Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

Are you kidding me?

NINE images attached to this PR email blast that dumped (twice) into my IN box, with the subject line in ALL CAPS just to ensure I didn’t miss it.

Er, I never write about celebrities. Or Mexico. And I rarely cover resorts.

I would love to say that this is uncommon; that most emails in my IN box are well-targeted, thoughtful pitches or interesting news from PR professionals who have actually established relationships with me before pitching.

Nope. More negative experiences happen all the time, from folks who apparently bought my name and email from some database.

What would I like to see?

Communication from those who reach out to get to know me before asking me for something (and hey, Dale Carnegie guy, putting my business card in for a drawing at your speaking event does NOT mean I want your course announcement emails. Ever heard of double opt-in?)

Sometimes I think that smaller tourism organizations have an advantage when they can’t afford to hire the “big, expert PR firm.” Based on my incoming emails, they aren’t missing much.

Last week I enjoyed spending 30 minutes on Blog Talk Radio with Australian entrepreneur and coach Des Walsh.  He has a regular program called Des Walsh and Friends, with a wide variety of guests all discussing some aspect of technology and business.

The noteworthy advantage of Blog Talk Radio (or any “Internet radio” service) is that not only can you listen live, but the shows are usually archived if you can’t be there at broadcast time, plus they’re also downloadable for later listening on your iPod or other digital audio player.

It gives radio/audio the worldwide reach that it never had before, as I discussed in this post about online radio and destination marketing for the Beaumont (TX) CVB.

Des and I talked about my background in travel, how Becky McCray and I launched Tourism Currents to teach tourism professionals about social media, and why businesses need to ensure a strong Web presence as customer search and interaction preferences shift online.

I loved having a fun chat with someone halfway around the world, and the time zones worked in my favor since it was afternoon my time, but very early morning for Des.  :)

Here is our episode:  talking social media, travel and tourism with Des Walsh.

(This is cross-posted on my BootsnAll Family Travel Logue.)

There’s a lot of action going on right now in my Travel 2.0 LinkedIn Group.

One of the members (Mike Huber, working with a commercial Arizona travel company not affiliated with the Arizona Office of Tourism ) asked this question titled Revamping a Website to include Web 2.0 features:

“We are in the process of totally overhauling http://www.arizonatourism.com.  Before we get too far down the road, I’d love some advice on what you think we need to include in the initial overhaul. Are there any travel sites you’d recommend we should emulate or any ‘must have’ features you’d recommend? Here is a preliminary ’spec’ of our new home page http://www.arizonatourism.com/newindex.html…any feedback would be greatly appreciated.”

Here’s how I answered:

“I’d ensure that your social media buttons are on every page of the site, and that they’re reasonably visible. Twitter, Facebook Fan Page at a minimum, a blog would be very smart, and the ever-underrated but awesome Flickr Group Pool [for travel photos from your customers.]

Itineraries based on travel interests are always helpful: families, outdoor adventure, history, culture, foodie, Native American sites for starters.

Make up some custom Google Maps focused on trails (food, history, etc. as above.)

Mobile, mobile, mobile.  You need to be all over mobile-friendly.

Incorporate music somehow – an easy but powerful way to bring atmosphere. By that I mean maybe suggested playlists (make them on amazon and iTunes and link to them from your site) NOT obnoxious music that auto-starts and makes people want to stab their computer.  :) ”

A follow-up question from another Group member asked:

“I am intrigued by adding recommended playlists and would like to add one to [our CVB] http://www.minneapolis.org. Can someone direct me to an example of linking to this from Amazon or iTunes?”

I just love music tailored to a destination, so I told her:

“I’m thinking of something similar to the lists on National Geographic Traveler, though I haven’t done such a list myself in iTunes, only burning my own CD mixtape-type playlists for road trips. (Rats: the words “CD” and “mixtape” both date me!)

***  Wonderful National Geographic Traveler destination-themed playlists.

***  The UK’s Guardian, one of my favorite newspaper travel sections, has 50 songs for 50 states.

***  From Heritage Ohio (they coordinate the Main Street program for the state) a playlist called Back Home to Ohio.”

Take a look at the original discussion thread on LinkedIn for a lot more ideas.

