Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

A good pitch is timely, short, punchy and answers the question WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?) for the recipient.

If this sounds familiar, it should. A good pitch to bloggers is very much like a good pitch to any media person.

At BlogWorld and New Media Expo West in Los Angeles, I talked to Jared Degnan from Brandware Public Relations about pitching bloggers….the video is about a minute long, and here’s the direct link to it on YouTube in case you can’t see the embed box below.

Did I get it right, or was I too simplistic?  Leave a reply down in the comments….thanks!

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Welcome to the Carnival of Cities blog carnival, where we tour the world in a single post, via submissions from a variety of different blogs, all about any aspect of one, single city or fair-sized town.

The previous Carnival edition was hosted on the Perceptive Travel Blog, and you’ll find the next one (February 8, 2012) on Edutech Musings.

If you would like to host a future Carnival edition on your blog, please contact me at Sheila “at” sheilascarborough “dot” com. Thanks!

Off we go….

Cities in the Americas

Seattle, Washington, USA   Mary Jo Manzanares presents Tourist at Home: Visiting the Seattle Aquarium posted at Traveling with MJ, saying, “Fun for adults and kids. . . and the otters are just so darned cute!”

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA   Angela Gaitaniella presents Pittsburgh is “In” posted at The Burgh, Exposed.

San Francisco, California, USA   Byteful Travel presents What’s Hidden Underneath the Golden Gate Bridge? (Exploring historical Fort Point) posted at Byteful Travel, saying, “Even though you’ve probably never heard of it, something very old is hidden underneath the Golden Gate bridge; and one a sunny day in September, I had the opportunity to photograph it.”

Orlando, Florida, USA   Eileen Ludwig presents Artsfest FREE Ticketed Non-Ticketed Florida posted at Freelance Tourist: Travel Tips.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA   hello haha narf presents Still So Much posted at Midnight Cliff.

New Orleans, Louisiana, USA   Tui Snider presents New Orleans? Cafe du Monde: A Taste of History posted at Mental Mosaic: Even Home is a Travel Destination, saying, “Coffee played a big role in New Orleans’ history, and at one point in the 1800′s there were nearly 500 coffeehouses in the French Quarter. Cafe du Monde is the sole survivor from that era, with a menu that is virtually unchanged since it first opened in 1862.”

Niagara Falls, Canada   Andy Hayes presents Top 10 Quirky Things To Do in Niagara Falls posted at eTourism Insight, saying, “Quirky things in what is perhaps the quirkiest place in Canada. ”

New York, New York, USA   Priya Mony presents My Reasons to Love New York: The Winter Edition posted at Let’s Take The Scenic Route, saying, “Great things to do and places to visit in New York even in the coldest months of the year.”

Cities in Europe

Panicale, Umbria, Italy   Ciao Bambino! presents Art Camp for Kids in Umbria, Italy posted at Ciao Bambino, saying, “Arte al Sol art camp is a great way for children to experience Italian Culture. It’s not just painting here. Activities may include glass blowing, cooking or even sheep herding – experiences that your kids won’t soon forget.”

Barcelona, Spain   Amanda Kendle presents Gaudi makes Barcelona beautiful posted at Not A Ballerina: A Travel Blogger’s Life.

London, England   Brooke Allen presents London Pub Crawl posted at Rambling Brooke.

Liverpool, England    Mr. Brightside presents [Come Dine With Us] Gusto! posted at The Wild Swans, saying, “One of the best Italian restaurants in Liverpool!”

Cities in Asia

Delhi, India   Mariellen Ward presents Delights of Delhi posted at BreatheDreamGo.

That concludes this Carnival edition, and thank you for visiting.

Please submit your (ONE, non-spammy) blog post to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities using our carnival submission form.

Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Over a six week period (1 December 2011 through 17 January 2012) we gained 137 new Likes/fans for our Tourism Currents Facebook Page. That is a 101% increase over a similar time frame from the previous year.

