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.

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.

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.

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.

Many tourism organizations have asked me lately how they can find bloggers (and others active in social media) who might be interested in covering their destinations.   I thought it would be helpful to write up a quick reference list.

First, thanks for asking, because blogger outreach is one of the main topics that Becky McCray and I plan to cover when we launch our Tourism Currents social media learning community for tourism professionals in September 2009.  If you want to be kept informed about it, there’s an email signup when you click the Tourism Currents link.

Secondly, Becky has already started a new series on her Small Biz Survival blog called Tourism Tuesdays.  For example, here is her dynamite post Never Been There, about incorporating local folks into your tourism outreach campaigns.  I read Becky’s work because she always finds the nuggets that others might not think about or notice.

Want more? Go to the Twitter Search Engine and type in #tourismtuesday to see general tourism chatter (this is called a hashtag and groups together all tweets with the same hashtag marker.)  If you want to see general travel tweets instead, try #travel or #traveltuesday.

Finally, here’s my quick-and-dirty list of other ways to sift around online to find bloggers and the social media-savvy amongst us:

• The Travel page on Alltop.com – it features the latest headlines from tons of hand-picked travel bloggers.  Use the Search function on Alltop to find bloggers in just about any area of interest, like food or music or Cleveland.
• Travel Blog Exchange – a relatively new forum for travel bloggers, they just hosted a successful TBEX blogging conference that will no doubt become an annual event.
• Google Blog Search – this only returns search results from blogs, so it’s a nice filter rather than using the Big Google haystack to needle-hunt.
• Travel Blog List – this Invesp Consulting list of general travel blogs is sorted every which way and is a bit too unwieldy for finding the smaller gems, but it does contain lots of the major travel blogs.
• Travel Bloggers on Twitter – a blog post by Condé Nast Traveler editor Wendy Perrin, What You’re Missing if You’re Not on Twitter, includes many travel bloggers.
• Update Dec09:  If you’re mostly looking for amateurs – like this Latin America/Spain travel company that is thinking of offering free holidays to bloggers in exchange for content – the BootsnAll Travel Network has lots of bloggers around the world. Disclosure: Boots has hosted my Family Travel Guide since Feb 2006.

Hope that helps to get you started, and if I missed any resources, please note them in the comments below. Thanks!

I recently received an email from a senior executive at a mainstream public relations (PR) firm.  She said that she has clients in the travel industry and they’d like to know how to reach out to bloggers, and specifically how to get a mention on my BootsnAll Family Travel Logue.

You know what’s next (bloggers are a different breed because we’re public, rapid and sharing) so to save myself from drafting an entirely new blog post when I’ve already written what I want to say, this is what I told her, shared here with you….

“In response to your question, the answer is yes, I do get a ton of PR/marketing emails and end up deleting most of them, and blocking those that are totally unrelated to family travel, sent to me 4 times or with giant attachments that clog up my life.

It is too hard (and not worth it for my [travel blog] readers) to keep up with the rising, ever-more-desperate stream of notices (desperate because of the economy) about hotel packages, good deals on ritzy, live-in-a-bubble resorts in Cancun (I’m not a resort kind of traveler, as any reader of my blog knows,) how CVS Pharmacy products can help my family road trip, blah blah.

The flood is really starting to impede my ability to see/respond to important emails that involve actual writing or consulting work for pay.

I want to blog about places I visit and things I do with my kids, not regurgitate, for free, press releases about resorts that I’ve never been to and will never visit.  I write for two travel blogs, two blogs about social media and another about drag racing – I don’t have time to plow through all that junk.

The few emails that resonate indicate that:

1. The sender actually reads my blog, and not just to get my name to “personalize” their email blast. I particularly like the copy/paste of my name such that the greeting is one font and the press release pasted below is another.
2. The topic ties into a place that I’ve been to and written about. I’ll admit that the current template on my Family Travel blog is NOT search-friendly and I’m addressing that with BootsnAll, but my topic categories can be found through Archives at the bottom of the front page.  You can’t read my mind to see where I’m going that I haven’t visited before, obviously, so PR might get lucky and hit me with something about someplace I happen to be planning to go (but I doubt it, so why waste your time?)
3. The email topic ties to my focus of budget, independent, family-friendly travel. I’ve lived in the Middle East as a preteen and with my own kids in Asia and Europe, and have traveled all over the US.  I am so NOT the kind of person to stay in some all-inclusive package place in Cancun or Jamaica, so don’t inundate me with off-topic pitches.
4. I would much rather support state/county/city tourism organizations than more commercial travel businesses.
5. I’d rather deal with someone who has already “hung out” on my blog, by leaving a comment or two on some of my posts. Problem is, hardly any PR rep who’s blasted an email at me has ever stopped by and left a helpful comment and participated in the blog’s conversation BEFORE filling my IN box.