To find LinkedIn Groups that interest you, simply used the Search box in the upper right corner of the site and specify that you’re looking for Groups, not People/Jobs/Companies, etc.

Some days, the ideas come pouring out of your head and it’s hard to get them recorded fast enough.

Other days, not so much.

An editorial calendar can really help with “blogger’s block.”  It’s simply a calendar (looking forward through the next few weeks, at least) of which topic you’re going to write about on which day.

Sit down now and project through 2010 what you’ll want to write about and when, in very general terms. You know you’re going to do something related to July 4, 2010 if you’re located in the US, right?  Commonwealth nations will have something about Remembrance Day every year, and so on. Then, break it down by month and then week.

You can have a rolling schedule of “video post on Monday, highlight our latest package deal on Tuesday, photo of the week from our Flickr Group Pool on Wednesday,” etc. if that helps.

For those days when the creativity fountain is dribbling rather than gushing, here are some post ideas to help kick-start your keyboard:

1. Itineraries.  Give visitors eat-sleep-play itinerary ideas for your destination. Go hyper-focused and do specific ones for foodies, history buffs, families, adult couples, birders/nature lovers, sports fans, genealogists, photographers, geocaching fans, etc.  Do seasonally tailored ones for spring, summer, fall, winter.
2. Coming attractions, highlighted by using photos or video.  Yes, of course, talking about upcoming events is a no-brainer, but make it fresh. Use one WOW! photo or a fun, short (2-3 minute) video, with a link deeper into your blog or Web site for more info. Let the graphics sell the event without you pumping out marketing text.
3. “On this day in 1841 (or 1917 or 1969….)” You know what to do with this one, right? Short and sweet.  Make that history come alive.
4. Breakfast with/Lunch with/Dinner with one of your distinctive local eateries. Economic redevelopment bonus: feature one in your historic downtown. Include drool-worthy food photos, videos of the chef at work, photos of locals eating there. Bonus round two: put those same photos on your CVB Facebook Fan Page and tag some of the people in the photos.
5. Promotions and package deals.  Don’t overdo this, but it can’t hurt to remind people to check your site for exclusive deals and packages. A lot of people really have no idea what a CVB/DMO does and don’t think to check your site for offers (which is why I wrote this reminder post on my family travel blog.)
6. Answer a frequent visitor question.  You know the ones that you keep hearing over and over in your Visitor’s Center.  No, not “Do you have a bathroom?”  The other ones.
7. Introduce one of your frequent visitors.  Have them talk about why they love your destination or attraction, and why they keep returning. Bonus: shoot a video of them for your YouTube channel. Double bonus:  upload the video to your Facebook Fan Page and tag them in it. Of course, you’ll link back to their Web site or blog from your blog post, right? Right.
8. Create a custom, targeted Google Map (here’s how to do it plus more background info.)  Make one with fun spots to visit on a weekend in your town.  Consider one with all of your local microbreweries, or your antique shops, quilting places or bars with regular live music.  Create one with your ice cream shops and bakeries; call that one “Sugar Shacks.”     How about your coffee shops and inns with free WiFi;  that one’s called “Blogger’s Heavenly Spots.”
9. Explain how to use Twitter as a “Twisitor Center”, so visitors can ask you questions (sometimes by including a dedicated hashtag in their tweets.)  Need an update on the concept?  See this Twisitor Center site, and also how Abilene, TX or Kissimmee, FL or Portland, OR do it.
10. How does your community support the arts?  Profile a local glassblower, painter, potter, dancer or musician – photo and video opportunities abound.  Is there a special museum exhibit or gallery opening?  A concert with the new work of a local composer?  A book by a local author that has a setting you can talk about? What’s your town’s equivalent to what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil does for Savannah, GA?

Good tourism-related blogging is helpful information and story-telling that gives a sense of place.  Do what blogging thought leader Liz Strauss recommends: capture the irresistible ideas and tell your story.

As a member of the Travel Insights 100 group of travel aficionados on UpTake, I’m looking forward to seeing all of the results of the latest member survey, asking us two questions:

• What trends or predictions do you forecast for the next year within the travel industry? and
• What are the dumbest moments in travel during the past year?