We did not buy Facebook ads or Sponsored Stories. We did not run a contest. We only did one thing differently …. we started interacting more on our own Home page (News Feed) with other Pages that we’ve Like’d.

That was it.

Sure, our Tourism Currents Page doesn’t have massive numbers of supporters, because we have a deliberate, laser-targeted focus on social communications for the tourism and hospitality industries.  We’d rather have a small number of people from CVBs (Convention and Visitors Bureaus) and Tourist Boards who really care what we say on Facebook, and then maybe check out our online Store, than thousands of random button-clickers who we never see again.

Facebook is like blogging and most other human interaction – if you want attention, you must give it. If you want your updates to be noticed, you need people to Like, Comment and Share them; that means they must remember that your Page exists.

How We Did It

As a Tourism Currents Page Admin, I switch from acting as my personal Sheila Scarborough profile to acting as the Tourism Currents Page. You can switch roles when you’re logged into Facebook; look for a little arrow at the top right of your screen next to “Home”.  The options available to you will drop down. If you are an Admin for many Pages, there is a small gray slider bar at the side of the dropdown box, although sometimes it doesn’t show up.

At least once a day, for about 10-15 minutes, I go to the Home page/News Feed acting as Tourism Currents. I click the Sort —> “Recent Stories First” dropdown arrow option on the upper right side. That puts my Home page status updates in chronological order, without regard to Facebook’s EdgeRank, which by default sorts the News Feed into the “Highlighted Stories First” setting. I want to see fresh, new, unfiltered updates. I also want my interaction to be noticed and not buried with 573 later Likes and Comments.

Then, I skim down and “like” interesting status updates, plus leave a comment on the ones where I have something useful to say.  I know that many other Page Admins are a lot like me; they notice and investigate those who actively respond to their content. Likes and comments help increase the visibility and EdgeRank of individual updates, so not only am I calling attention to Tourism Currents, I’m also helping other people’s content get more attention.

As the screenshot above shows, once I started doing this consistently, we gained 137 new Likes in six weeks.  For a Page with 895 Likes (as of this writing) that’s a nice little jump.

Numbers Aren’t The Point, Though

Excessive focus on getting more fans or supporters is useless bean-counting, unless it’s combined with actively engaging those people and getting them interested in and talking about your destination, attraction, lodging, service or product.

At a minimum, you should have a tab on your Facebook Page for easy signups to your own email newsletter.

You’re not in business to build an empire for Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg …. you want to own your own data.

We use a Facebook app tied to our Tourism Currents MailChimp email account to encourage newsletter signups right on our Page.  To see how it’s done, here’s how to add a MailChimp signup form to Facebook; your email provider probably has a similar procedure.

I disagree with some of the current advice to increase the frequency of your Facebook posting because of the new Timeline format.  Making more noise and spewing even more content for busy people to have to plow through is not a sustainable communications tactic.

To get Likes, be a Like-er yourself, and then have a plan for what the heck you’re going to DO with the community you build.

What can city people learn from rural folks?

If my own experience is any indication – a TON.

Thanks to a diverse social network that includes interesting people in small towns and rural areas, I’ve learned so much over the last few years about the hopes, dreams, troubles and blissful moments of people who live in what I used to call “out in the middle of nowhere.”

They’re more tech-savvy than you’d think …. I recently found an AgChat Foundation Facebook discussion about the hot new Pinterest social sharing service and how farmers might use it for “agvocacy.”

You know that ongoing discussion about getting broadband internet access out into rural areas? It sure seems similar to efforts in the 1930′s to get electricity and telephone service out to less-populated places, and the same objections are being raised; it’s too expensive, there aren’t enough people to justify it, it’s a “luxury” they don’t really need, etc.  I never really thought about this problem until I got to know some small town geeks.