When I DO say “y’all come” to tourism organizations, they are often clueless. They’re so used to broadcasting, they don’t know how to interact in a two-way fashion.

For example, I’ve been running the 50 State Series on my family travel blog for weeks now, taking family-friendly suggestions from Twitter and Facebook for each state. I’m giving state tourism organizations a chance to toot their own horn, but I can’t believe how hard it is to get them to respond. Hel-LO!  Here’s the Vermont family travel 50 states post; that is the kind of stuff I want to blog about. Thank goodness for my Twitter followers; at least they know how to respond to calls for tips or I’d never get a post done each week.

Other insights:

1. I talked about this outreach topic in a podcast with travel writer and blogger Pam Mandel for Canadian tourism tech expert Todd Lucier: A conversation with bloggers about their craft.  Some of your clients might find it helpful.
2. They should also read this guest post by my Perceptive Travel editor Tim Leffel:  6 ways to improve your destination marketing (and why you’re toast if you don’t)

Sorry if any of this came across as excessively crabby, but there’s no magic bullet for blogger outreach. Good PR has always been about knowing your target journalist or writer, establishing a relationship BEFORE you pitch and not pitching blindly.

PR folks Geoff Livingston, Kami Huyse and Jason Falls have met and interacted with me on Twitter, on my blogs and in person at events like the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference. I respect their knowledge, count them as friends and would now listen to most anything they have to say to me. They’re the gold standard.”

That’s all you gotta do, really….

Did I miss anything? Am I, in fact, just too crabby? 

The familiarization trip/press trip or “fam tour” (I’ll use the terms interchangeably here) is a warhorse staple in the tourism public relations and marketing arsenal. It means that you bring writers to your destination, pay their expenses, show them your highlights and then wait and hope for positive future coverage in their magazines and newspapers.

Many publications do not accept articles based on such trips, but many others do.  I have written for both. Some pubs are more transparent than others about freebies.  A whole industry supports this matchmaking – I attended a conference about a lot of it, Travel Media Showcase, in September 2008.

Fam Tour Pros – Efficient use of time and assets for tourism organizations and Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs.)  Allows writers to travel to places that they otherwise might not afford since travel writing pay is notoriously low, especially in today’s tough economy, including pay for guidebooks.

Fam Tour Cons – The journalistic ethics “sniff test.”  Can writers be truly objective about a destination when it’s handed to them, however sincerely, in a nice package with a bow? Can writers find original, unique stories and hidden nuggets about a place when they spend all day marched on and off a bus and their nights at nice hotels/resorts courtesy of the local Visitor’s Bureau?

Now, let’s make the discussion even more interesting and throw in the question of bloggers taking fam trips.  Are they considered journalists? Do ethics rules apply?  If bloggers clearly disclose that posts are based on a free trip, is it up to the blog’s readers to decide the value of the content, or has a line been irrevocably crossed?

Is the blogger press trip the right vehicle to gain social media presence for a tourism organization?  Is it a good vehicle at all?

My Personal Experiences

I wade into these fractious waters after returning from my third press trip….the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA) dipped toes into social media waters with the So Much More Hawaii bloggers tour, to which I was invited to blog primarily about family travel. I went because I know and appreciate the islands and wanted to support HTA’s efforts to use social media in reaching out to new potential visitors.

I’ve taken face shots in this area before. When I wrote about a Virginia fam trip on the Write to Travel blog (The Press Trip: Great Deal or Big Hassle?) and then posted the link for discussion on the mediabistro.com Bulletin Board, one commenter said, “I hope you never expect to be taken seriously as a travel writer after a post like that.”

Well, alrighty, then!

My second fam tour was to Hutchinson, Kansas – my expenses were paid once I got there but I paid my own airfare to/from Texas.  (As an aside, a “free trip” to Kansas did not seem to raise much interest or ire from the ethics watchdogs.) I participated in the Hutch trip because I wanted to support one of the tour organizers, Cody Heitschmidt, in his efforts to use social media to step up awareness of his town.

