For the past three days, I’ve been in Florida field-testing Google Glass in an outdoor environment. It has been my privilege to be part of the first concerted effort to use Glass for travel-oriented content marketing in a project called #FindYourIsland created by MMGY Global. They pulled five Glass Explorers, including yours truly, out of their native environments and flew them all down to the Fort Myers/Sanibel Island area of the Florida coast for three days of POV (point-of-view) media creation. It was a wonderful group to spend the weekend with. In addition to myself, our team included:
- Eva Smith, Founder and Publisher of Tech Food Life Magazine. She has been featured in USA TODAY as a Top Blogger to Watch, VOXXI‘s Most Powerful Latinas in Social Media, and Latina magazine’s 25 Latina in Tech (Twitter | Google Plus)
- Hilary Topper, founder of HJMT Public Relations Inc. She is the author of one of the first books on social media, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Social Media, but were afraid to ask…, host of “Hilary Topper On Air” on BlogTalk Radio, and is the founder and President of the Social Media Association. (Twitter | Google Plus)
- Keith Kaplan, Social Brand Strategist at IBM, and an avid CrossFitter, whitewater kayaker, and beachgoer. (Twitter | Google Plus)
- Jeris JC Miller, developer of innovative content, communications and social media strategy and community engagement programs for Google, Microsoft, Intel, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She is a member of the Google #GlassExplorers, Founder of the #SeattleGlassExplorers and Lean In #GlassExplorers, and Founding Member of the #GlassMed Communities. (Twitter | Google Plus)
The group composition was key. A variety of viewpoints and backgrounds were represented ensuring that each stream of media created would not only have an individual voice but also appeal to a different audience. As bandwidth increases and wearable computing devices become commonplace, this sort of video-intensive, point-of-view content marketing is going to become commonplace as well. MMGY Global is ahead of the curve by being the first to implement it within the travel segment. As you can see from a simple Google search of the #FindYourIsland hashtag, it was a well-orchestrated campaign that leveraged the media creation capabilities of Glass along with media created by a professional team of filmmakers about them as they did so. Thanks to proper prior planning, the effort was also covered extensively by the print and TV news including Naples News, Marco Island Sun Times, and ABC TV, among others. At the end of the weekend, a vast amount of social sharing had driven the campaign to the top of its search vertical. My own Google Alerts for Glass showed us as the top link for several days. Now that we have returned home, the MMGY team is creating a stunning array of videos and other promotional materials out of the raw materials we’ve provided. The first one was just finished and made public a few days ago, check it out:
I think that MMGY’s Robert Patterson, VP, Social & Influencer Marketing, has just changed the face of travel-oriented content marketing, and I cannot wait to see where things go from here!