Mexican PR Effort Highlights Importance of Social Media Listening and Power of Crowd-Sourcing

Tourism in Mexico faces an enormously difficult public relations challenge. Headlines and photos of gruesome drug-related murders have dominated news from Mexico for years. In today’s visually oriented media environment, photos of mutilated or decapitated bodies were particularly damaging to the country’s image abroad.

Mexican authorities battled the drug cartels but only worsened the PR situation by displaying captured drug dealers before reporters and television cameras.

Not surprisingly, many Americans became reluctant to visit Mexico for vacations or business trips, a serious blow to the country’s large tourism industry.

Time for a New Story

Mexico realized it needed to change the narrative, without denying the existence of drug-related violence.

Christopher Graves, chairman of Ogilvy Public Relations, and Nick Wachira, a former Nation journalist now with Ogilvy Kenya, explain how their public relations efforts with Mexico strived to meet that goal in an article for Daily Nations.

The mission was to spread positive facts about Mexico which:

∙ has one of the two World Heritage Cuisines,

∙ has more World Heritage Sites than any other country,

∙ has developed environmentally sensitive and sustainable tourism, and

∙ has a young, educated demographic that’s energizing the country’s economy and transforming it into a magnet for high-tech businesses and giant multinationals.

Social Media Listening – The First Step

The Oglivy PR managers first listened to audiences on social media to better understand their viewpoints rather than developing a single, over-arching advertising-dominated campaign in hopes of drowning out negative perceptions. By using social media and search analysis tools, they listened to real conversations and learned about the real impediments to understanding.

Mexico’s PR team addressed the specific interests of their many different audiences: eco-tourists, golfers, cyclists or archeological buffs. They created content to match interests of each group, pointed them to more information, or introduced them to fellow travelers with similar interests.

In a major break from traditional travel marketing, the PR pros turned to social media. They realized that today’s skeptical or cynical audiences ignore or disparage official tourist messages.  People trust their peers on social media more. Their data also showed that veteran travelers visited Mexico repeatedly.

So they encouraged American bloggers and tourists who had visited Mexico to tell others not to fear the country.

Other Steps

Mexican officials gave Americans a geography lesson. Mexico is a big country. Drug violence was occurring hundreds of miles from vacation sites. On American TV, Mexican officials asked questions like “If there was a shooting in Los Angeles, would you cancel your family vacation in Orlando, Florida?”

They convinced the U.S. State Department to change its travel warnings from nationwide to specific localities.

Ogilvy touts its “Mexico – the Place Your Thought You Knew” campaign with a video. Employing media appearances by Mexican officials and American business leaders and help from bloggers and online communities, the campaign stressed that the violence was contained and far from tourism locations. Mexico is a rising economic star with a wealth of tourism attractions. The integrated campaign led to a ten-fold increase in the number of positive articles and one billion online impressions. “The crisis that claimed the country has been contained,” it states.

According to a report from the Mexican Tourist Board, the number of international tourists to Mexico exceeded 14.2 million in the first half of 2014, a new record. The total number of international visitors increased to 39.2 million, a 2.8% increase compared with the first half of 2013.  International flights and number of passengers arriving in Mexico in the first half of 2014 increased by 7.3% and 10.7% respectively.

Not All is Well Yet

But Mexico may still have more work to do. The disappearance of 43 students last year was surely a blow to the country’s image. The bodies of the murdered students were eventually found incinerated in a landfill.

Mexicans often call President Enrique Peno Nieto’s policy of playing down the violence “a performance,” according to the New Yorker.

Father Alejandro Solalinde, a Catholic priest and prominent human-rights activist, said the drug cartels become emboldened when they realized Nieto was unwilling to speak publically about the country’s violence.

Bottom Line: The Mexico tourism campaign offers multiple lessons to tourism marketers including visitor’s boards, airlines, hotels, convention centers and local attractions. 1) Destination marketers must first listen to each audience in each market in order to better understand their needs and concerns. Using social media and search analysis tools, it’s possible to hear the real conversations about the real impediments and real desires.

2) Integrated PR campaigns that include social media, appearances on broadcast media, and other earned media strategies can: a) change the prevailing image of the destination and b) greatly impact tourists’ attitudes and trip decisions.

3) Create specific PR/marketing messages for specific target audience affinity groups and their concerns. Among the specific interests are golf, archeology, ecology, scuba-diving, cooking, art, music, museums/culture, business meetings and many others.

4) Make placements of interest-specific articles in interest-specific media that have loyal audiences. The traditional PR approach of broadcasting feel-good messages from the sponsor to all media may no longer work well because a government or tourist-board message lacks credibility.

5) Integrated PR campaigns that include social media, appearances on broadcast media, and other earned media strategies can: a) change the prevailing image of the destination b) greatly impact trip decisions.

5) Crowd-sourced peer-to-peer campaigns to stimulate positive posts on social media by knowledgeable and trustworthy recent tourists and business visitors have greater credibility than sponsored messages – and reach people with interest in travel. The PR/marketing approaches used to revive Mexican tourism can find success in other locales. Viva la Mexico!