At last fall’s 140 Characters/State of NOW Small Town communications conference in Hutchinson, Kansas, I was honored to be chosen as one of the speakers, and I talked about this personal awakening.

There were some video problems at first, so all I have for you is the audio recording, but it’s only about 10 minutes and I talk fast.

Here’s the direct link to the audio file if you can’t see the embed box below:  http://blip.tv/140confevents/140conf-smalltown-2011-sheila-scarborough-city-kid-among-the-cattle-5639673 

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Fourth and final post in a series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s.

The right question is not, “How do we get more Twitter followers?” or “How do we get more Like-ers/fans on Facebook?”

The right question is, “What do we want to DO with our followers and fans?”

Counting heads is fun – we’re all guilty of it, including me – but unless those people are helping you achieve stated objective(s) for your organization or business, you’re fooling yourself that anything is accomplished by totting up raw numbers.

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  As you gather more supporters in 2012, have plans for what you want to do for them, and what they could do for you.

—->>  On your blog – do you want readers to sign up to get your posts by email or RSS?  Take a hard look at whether you have made that signup process as simple as possible, including on a mobile device.

—->>  It’s Facebook Page 101:   make sure that people can sign up for your email newsletter right there on your Page.  On our Tourism Currents Facebook Page, we use a tab and a short signup form via our MailChimp email service.

Are you trying to build your own list, or are you busy building Mark Zuckerberg’s list?  Use Facebook for your own business success!

—->>  On Twitter, periodically let followers know how to sign up for your email updates.  Note: Send them directly to your signup page – don’t dump them onto your homepage and hope they find it.

—->>  What are you doing with your email newsletter list?  What’s your point to cranking it out? WHY should people open up their already-overloaded IN boxes to you?  Ask yourself those tough questions….often.

Back to numbers:  if you suddenly picked up 1000 more fans or followers, what would you DO with them that you couldn’t do already, right now?

My own 2012 plan for the fans and followers of this blog

Since I’m asking you about your plans for your platforms, here are mine for Sheila’s Guide:

1)  Lead the tourism industry away from a somewhat silo’d focus on social media, and toward a more general incorporation of social communications as simply “how we do things.”  It’s like email – nobody has an Email Department, do they?  It’s time for social media to stop being new or special.

2)  Support the growth of my Tourism Currents business with Becky McCray.  We’ve set a performance goal that we’ve agreed to meet by our 3rd anniversary in business (September 2012) or we’re going to radically overhaul what we offer.

3)  Support my work as a professional speaker on tourism and social media.

4)  Support the marketing of my upcoming book, The Elastic Waist Entrepreneur.

Thanks so much for your support, and hope to see many more of you in person in 2012.

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Third in a blog post series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Many people avidly read every one of marketer Seth Godin’s blog posts.

I think it’s mostly because they’re well-written and helpful, but part of the reason is that his posts are often quite short.

As in, a few sentences.

Most of them do not include a photo or video; they’re just plain ol’ text.

But….his readers know that he’ll be pithy, get to the point and not take up too much of their time.

(I won’t go into the fact that he does not allow comments on his posts, which is not how I prefer to blog.  He has his reasons, and it’s his blog, after all.)

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  Go short more often in 2012.

—->>  Just a few interesting sentences can be a blog post for you, too. Try it one day in the first week of January 2012.

—->>  Make every other Facebook Page update a one-sentence declaration or question for a few days.

—->>  Twitter is MADE for pithy thoughts. In the early days of the service, we called an exactly 140 character tweet a “twoosh.”

—->>  Make your email newsletter unexpectedly short one month (and say that it is short, in your Subject line.) See what happens with the open/click rate. Does it improve?

—->>  Challenge yourself to shoot a 30-45 second video, or a fun Google Search Story or a short Animoto video out of photos you already have.

Can you think of any other ways to “go short?”

For more ideas on effective content creation, see Lesson Two of our Tourism Currents online course, Building a Home Base. It includes a video of our own blogging lessons learned.

