustrate how innovative the company is and how active the company is participating in the conversation with their customers.

related items

• social media project; Air France KLM launched social network Bluenity
• project about social media in hospitality and travel industry
• Eyefortravel travel summit, TUI Travel on social media
• Eyefortravel Podcast; Managing Director of Tripadvisor on future of online travel

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