We could answer both questions or just one, so based on my talk at the recent Social Media Breakfast Austin, I chose to tackle the future. Here’s what I said in response to the Insights survey question….

“I predict the mainstreaming of social media into travel, helped along considerably by the cross-generational adoption of Facebook and the explosion of mobile/smartphones.

Not only is Grandma on Facebook, she’s going to figure out that her Blackberry (or iPhone or whatever it is) just put the Internet into her purse as well.

Lordy, now she can upload photos of her grandkids to her Facebook page while riding through “It’s A Small World After All” at Disney World!

Not within this year, but soon enough, social media is going to be “the way we do things” and will be as accepted and ubiquitous as email. No one advertises their services as an “Email Guru,” do they?

Mobile is going to explode because there are going to be multiple handset options available across all of the major carriers, thanks to Google’s Android (I don’t think Palm can recover their dominance, nor Windows Mobile, unless they do something extraordinary very soon. RIM/Blackberry and maybe Nokia have more of a fighting chance for impact.)

Go, Grandma, go!”

I’ll pop up an update post when the rest of the Insights results come out later this week.

Yesterday, I sat down and began writing a post for one of my two travel blogs.

It was a post topic that I’d been meaning to cover for years, an annual January literary event at a museum.  Every year I’d blow it and forget to write the post until it was too late, but this year I put a big fat star on my calendar for the end of December, so I wouldn’t forget.

There was no problem finding updated information about the event, and I was particularly pleased to find that the museum also has a blog, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter stream, YouTube channel (only one video, but hey, a start) and lo and behold, a Flickr photostream.  I linked to all of them in my travel blog post, because that’s the power of the Web – the simple act of linking actually helps you pull other blogs and sites up in search rankings, because linking to a site increases its authority in search engine algorithms.  Hey, my whole job these days is tourism and social media, so I love to shine a light on great places.

I ran into trouble when it came to finding a good photo and video to go in the post.   A photo or some sort of graphic is almost a must-have for a compelling travel post, and embedding a short video of this particular event into my post would also make it more intriguing and attractive to possible visitors.

When I don’t have a photo of my own, I always go to Flickr and look for images with the appropriate Creative Commons alternative copyright license (need more ideas for finding photos? Here’s how to find local photos for your tourism projects.)

Since the museum has a Flickr account for their own pictures and a Flickr Group Pool for others to contribute their personal photos, I figured I’d have an embarrassment of riches for wonderful pics.

No such luck….I struck out in the Group Pool and even though the museum had plenty of nice photos taken at the annual event, I couldn’t use any of them in my blog post because they all had the default Flickr Creative Commons license of “All Rights Reserved.” For this particular travel blog (which is ad-supported and for which I’m paid per post, so I consider it commercial) I needed an image with one of the least-restrictive CC licenses, simply “Attribution.”

That means that when I use the photo in my own content, I give attribution/credit to the original photographer, and I also link the photo in my post back to its original URL page on Flickr.  Confused?  Just look at the Whistler’s Mother spoof photo above in this post. Mouse over it to see the attribution, and click it to go to the source page.

Yes, if I contacted the museum and asked, they might let me use one of their photos, but it was New Year’s Eve and I wanted to post that day. I didn’t have time to wait around playing “Mother May I.”  I’m a blogger and I want it now, and I want it at 2 a.m. if that’s when I’m writing the post.  You can see our obsession with speed as either a total pain in the neck or a totally great opportunity to get the word out, fast.   I vote for Option B, of course.

If you want me or any other wired writer to have great material to highlight your destination, help us out.  Make it easy for us to toot the bloggy horn about your destination, attraction or event.

Give at least some of your Flickr photos the simplest license, “Attribution,” or even “Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs” would work for many blogs. Put a link to your photostream on your Web site or blog, to help us find it. While you’re at it, put a nice selection of available-for-media-use pics under the Media tab on your site. Yeah, ’cause we are media – even though you may never have heard of us, I guarantee you want our coverage and links.

Give us a few decent videos to help show off your goodies, about two to three minutes long, with titles and credits that say who you are and list your URL.  Make sure we can embed them, whether you use YouTube or some other service like Blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo, etc.  They do not have to be professionally produced, but they do have to be interesting, with decent audio, and easy to embed.

