For Deepa Lakshmin, social media director of Lonely Planet, business trips include agenda items like scuba diving with nurse sharks in Belize and exploring the Medina in Fez, Morocco. While most legacy print brands have struggled in the online transition, Lonely Planet’s approach has made it a go-to digital destination for 13 million followers with a case of wanderlust.
Lakshmin won a 2024 Webby Award for Best Social Media in Arts and Culture. b. sat down with her to talk digital brand strategy, travel tips, and why even the most fun-sounding job boils down to strong organizational skills.
b.: How often do you travel?
Lakshmin: It ebbs and flows. Sometimes I’m traveling for work; sometimes I’m traveling for fun. Sometimes I’m traveling for work and then I add on a couple of extra days for fun, because I’m always trying to see as much of the world as possible. … My running joke is I don’t have work-life balance; I have work-life integration.
I have my laptop with me; I’ve got Canva [and] Asana on my phone. I’m constantly making sure I am plugged into what’s going on. And it works, because I love traveling, and I love my job. So, the line between work and play for me is very blurry at best. I know that’s not the case for everybody, but I feel very fortunate that that is the life I’m living right now.
I’m working on planes. I’m working at airports. I spend a lot of time on buses and trains with my laptop, out in hotels, waking up early, staying up late, doing what I gotta do. But it is a really fun job … because I know that there’s something else I want to see or something else I want to get to. … It is in a lot of ways a dream job for me. It is a very great and rewarding job to be able to package up wonderful travel content and stories from around the world in a way that it reaches more people.
I personally believe travel is the way you get to open your mind to new experiences. You get to find out new things about yourself, and also about others. I think it opens up the lens so it becomes easier to step into other people’s shoes, see how folks across the world from you live and how they approach life.
b.: What are you considering when you’re putting together your editorial calendar?
Lakshmin: It’s a mix of things. It’s one: diversity of content, diversity of format, because we want to make sure every single thing you see in your feed from Lonely Planet is something that feels fresh and exciting and inspirational.
We want to make sure that, at the same time, we have regularly scheduled programming because it makes our lives easier as the publishers of those channels and having to program [and] create all of that content. … It helps us just organize our work internally a lot more easily. It also helps us to zoom out and have that bigger picture of making sure cohesively, everything on our channels feels representative of our brand.
So that means making sure that we’ve got content that covers a variety of destinations across all the continents, making sure that we’re representing not just the traveler’s point of view, but also the local community’s point of view. And you can really only do that if you are planning — if you’re looking at your calendar zoomed out.
I’ve worked in social media jobs before where I would wake up each day and kind of think, like, “Okay, what am I posting today?” And that is really stressful. And it isn’t, in my opinion, the best way to run social media channels. Of course, social never sleeps and is going, going, going all the time. And you have to always be cognizant of what’s going on in the world and what’s trending in the moment and that timeliness [and] you can react to those spontaneous moments.
What you’ve got regularly scheduled, that’s your foundation. And once you have the foundation secure and scheduled and managed and running smoothly, that’s then, in my opinion, when you can build upon that. Because if you just chase whatever’s trending — chase what’s most viral at the moment — it can be a lot harder to connect that back to your brand and define the purpose of a particular channel.
b.: Is there a sweet spot in terms of reacting to different algorithms?
Lakshmin: I think it depends on the brand. I’ve worked for news brands, and it’s a lot more difficult there because you have to stay on top of the news cycle. And the news cycle dictates your content to a certain degree. And that can be really stressful, very challenging. And it requires more of a reporter’s journalistic mindset.
When you work for social for a brand, it gives you a little bit more leeway in terms of being able to look at things and plan out much farther. What makes sense for your brand?
It’s a lot easier for me to think about social programming, because I can kind of slot myself in and say, “What would I want to see on social?” So for Lonely Planet, for example, we have our calendar fully scheduled [months ahead] with workbacks. I know what we’re planning to publish every single day until then.
And what we do publish daily, that will change inevitably. But it becomes really easy to move things around when you’ve already got, again, the foundation laid out, so it becomes a question of, “Hey, we’re still waiting on this photo,” or “Hey, this voiceover didn’t come in from a contributor yet, so let’s push this back another week and adjust the workback,” and then “this thing that actually came in earlier than we expected, let’s move this up.” So it becomes a lot more of a puzzle of moving things around.
That is far better, in my opinion, than staring at a blank calendar and being, like, “How do I fill this?” … I think I just put something on the calendar for November … I know that eventually that will move. We’re not going to publish that on November 1st as I had put it on the calendar, but it’s just a placeholder. And that ensures that we don’t forget about something. It means we have a loose plan of what we want to be publishing out down the line. But everything’s written in pencil. Everything will change, having that loose idea or that framework. … I think one of the worst feelings, especially when I was a social media manager — more mid-level — was waking up and saying to myself, “What am I going to post today? I don’t know.”
b.: What were some of the early opportunities for growth or transformation when you first started at Lonely Planet?
Lakshmin: The main opportunity I saw was, a lot of the boring unsexy stuff of just setting up that [scheduling] foundation. … Because when I came in, my direct report said, “Hey, I would love if we could have a calendar that went out for more than two weeks.” And I was joking with her this week, “Now we have a calendar with stuff on it in November.” So maybe I swung too far in the opposite direction — but I love getting things organized and having a clear workflow.
I think that those guardrails are what help creativity flourish in a way that drives a team towards one singular goal.
