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What happens when two intrepid romance novelists and former travel buddies join forces using social media in a quest to win a trip to Thailand?  Thrills, spills, and some interesting lessons learned.

From the time Liz first saw the press release from the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) calling on “Internet-savvy World Travelers” to compete for a six-day trip to Thailand this December, we were game to go.  We’d enjoyed traveling together to Paris and London the previous spring and were already considering a winter decamp from The Big Apple (AKA The Big Chill) to warmer climes.

Besides, the only requirement for winners of this “Ultimate Thailand Explorers Competition” was to report on the trip through video, pictures, and blogging via the Internet.  As popular fiction writers with books to promote, we already devote a healthy chunk of time to maintaining an active online presence.  Keeping up a similar level of connectivity from a beach towel in the Land of Smiles sounded like an ideal work week if there ever was one.

In fact, this was just the sort of thing that would shed some light on how well the social networks we’ve set up to promote our writing careers would work toward a clearly stated, time-delimited, real world goal. Win-win, right?

Making the Finals

The contest entry required applicant teams to select from among five Thailand destinations and then to submit a one-minute video and application form.

We settled on Pattaya because a) Liz hadn’t been there on her previous trips to Thailand and b) the other four locations had at least one entrant team that we would have picked if we were the judges.  (Memo to future Ultimate Thailand Explorer wannabes: do not think you can compete with a stunningly beautiful Bangkok-born twenty-something graduate student asking to take her dorky but adorable American fiancé “home” to meet the parents.  Ditto for the wholesome American couple with a cute baby on board.  Just don’t do it.  Seriously, don’t.)

Far from trying to hide our romance novelist selves, we wanted to feature it, as this trip would have the side-bonus of providing an opportunity to combat some of the negative stereotypes with which the romance community struggles.  We settled on “Telling stories to the world is what we do and we want to share this (Thailand’s) story with you” as the lynchpin of our pitch.

We had two hurdles to overcome.  The first hurdle was to impress the TAT officials—they’d be the ones choosing the finalists.  The second hurdle was the general public—they’d be the ones choosing the winners from among the five finalists.

Hmm, two very different audiences would be judging the same video.  In the end we decided that it would be easier to get votes from the general public than from the TAT officials, so we would shoot a video with TAT as our primary audience and the general public as our secondary audience.  In hindsight, perhaps we should have done it the other way around!

For the video, we researched Pattaya and scripted a message touting ourselves as successful romance novelists, natural adventurers (Liz worked a couple of seasons on a research base in Antarctica), and, yes, savvy social networkers with nearly 2,000 social networking contacts between us.

A few weeks later, we learned our instincts were correct: from among the hundreds of entrant teams, TAT had chosen us as one of the five finalists vying for Pattaya.  Yippee!  We were already halfway to toasting our winter white bums on a prime patch of Pattaya beach.  We could almost taste the spicy tom yum goong soup burning a hole through the backs of our throats.

Luckily, we didn’t start packing, because the second round public vote was where the real (social net) “working” began.

Reality Bytes

Our four competing teams included a corporate trainer, physical therapist, architect, wellness manager, advertizing exec and a couple of singers/songwriters.  But we were intrepid.  We were not about to see romance writers take yet another public black eye.  We Tweeted our friends, family and fans.  We took turns sending out beg-o-grams on Facebook and Myspace.  We pimped out our personal author blogs as shout-outs, too.  Liz repurposed a previously used promotional web site where she posted not only our entry video and links back to the TAT voting page but a blooper reel of outtakes that we still say was pretty damned charming.  (Did we mention we wore cute hats and matching tops?).

Still, we couldn’t crack the Number #3 position and within days, it seemed, we were sinking fast.  Desperate to save face, we re-spammed our friends, reminding them they could vote more than once—daily—and, yes, to please re-tweet and otherwise pimp us on their own social networking profiles, blog pages, listservs, you name it.  (Between us we owe one first-born child and two kidneys in payback.  Possibly some liver cells, too.)  We reached out to friends who reached out to friends who reached out to friends—and still for every 100 contacts we reaped a mere fraction of votes.

After that, Liz came up with the idea of mutual endorsement—we stepping outside the romance fiction community and approached leaders of non-romance blogging communities who were also trying to win contests.  They were incredibly enthusiastic—in part, because they were having the exact same problem of trying to convert eyeballs into votes.

By week #2 Cute Baby was spanking us big time and the Cheeky Canucks were nipping at our heels.  By the end of the third week, we’d fallen from our respectable third-place ranking to fourth and then finally to the loser spot at yes, #5!

Yeppers, despite all our Internet savvy, readership, and yes, fresh-faced smiles, there was no getting around it.  Not only were we not going to make it to Thailand on the TAT’s dime, but we were the bottom biyatches.

And it wasn’t just about missing out on a trip overseas.  The experience of trying to wring out votes using the oft-touted social media networks was making us wonder if logging in mucho hours on social networking in promotion of our books was really such a smart use of our (writing) time.

Ultimately, we finished in fourth place with 1,146 votes, which come to think of it, wasn’t too shabby.  And we had tons o’ fun figuring out what works, what doesn’t work, and what, with a tad of tweaking, might work better.  And no doubt about it, Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, and the like are great ways to connect online, including putting out the rallying cry for your event, contest or product.

We see a tremendous number of links to articles about social media posted on Twitter and Facebook every week.  There is some presumption that all of this connectivity is actually going somewhere.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, and yes, it depends on how you craft your message and how you send it through the channels.  But in the end it does make one think about how easy it is to reach out online and connect with other people in a positive way—but then how much harder it is to break through the noise enough to take it to the next level and actually influence behavior.

Going Forward

Our actual quest to win a trip to Thailand ended with nothing more exotic and exciting than a post mortem at a Thai restaurant in New York, but the lessons we learned were absolutely worth it.  We’ve both changed the way we approach social media strategy in our careers, plus we learned a lot about making videos, including the fact that you cannot shoot an audible video from the red steps in Times Square without a serious microphone.  Liz is currently elbow-deep in code, experimenting with FBML on Facebook and hooking up databases.  Hope is taking a brief break from the blogosphere to finish an under deadline manuscript but once she does she plans an overhaul of her online presence, including making better use of Google Analytics to track the sources of traffic to her author website and tailor her online time.  Look for our social media “lessons learned” article for the Novelists Inc, Newsletter (NINC) in early 2010.

Whew, come to think of it, we’re exhausted.  We’re thinking it’s time for a vacation, possibly to…Thailand?  Just remember, no matter where we are in the world…you can always find Liz and Hope online at www.lizmaverick.com and www.hopetarr.com.

Join in the chitchat RomCon readers! Hope and Liz have some spectacular giveaways for today's commenters: Hope's holiday HQBlaze release, Strokes of Midnight; Vanquished, the first in Hope's "Men of Roxbury" Victorian trilogy; a backlist title or two (tbd) from Liz!