Most bloggers could care less about email blasts (“delete, delete, unsubscribe, delete” describes much of my day) or pretty Flash-based Web site pages that we can’t link to or some giant press packet on a CD.  I know exactly what I want to write about and I do it on my own schedule.

Learn to think like a blogger and provide those nuggets that help us tell your story, because we want the world to know about you.

Feel free to let me know in the comments if I’m off my rocker and missing some obvious impediment, or if you have additional thoughts. Thanks!

Update:  Kudos to the museum! After I asked them on Twitter to switch some of their photos to a less-restrictive license, they did it, so here is the blog post that I updated to include two of their images and here is their whole set from the event.

Although I’m not personally a big fan of press trips/”fam” (familiarization) tours, I will admit that one of the major upsides to the Hawaii Tourism Authority’s So Much More Hawaii blogger tour was the chance to meet some of the extraordinarily creative wired writers, photographers and videographers who were on that particular trip.

Let me introduce you to one of them – Mark Tafoya of Culinary Media Network (@ChefMark on Twitter) – and through some of his videos, explain how your destination can benefit from culinary blogger coverage (either through press trips that include them, or even better, by also finding and supporting your own local foodie bloggers.)

Culinary tourism highlights your local restaurants, farms, cooking schools, bakeries, chefs, etc. as a way of attracting visitors to your destination.  A few places that are significantly developing culinary tourism include Asheville, North Carolina, British Columbia in Canada and Fredericksburg, Texas. The NAFDMA blog, in another example, supports farmer’s markets/agricultural tourism and how that ties into bringing foodie visitors to your town.

Don’t forget the online work of your locals, either, like Massachusett’s Diary of a Locavore in the Cape Cod area, Austin’s Texas Locavore or the Cincinnati Locavore.

Good food writing is very visual, so a blogger who can also shoot mouthwatering photos or video is a major bonus; that’s exactly what Mark Tafoya does with his video blogging (or “vlogging.”)  Not only does a food blogger have a much bigger “content tool bag” than his/her print counterpart (they can do video, photos and audio podcasting in addition to text) but a blogger like Mark also has a strong presence on other social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube.  Their content about your destination simply shows up in more places online than it ever could with a one-off magazine article.

When we were together in Hawaii, I was in awe of Mark’s ability to shoot quick videos and photos (everything from a Kauai coffee plantation to a Big Island abalone farm to a Honolulu fish market) then upload them simultaneously to numerous places online.  His many fans, friends and fellow foodies were constantly interacting with him through his iPhone, which made it even more fun and spread his work even further.

Here are two examples of what a savvy food blogger can do in two very different locations:  Virginia and Hawaii.

The Virginia videos were filmed in Colonial Williamsburg and historic Jamestown; they cover Colonial-era baking and cooking.  They are more polished because they were shot at a slower pace and there was more time to smooth and edit them.

**  Here is the URL directly to the Virginia videos if you are reading this in RSS or can’t see the box below. **

The Hawaii videos were much more of an “on the fly” production.

We were moving from island to island, with only evening hotel time to do any significant video editing or uploading. Mark did lots of “Quick Bites” segments, with basic equipment and sometimes-iffy Internet connections, but the immediacy is part of the charm (you can see my son and I in the “Volcano Lunch” QuickBites segment.)

**  Here is the URL directly to the Hawaii videos if you are reading this in RSS or can’t see the box below. **

Based on Mark’s examples, think about how you might incorporate a culinary travel blogger’s work into your destination marketing efforts. I’d love to hear any of your ideas in the comments below.

Although my business partner Becky McCray and I were rather hammered by an ambitious schedule of conferences and workshops across the country during October, the good news is that we’ve gathered tons of useful information and insights for the lessons, videos and newsletter that we offer our online learning community at Tourism Currents.

The next Lesson, “How to Listen Online,” is being posted as we speak and will be fully available to paid members by Friday, November 6.

This month, we’re excited to include some very helpful video interviews with Ann Peavey, who tweets for Seattle Tourism as @SeattleMaven.  I shot the video while in Seattle during the Association for Women in Communications (AWC) conference (salmon taco or awesome coffee, anyone?) and can’t wait to share it with you. Ann is a real pro and a dynamite, fun person; you’ll love seeing how she’s mastered Twitter to show off her city!

