On the day the 5,400-passenger Oasis of the Seas sailed into Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades for the first time last November, "Oasis of the Seas" was the most searched term on Google.com.
Days before, while the Royal Caribbean International ship was crossing the Atlantic from Finland, more than 200,000 people had tuned in over a 24-hour period to watch video of the Oasis captain — more viewers than Anderson Cooper drew on CNN.
And as of last week, more than 10 million unique visitors had made their way to OasisoftheSeas.com.
The success of the Oasis media launch can be attributed to more than its status as the world’s largest cruise ship. It’s the result of a calculated campaign to promote the ship mostly through social media channels, ultimately letting consumers drive the Oasis to the mainstream media.
"The media landscape was changing drastically, and we wanted to be ahead of it," said Rene Mack, president of the travel and lifestyle marketing practice at New York’s Weber Shandwick agency, which handled the Oasis media launch.
While the Oasis launch took social media use to the highest level to date, other lines have been quick to follow suit.
Norwegian Cruise Line, set to launch its largest-ever ship, the Norwegian Epic, in June, is aggressively using social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter as well as an Epic microsite, all part of its broader social media strategy.
Holland America Line just launched a campaign on Facebook and Twitter titled "Countdown to Nieuw Amsterdam Launch." In the 100 days before its July 4 delivery, the campaign is listing 100 reasons to sail on the newbuild.
What all these cruise lines seem to be embracing is the idea that social media can drive the conversation about their brands further than ever.
"The consumer is now in control," said NCL’s Andy Stuart. "You can ignore it at your peril, or you can embrace it in a way that makes sense and creates value."
For the Weber Shandwick team, it was clear that Oasis’ size and features would create buzz, but they wanted that buzz to spread beyond the 18% of Americans who have cruised and to media outlets that might not normally cover cruising.
Their overall philosophy centered on the idea that all forms of media — broadcast, print and online — feed into each other, creating what Weber Shandwick calls "inline" media.
"What starts online moves offline, and what starts offline goes online," Mack said. "The two are connected and parallel. Stories on CNN, Fox and in the Wall Street Journal, they start online but move into the elevator and captivate people."
Weber Shandwick’s team made OasisoftheSeas.com a central information portal and used Twitter and Facebook to blast out information about the ship.
"Twitter is the best push-button for the [public relations] world," said Alice Diaz, an executive vice president at Weber Shandwick. "Everything communicated started with a traditional press release and got pushed out with multiple tweets and postings."
Weber Shandwick said part of the success of the launch was that from the highest management levels, Royal Caribbean was onboard with some riskier parts of the strategy, such as allowing the public to name the Oasis and its upcoming sister ship, the Allure of the Seas.
"To let someone you’ve never met name a ship that cost well over $1 billion is a huge risk in the world of traditional marketing," Mack said. "It’s giving up control."
The naming was done via a contest with USA Today’s cruising subsite, the Cruise Log.
Weber Shandwick chose USA Today in large part because of its significant online presence and ability to engage a devoted community of cruisers that would spread the word to the noncruising community.
The contest, Mack said, "became a source for many other TV shows and online content, and it gave the public the opportunity to participate in something they are not normally asked to. It was a fascinating exercise to collaborate with your future customers and vacationers on what the ship should be named based on what we could reveal it would be like."
People in the cruise realm are embracing an enthusiastic base of online supporters that can be tapped to spread their messages.
Cruisers, NCL’s Stuart said, "have a level of engagement with the brand beyond the typical level of engagement between consumer and brand. When they cruise they spend seven days on average, 24 hours a day with us. It’s an in-depth experience."
Diaz said that base was easily activated and well organized and pushed the online conversation to a point where it couldn’t be ignored even outside the cruise community.
"They brought in other audiences and vacationers and other travel media and broadcasters," Diaz said. "In the end, the Oasis was so well talked about that it drove media that originally wasn’t interested."
Social media enabled the Oasis to attract far more coverage than the Freedom of the Seas did when it debuted as the largest ship in the world in 2006, despite having fewer media people actually onboard the ship.
Apart from coverage by ABC’s "Good Morning America," Mack said that not one TV station outside of Florida came onboard the Oasis. Yet 200 TV stations around the U.S. aired video from the Oasis website.
"The consumer decided what they wanted to see," Mack said. "They put the Oasis on news platforms."
That ability essentially makes a social-media-savvy audience part of a brand’s marketing team, Stuart explained.
This report appeared in the May 31 issue of Travel Weekly.