A lot of my work in the initial months — I’ve been there for just over a year now — was doing a lot of cleanup of our variety of social channels, from even just resetting passwords and making sure everything was accessible by the people who needed to access them … archiving our Instagram Stories because they were kind of just all over the place when I came in. There wasn’t a lot of strategy behind them. … For example, Instagram Stories is something that we do occasionally now, but the social industry has moved from being … much more copy-based — with tweets and Facebook posts and links — to something that’s much more video-based, which requires a lot more planning, a lot more budget against it.
Production is not an easy thing, as we’ve had to start to make more videos. It’s also been a question of, “Hey, we don’t have as much time to do these other things.” Ideally, if you have a robust social team, every single channel requires its own strategy and programming because the way you program for TikTok is different; the way you program for Instagram Stories is different from the Instagram feed. The way you program for Threads is different than Twitter/X. Same for Facebook.
And what we do is, we do a lot of cross-posting. And we acknowledge when we’re putting something that actually has a little bit more of an Instagram feel to it on TikTok. We know when we’re doing that … because we don’t have the bandwidth to make something bespoke.
I think even when you’re doing that, even if you’re a small brand … anything you are posting is going to provide insights and data that help you then make more informed decisions about where you’re going to go from there.
I think it is much more fruitful to do one channel very, very well — and have it drive the business impact that you’re looking for — than to half-ass all the channels [which is not] going to move your business forward.
b.: Is there a way for companies to prioritize a channel if they have to focus on one?
Lakshmin: Look at where your consumer is. That’s the easiest way, right?
It is also looking at, what’s your KPI? What action are you trying to get folks to do? If your main KPI or the thing that makes your company money is … when you increase traffic … you’re gonna probably go to social media channels that make it much easier for folks to click off-platform and go to your site. And that’s what we saw with so many different media publishers in the 2010s.
Now a lot of channels, their priority is to keep you scrolling on their channel itself. So it might be, “Hey, this channel is much more about top-of-funnel brand awareness; let’s make … something that’s much more entertainment-focused that keeps people coming to us.” For example, we want people anytime they think about travel to consult Lonely Planet, because they know wherever they’re going, we’re going to have something for them around that destination.
An important caveat to that is, it changes, right? Even though it does make sense to pour what you’ve got into one primary channel, it can be really dangerous to … put all your eggs in one basket, because at the end of the day, we have no control over these algorithms or what happens to them. I think Twitter/X is a great example of that. All of the conversation around the TikTok ban is also an example of that.
The most healthy business on social is going to be one that has a robust ecosystem of content that pours into different pockets of their business … in the same way you think about diversifying your income. … If one channel stops working all of a sudden for circumstances outside of your control, you have to be able to quickly pivot …
It’s really important in social — and in anything related to audience development or growth marketing — to constantly be testing and learning and reevaluating every six months, because things move so quickly.
When I was 23 and in my first job at MTV News, I don’t think I fully understood what social media would become. And when folks ask me [today], “Where do I want to be 10 years from now?,” I don’t think that job exists yet because digital moves so quickly. … I think that 10 years from now, we’re gonna look back and be like, “Wow, this is a solution to a problem that we didn’t even know we had,” in the same way that nobody knew they wanted the iPhone until the iPhone came out, and now it’s one phone to rule them all.
b.: Despite how quickly things change in the digital space, is there one evergreen thing that makes for a good post and always has?
Lakshmin: Storytelling. How are you hooking people in? How are you keeping them engaged? How are you telling them something that they don’t already know? There is never gonna be, in my opinion, something to replace storytelling …
You know, our books are a great example of that. We have these guidebooks. We have a wealth of travel resources and information. So social is all about just taking all of that amazing content and repackaging it, cutting it down, adding photos, visual elements, thinking about what the narrative of that is. What’s the journey through that content that makes sense for whoever happens to be scrolling past it? Especially when you’re working for a brand that their bread and butter is … evergreen, which is the case for us.
Of course, things need to be updated. You know, sites have different parameters, opening hours may change, prices may change, etc., etc. But at the heart of it, travel recommendations are a fairly evergreen thing. And that means where innovation comes on social is in the way we are packaging and telling that story.
b.: Do you think the rise of digital nomadism has changed the audience for travel content?
Lakshmin: I don’t have numbers on that, but there has been, anecdotally, a surge in travel since the pandemic. If you were to ask me based on my wild assumptions, I would say it’s because folks just didn’t have the chance to travel during the pandemic and now they’re making up for lost time.
I think that the heart of what digital nomads get at — which is that curiosity to explore the world — is what our audience has always had. Traditionally, Lonely Planet has always … capitalized on those off-the-beaten-path destinations, embracing this explorer adventure mindset.
That is also something that a lot of the folks who work there embody. That curiosity about the world — whether it’s being a digital nomad or backpacking somewhere for a month in between jobs, or quitting your job to travel the world — that spirit is really what we speak to. … Maybe if remote work was all along part of the conversation, it would have been part of the travel industry years ago.
b.: What’s one thing that you recommend everyone packs for a long trip? And one thing that you think a lot of people pack but probably don’t need?
Lakshmin: Ooh, good question. … I always bring granola bars [because] I always plan too much and forget to eat, so it is nice to always have a snack with me so I don’t get hangry.
The thing that people probably don’t need? Uncomfortable but very stylish shoes. … You’re walking so much when you’re traveling that you don’t want to be squeezing your feet into something that looks good on camera but makes your feet scream.
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