The bottom line is this – once we finish editing and uploading all of this terrific content,  we are going to close the doors to further paid Tourism Currents members until the next class cycle in Spring 2010.

We’ll still accept more free newsletter-level members, but anyone who wants access to all of our lessons and videos will have to wait until the next class.

Our reason?

We said at our launch in September that we want to keep class sizes manageable, and we want to move our members through the content as a group so that no one feels left behind or overwhelmed by having to play catch-up.

Those who are already paid members are all set and don’t need to do anything else except to continue learning useful social media tips for their destination marketing.

New sign-ups and those who are already at the free newsletter level have until THIS FRIDAY, November 6, to upgrade to our paid Just the Basics level ($45/month for 6 months) or our Regular level ($75/month for 6 months) so that you can really dive into all of our training materials.

We think that these are exceptionally reasonable prices for this kind of detailed, tourism-specific learning material; in fact, we know you can’t beat it anywhere else, because we’ve snooped around to look.  :)

These are the organizations and people that we think would find our training particularly helpful:

• Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs)
• Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs)
• Main Street, historic preservation and heritage trail organizations
• Parks, nature preserves, botanical gardens and other nature/outdoors-related attractions
• Public Relations professionals who do tourism work
• Chambers of Commerce
• Those with niche focus like agritourism, culinary tourism, arts/culture, sports/adventure and educational travel
• Festival and event planners
• Attractions, museums, lodging etc. that depend upon tourist traffic
• Historic highways and scenic byways
• State and city governments who do marketing and outreach related to tourism

Please do consider joining us to start learning – this stuff moves fast and frankly, your tourism organization can’t afford to dawdle. Don’t wait until Spring 2010 let us help you become social media savvy!

Interested?  Sign up here or go here to read more and see if Tourism Currents is right for you.

Thanks for your support.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued clarification on new rules designed to force more complete disclosure of payments, freebies, endorsements and product review procedures on blogs.  Here is the FTC file (a PDF) for download.  The rules take effect on 1 December 2009 and involve fines of up to $11,000 for violators. Yes, of course enforcement seems impossible, but the rules are there.

I think this will have an impact on tourism industry press trips/”fam” (familiarization) tours, which some (like UK blogger Darren Cronian) consider not much more than blogger payola.

From a CNN/Money article on the FTC guidelines:

“The test here is, if the relationship were known between the blogger and the advertiser, would that affect the credibility of the endorsement?” [emphasis mine] FTC assistant director of advertising practices Richard Cleland told CNN. “That question has to be determined on a case by case basis. What we have produced is a general guidance that says in certain cases receiving a free product is not any different than being paid directly for an endorsement.”

Is a free press trip/fam tour – with lodging, meals, attraction entry fees and transportation all provided by a DMO (Destination Marketing Organization) – considered “payment in kind” and does going on such a trip and writing positive words about what you experience there a form of paid endorsement?

My personal belief….you bet it is.

Other writers and bloggers disagree vehemently with me, and they say that they can maintain their objectivity on such trips. That’s great; more power to them as long as they disclose.  The press trip model works well for a lot of interest groups and I don’t see the market for it going away, although I’m certainly not the first writer to feel uncomfortable about it.

I personally have a harder time with the vaunted objectivity goal, because while it’s easy to write superlatives when you have nice experiences, it is much harder to be critical when your experience is lacking.  What ends up happening is that most writers simply don’t write about “the bad stuff,” out of understandable concern and respect for their kind and generous hosts.

The problem is – just like making no decision is, in fact, a decision – it is in those unwritten posts, those criticisms left unsaid, where at least some of the travel truth lies.  I addressed such issues in detail in one of this blog’s most highly-trafficked posts:  Are blogger fam trips a good idea, or are they Jurassic PR?

I’ve been on three press trips myself: to Williamsburg VA, Hutchinson KS and to Hawaii along with my son.  They were well-run tours, I enjoyed myself and I met many marvelous, hard-working tourism professionals. I disclosed my compensation for each trip to the best of my ability, although I probably need to go back and re-check all of my posts (on two different travel blogs) to make sure I was clear, and add a disclaimer if I wasn’t.