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First in a blog post series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s

Here’s a way to reach fans of your destination who live far away, but still want to connect even when they can’t visit …. tell them how to find and listen to your hometown radio stations that stream online.

People who enjoy familiar music, a long-time DJ’s voice or a particular show may not even know that they can now hear those sounds on the web, even when their regular radio is nowhere near the station’s terrestrial broadcast tower.

For example, my at-home radio is always tuned to FM 89.5 KMFA in Austin. It’s a public, listener-supported station that plays classical music in Central Texas. Unlike KUT, the other public station in town, KMFA does not have standard NPR fare like All Things Considered. It simply provides a wide variety of classical music, 24 hours a day. I love it.

When I’m far away from home in a hotel room, I do look for local stations, but even in music-rich places like New Orleans I seem to have a heck of a time finding them (or getting the hotel’s bedside clock radio to pick them up.) Often I default to playing KMFA in my room through my laptop, which is a nice homey Austin touch on a busy morning when I’m prepping to speak at a conference, for example.

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  Do a little destination marketing with radio in 2012.

—->>  Write up a blog post that tells visitors where to find 3-4 of your best local radio stations online. Include their AM and/or FM station numbers for people to dial into when they are physically in town. Link to each of the station websites in your post.

—->>  Put a link to the post in a Facebook Page update. Tag the radio stations in your update.

—->>  Tweet the link to your post 2-3 times on Twitter, over a few days, at different times. Include the station or DJ Twitter handles.

—->>  Summarize the post as part of your email newsletter.

—->>  Ask the stations if your CVB or DMO can be a guest on any of the shows that cover local events or festivals, then make sure that your blog/Facebook Page/tweets/newsletter let people know when to tune in to hear you talk up your town. Shoot a short video of you on the air, and put that on YouTube, with a link back to your blog post in the video description.

Can you think of any other way to use radio to connect with visitors?

Oh, and I did finally find a great New Orleans station that streams local music and shows:  WWOZ online, or dial up 90.7 FM when you’re there.

Want more help and training in social communications, tourism and hospitality?  That’s why we started Tourism Currents.

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Are the holiday crazies starting to get to you?

Let’s take a moment to breathe.

It’s morning in Mississippi, near Greenwood, and the Tallahatchie River is oozing past….

My nearby cabin at Tallahatchie Flats was pretty comfy, too.

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While we mess around with our Facebook Pages, mobile devices and tweet-crafting, I’d like to pause for a moment and talk about books.

Lots of books, in a place that doesn’t have them, for people who want them very badly.

We’re talking about raising US$80,000 (yes, it’s a lot of zeroes) to build two libraries in Zambia …. the building construction, all the books and educational materials, teacher training and support for three years …. through Passports with Purpose, the annual travel bloggers’ fundraiser.

One of the PwP co-founders, Pam Mandel, is a dear friend of mine and a blogging kindred spirit, so I look forward to this every year. The #PwP hashtag is already jumping on Twitter.

Last year we raised enough money (mostly in US$10 increments) to build an entire village in southern India in partnership with Friends of LAFTI.  This year, PwP is partnering with Room to Read for the libraries.

I started my first travel blog in February 2006, and I’ve supported PwP since the beginning, but this is the first time that I’ve offered a sponsored prize as part of the fundraiser.

It works rather like a raffle – in addition to the goodie I’m showcasing below, you can browse through this full list of travel-related prizes and bid for chances to win whichever ones appeal to you.  At the end of the fundraiser – it runs through December 16, 2011 – one winner of each prize will be randomly selected from all of those who have bid.  A $10 donation per bid is suggested, but if you don’t want to make a donation, mail one self addressed stamped envelope to: Passports with Purpose, P.O. Box 16102, Seattle WA 98116.  Include the name of the prize you are entering to win.

