Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

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. **

<a href=”http://www.yubby.com/c/7751/” mce_href=”http://www.yubby.com/c/7751/”>You are watching channel CMN Travels: Colonial Virginia</a>

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. **

<a href=”http://www.yubby.com/c/7736/” mce_href=”http://www.yubby.com/c/7736/”>You are watching channel CMN Travels: Hawaii</a>

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.

Look, I understand that there are still organizations that haven’t even reached the Cluetrain Manifesto stage – they still do not understand social media and they’re still scared of it.

That’s precisely why Becky McCray and I do social media training through Tourism Currents, with a “teach you to fish” philosophy.

I mean, I freak out about cooking and I’m still scared of math after making a blazing grade of “13″ on my first college pre-calculus test.  We all have our problems.

But this is ridiculous.

If you are a professional tourism person, you are by default a professional communicator. Representing a destination, attraction, hotel, shop or restaurant means that you communicate with the public (and hopefully do it well) in a proactive manner.

Professional communicators don’t let someone else horn in on their conversations. They may not always have positive conversations, they may step on their own tongue occasionally, but it’s their conversation.

That’s why tourism people must understand why something like Seth Godin’s “Brands in Public” is taking them down a fool’s path.

Sure, it looks like the “Brands” idea – having a single page with most Web mentions of your brand aggregated into one spot – would make it easy to “manage” conversations. Here’s the page for the Best Western hotel chain, so you can see what I’m talking about.

Herd all those cats onto one page and give ‘em the spin, for only $400/month to Mr. Godin.

Don’t be a sucker, folks. The Web does not work that way. It’s messy. It’s splattered. It’s people in all their messy, splattered, opinionated selves.  To respond to their gripes, compliments, observations and suggestions, you must engage them at the source of the discussion.

It might be on Yelp or the Chowhound forums. It might be on TripAdvisor. It might be on their personal blog, whether they have positive or negative things to say about you. It would be great if lots of the conversations were on YOUR tourism blog or Facebook Page, wouldn’t it? You know, like the Arkansas tourism blog or Iowa’s Facebook Page.

I guarantee you that the conversations of value are not going to be on some aggregator Squidoo page like “Brands in Public,” and I don’t care if it is a product of Seth Godin, the marketing and philosophical wizard (who does not allow comments on his blog posts, but I digress.)

There is no magic social media bullet. It is your basic communications roll-up-sleeves-and-engage work, with two-way tools like Twitter and Facebook and souped up to a demanding 24/7 cycle.

You can do this. You might have to spend a little money to learn things and move your online communications strategy down the road, but don’t blow $400/month on attempting to herd a pile of Web links on Godin’s site.

You’re smarter than that.

Does part of your destination marketing include trying to attract “leaf-peepers”  –  visitors who particularly enjoy traveling to see autumn foliage? (Soon I hope to visit the Lost Maples area here in Texas for those pretty reds and yellows.)

Why not steal a page from one of the latest uses for Twitter – roving location/update reports from food trucks, like this insanely popular Korean BBQ truck in Los Angeles – and use social media tools to provide timely reports of leaf color for your location.

Some area color displays change very quickly in the fall, and prospective visitors may make last-minute travel plans based on the most timely and complete reports.

The weekly color updates that many tourism Web sites offer are nice, and many have elaborate whiz-bang display interfaces, but that seems a slow and clunky way to make these reports in 2009 (plus it means you have to wait on your Webmaster to do all the work.)

Use the social Web to your advantage!

Some locations and regions already have foliage blogs, like Yankee magazine’s New England Foliage Blog or Oregon tourism’s Fall Foliage Report blog, but it would be even easier and faster to use Twitter for quick updates by your staff out on the road.

In fact, Oregon is already there with their @ORFallFoliage Twitter stream.  Good for them!

Any of your staffers with halfway well-equipped cell phones can snap photos when they’re out and about, and then send them in from the mobile device straight to TwitPic or YFrog for posting on Twitter.

I did this myself with an absolutely ancient Samsung flip phone, using it to take a photo of a bougainvillea plant in my back yard and then email it, from the phone, to a special email address that links to my TwitPic account.

• Here is what the tweet looks like, with the TwitPic link embedded, emailed to TwitPic from my phone.
• Here is what the photo looks like on its specific page on my TwitPic account (every photo has a URL.)

What about it, tourism gurus? Why or why not is this a good idea for your organization? Your comments below are welcomed.