Here’s one version of what I put on every post from Hawaii:  Just So You Know Disclaimer:  The Hawaii Tourism Authority through Cilantro Media is paying my way to Hawaii, and also paying most of my expenses while I am there including lodging.  I am contributing to my son’s expenses. The point of the trip is to bring experienced bloggers and communicators to the islands to talk about what we see; my primary focus will be on travel with kids. No one has told me that I cannot post negative information. No one has told me that I must say positive things.  I will be as objective as I can possibly be.

After putting a lot of thought into the topic while writing the “Jurrassic PR” post, here’s where I stand right now on press trips:

“For myself; I am willing to consider going on future blogger fam trips, but I won’t seek them out. I will still produce content (print/online articles, blog posts, photos, videos) from the Virginia, Kansas and Hawaii trips, and I will still clearly disclose when my travel was paid for, but I now plan to redouble my efforts to make enough money through my consulting and freelance work so that I can pay for my travel on my own.”

Want to help me in that self-funding endeavor? Go sign up for my social media expertise, along with Becky McCray’s, on our Tourism Currents membership site.  :)

I’ve also proposed a blogger ethics panel (Can They Buy Your Voice?) for the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference in March 2010;  we’ll know soon whether it was approved or not. If it is, I predict a lively discussion, which is perfect. The more open discussion, the better.

Meantime, tourism organizations need to take a hard look at how their press trip hospitality is disclosed by the journalists, writers and bloggers that they invite. The days of “wink, wink, nudge, nudge – don’t ask and don’t tell” may soon be over. I’m not so naive as to think that current arrangements won’t persist; I just want disclosure of those arrangements.

Ironically, this means that bloggers now have more stringent disclosure rules than almost any magazine or newspaper I’ve ever read.

Fine.

Tell me your biases and good deals upfront, and I’ll judge your content worthiness for myself. I’d rather see honest blog posts than pretty magazine words and pictures that came from tourism board hospitality, but no one will confess to it.

Such a deal we have for you….

My business partner Becky McCray and I are very proud of the content we’ve pulled together on our Tourism Currents membership site – tons of resources in our first, introductory lesson focused on social media for tourism professionals.

However, only our paid members can see most of it  –  access to our monthly Newsletter and the option to join our Flickr Group Pool are free with sign-up, but everything else is reserved for paying members.

While we think that our insights are well worth US$45 or US$75 a month (at the two least expensive membership levels) for such detailed, specific content spread over six months of lessons, we understand that budgets are tight and people want to ensure that they’ll get their money’s worth for their investment.

So, we decided to throw open the doors, lift the pay firewall starting right NOW (just after 11:45 CST on Tuesday, September 29) and as long as you register for the free Newsletter-level membership, you’ll have access to ALL of our content, including the stuff you’d normally pay for, until 12 midnight on Friday, October 2.

Here’s how you get in:

Right now, you’ll see the full Introductory lesson, with three huge text lessons, three video interviews, tons of examples specifically for tourism and extras in the Resources section….without paying a cent!

But wait, there’s more. A blender! Ginsu Knives!

Sorry, not really, but as another bonus during the Open House, you can also upgrade to a Regular membership for the Just the Basics price.

Here is what you get at the Regular level, normally $75 per month:

• Access (along with other members) to a monthly one-hour live video Q&A/round table discussion with Becky and me,  concentrating on the lesson topic for the month. You want to “pick our brain?” Here ya go!
• Access to all lessons – a new one each month – including video interviews and takeaways/checklists.
• Access to the Tourism Currents Member Forum.
• Monthly newsletter and access to full newsletter archives.

During the Open House only, you’ll get this for US$45 per month instead of US$75 per month.

Simply register at the paid “Just the Basics” level during the Open House timeframe, and we’ll manually upgrade you to “Regular” level on our site’s back end.  (Almost as nerdy as it sounds.)

This offer is strictly limited, and ends midnight CST on Friday, October 2, 2009. Period. Finito.

We think we have good stuff. We want you to check it out. It’s that simple.

Thanks very much for your interest and support.