Thanks to Nick from Guerrilla Packs, I get to showcase one of their top backpacks as the Sheila’s Guide PwP prize – the Voltij.  (Shipped to winners in the continental US only – bummer – but the winner can choose red, blue, or orange.)

This pack is designed for the serious traveler/hiker who needs cleverly designed storage space, comfort, and style.  My favorite feature is the detachable day pack, so you don’t have to look dorky wearing the whole framed backpack walking through, say the Uffizi in Florence or grabbing a bubble tea in Shanghai.

Here are some other Voltij specs:

- Detachable padded laptop sleeve shoulder carry bag
- Aluminum internal frame
- Fully adjustable EVERYTHING!
- Built in compass and thermometer
- Rain cover
- Passport pocket & cell phone pocket
- Supports H20 hydration system
- Sleeping bag / wet clothes pocket

Want to know more?

Here’s a helpful video about the pack (direct link to Voltij demo if you can’t see the embed box below:)

For a chance to win this prize or one of many others, go here to the PwP Prize List/Donate page and follow the directions.

Thanks for your support of Passports with Purpose, and I look forward to showing off some photos of the libraries in the next year or so.

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It can be difficult to keep up with current trends in tourism, hospitality, travel and technology….unless, of course, sleep is optional for you.

For the rest of us mere mortals, fast-paced Twitter chats are invaluable.  They are some of THE most useful hours I spend online researching industry happenings and discussions.  You’ll get help from peers and network with fellow professionals around the world (here are 9 tips for following hashtags.)

I offer my own list of resources below that I use for speaking and Tourism Currents online training.

I’d love to hear more ideas from you down in the comments.

If you follow no other chat….

New chats pop up all the time – some Scotland-based tourism businesses just launched the #ScotlandHour travel chat, for example – but for tried and true value, don’t miss #tourismchat.

It’s usually biweekly, at 2 pm CST on Thursdays. Check the #tourismchat Facebook Page for dates and topics.

Chat co-founder Anne Hornyak summarizes a #tourismchat session here, if you want a sense of how it works.

Other good tourism chats

Keep an eye out for the hashtags for conferences like ESTO, #SoMeT (this hashtag is active year-round,) PRSA Travel, eTourismSummit and the annual state/province Governor’s conferences.

The conference calendar on DMOPro can help you keep up with these.

Get some hybrid vigor

Following non-tourism hashtags ensures that I don’t get stuck in a stale echo chamber listening to the same people over and over. Mixing it up fosters what my Tourism Currents business partner Becky McCray calls “the hybrid vigor of ideas.”

Some of these chats include:

**  Crazy-fast #blogchat on Sunday nights, 8 pm CST.

**  Tech conference hashtags like #BWEchat (year-round for BlogWorld and New Media Expo East and West)  #SXSWi (mostly active January through March for South by Southwest Interactive) and #SOBCon (year-round for the SOBCon business blogging conferences.)

**  Since search engines are so integral to online activities, I keep an eye on hashtags for Search Marketing Expo / #SMX events worldwide, especially #SMXEast and #SMXWest.

**  I’m not a gadget person, but the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona / #MWC12 for 2012 and the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) / #CES in Las Vegas are worth a look, if only to find links to good event round-up blog posts towards the end.

How to keep track of all this chatter

You can follow and participate in chats with regular web-based Twitter, but I prefer a dashboard to keep things sorted. I use columns in TweetDeck for each hashtag, adding and removing as events come and go.

Others are fans of HootSuite;  since it’s cloud-based you can get around any IT download restrictions in your office, and multi-person team accounts seem to like it.

When the chat is actually in progress, I log into TweetChat to keep up with the conversation flow and add the hashtag to my tweets automatically.

Which chats or tools am I forgetting? Let us know in the comments….

Still a bit unsure of the value?  Here’s 60 seconds with Beth Conway from the St. Joseph, Missouri CVB on how she uses Twitter (direct link to the video on YouTube if you can’t see the embed box below.)

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