We did it.

Our Tourism Currents online learning community launched on September 9 – Becky McCray and I couldn’t be more excited about it.

We’re offering a newsletter, monthly training lessons, exclusive video interviews with experts in the social media and tourism fields, a member’s Forum plus live hour-long video Q&A sessions.

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

• Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs)
• Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs)
• State and city governments who do marketing and outreach related to tourism
• Main Street, historic preservation, heritage trail and historic highway organizations
• Parks, nature preserves, botanical gardens and other nature/outdoors-related attractions, including scenic byways
• 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

If you’d like to know more, go here to see if Tourism Currents is right for you.

Thanks for your support!

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet from Berlin Tourism that said they’d mail small pieces of the Berlin Wall to 15 people who sent them a US mailing address via DM (Direct Message – private communication not seen by the Twitter public stream.)

As a student of history, I jumped all over that offer.

Now I have the lovely but sobering little bit of history that you see in the photo in this post.

What a great way for a tourism organization to use Twitter, wouldn’t you say?

It is difficult to believe that it has been 20 years since the Wall fell, but Berlin is commemorating the event in a big way (don’t miss this list from the Guardian of top 10 books about the Berlin Wall.)

I’d love to visit myself some day – there’s been a lot of buzz about the city around the Web lately.

WorldHum mentioned Berlin as a possible expat writer refuge, there’s a new currywurst museum, nice parks, a film festival in the subway, cutting edge fashion,  geeky startups , scenery and architecture (and here’s a detailed transportation update from EuroCheapo.)

But, if I can’t see all that in person, I still have a wonderful souvenir.

Thanks, Berlin Tourism.

After a quick Tourism Currents pre-launch meeting with my business partner Becky McCray….

….and did I mention that she’s a BusinessWeek Top 20 Entrepreneur to follow on Twitter? Well, she is!

….and don’t you know it makes her crazy when I do this kind of “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” off-topic diversion….

Anyway, we arranged a one-night planning session in Dallas, meeting roughly halfway between our homes in Oklahoma and Texas (because you can only do so much organizing even with regular video Skype calls.)  On the drive back to my house, I was so pumped up about the great learning material that we’re developing to combine tourism marketing and social Web tools, I just HAD to talk about it.

I used Utterli and my cell phone to call in an audio post (that I can embed in a blog post, as I’ve done here) from the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Waco, Texas.

Because I know how to live it up!

(If you can’t see the audio player box below, here’s the URL directly to the recording.)

This may be stating the obvious for many, but I’m seeing the same problem so often that there’s obviously a disconnect….

If your tourism organization is participating in social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., do not forget to put a prominent link to those on your main destination Web site.

Give your eager and enthusiastic customers multiple ways to find you, connect with you and talk about you.

Yes, I know that Web site real estate is a precious thing, and you may have to break some “personal rice bowls” to make this happen (meaning things can get political, your Webmaster may not want to give space/links to other platforms, etc.,) but here’s why you want to do it….

For example, when someone becomes a Fan of your state tourism Facebook page, a note to that effect goes onto that individual’s personal Profile page.  This means that all of, say, “Susie Smith’s” Facebook friends can see that she just became a Fan of XYZ state.  Some of them may click through to see what you’re all about, because they trust Susie and are interested in her interests.

Result? More eyeballs are seeing what your destination has to offer.

Here’s a Web site to emulate:  Discover Ohio.

Their state tourism organization is on Twitter at @DiscoverOhio, they have an Ohio Flickr Group for photo-sharing, an Ohio YouTube channel and here’s the Ohio Tourism Facebook page.

You know what’s really great? The logo links (widgets) for all of those social media sites are clearly displayed on the right-hand side on the front page of the main Ohio tourism Web site.

It makes it a no-brainer for Ohio enthusiasts to click through, connect and communicate with Ohio tourism in at least four different places. That’s how you can seem to be “everywhere.”

Make it easy to connect.  Make it easy for your visitors (and your residents) to talk with you and about you.

That’s just good destination marketing, right?

Who else would you recommend for providing multiple ways to connect?  I’d love to read about them in the comments below.

(Oh, and one more thing I don’t see often enough – give me easy access to some images from your destination. See that Lake Erie lighthouse up there at the top of the post? Discover Ohio made it easy for me to use, as long as I gave them credit. They have a simple-to-find free images page for media on their Web site. Thank you, Ohio!)