My third fam tour, the one to Hawaii, garnered positive press reaction in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and KHON 2 News, but David Shapiro, a journalist blogging for the Honolulu Advertiser, wrote that “the new media folks accepting the freebies were a throwback to the bad old days of journalism when favorable coverage was for sale at the right price” in his post Junketing gets wired.

(Read the comments on Shapiro’s post – they’re lively. This time I get to be “scum” and some other unmentionables.)

I Tell Tourism To Reach Out To Bloggers, So They Do. Now What?

A UK public relations person with McCluskey International, Ian McKee, asked the question “Blogger FAM trips – are we nearly there yet?” and I responded with some thoughts on the whole fam trip issue:

“Yeah, we’re already there for blogger-focused fam trips, at least in the US.

The material that I gather from these trips goes into many different blogs (not just my travel ones) and is also pitched to those publications that accept material from “comped” [complimentary] travel. So many people don’t even realize that US national-level glossies like National Geographic Traveler, Condé Nast Traveler and Budget Travel do not allow comped travel. The idea is that their pay rates (US$1/word and up) make it worth the writer’s while to pay for everything up front and reimburse oneself later when the check comes in.

I will come right out and say that Darren Cronian [the Travel Rants blogger who left a critical comment on Ian's post] is right; you cannot say you are totally, totally objective when your destination is handed to you on a platter.  I would LOVE to have the funds to do it “right” – completely anonymous, paid out of my own pocket, researched on my own and not supported by local tourism PR any more than any other traveler who calls/rings up the office and asks for help.

The fact is, I cannot always operate that way, and it does bother me. So, I try to use the freedom offered by my blog outlets to be as objective and fair as I can possibly be, given my own ethics compass, and ALWAYS disclose that my material is coming from a sponsored press trip. I even blog about my discomfiture, as other writers….have done.

Thank you for bringing up the “days of lost income” issue. People think, ooh, Hawaii, what a deal she’s getting. No, in the basic sense, it is 10 days when I am writing free content for the Hawaii state tourism board. I have lived in Hawaii and other beautiful places; I am not impressed by “paradise.” My 9-year-old son will accompany me since I’m covering family travel and want to test all this on an actual human child. I love my kid, but he ain’t a vacation.

So why am I doing it? Ah, there is method in my madness. There are stories that I can write from Hawaii that have nothing to do with travel, per se, so the comped travel problem won’t be a factor (I have a story idea for WIRED magazine out of the Kansas trip, believe it or not.)  More importantly, I am beginning to focus my social media consulting business on what I call “Tourism 2.0″ – teaching CVBs/tourism organizations how to use the social Web to reach potential visitors and help with economic development. I will gather ROI data and other things from the Hawaii trip to help build my business.

My plan is that someday soon, I’ll make enough money from this sort of consulting that I WILL be able to travel my way – independently, unfettered and able to pitch to any publication. The only reason I’ll contact a destination’s tourism/PR folks will be as “Joe/Jane Six-Pack” regular traveler, to test how responsive they are to visitor requests.

In sum, I think tourism organizations are missing the boat if they are not reaching out to bloggers. I coach/advise/consult and tell them to do it. What’s tough is when they DO reach out to a blogger, but it’s ME.  I’ll play, but I’m not particularly comfortable with it.”

That last paragraph block is the core of this blog post. Fam trips make me feel rather funky, as a print writer OR a blogger. How do you mitigate “funky?” Can you? A lot of others don’t seem to have a problem with press trips. Who am I to judge them? (but I must consider what is best for me and for my work.)

Do Bloggers Have A Place On Press Trips?

From my point of view – Yes – within limitations.

There’s no question in my mind that you cannot beat a well-connected blogger’s impact compared to “one and done” print media. I do not question whether we are a good deal – we are. That’s the problem. Social media is now “Today’s Special” on the PR/marketing menu. My concern is blogger credibility in the face of these freebie handouts that have implications that may not be clear to the non-journalist.

Bloggers can take the disclosure problem right into their own hands. They should fully disclose in EVERY post that the trip (or product or hotel stay) was provided free of charge or was substantially discounted.

But is that enough?

Video podcaster and social media consultant Roxanne Darling goes so far as to say that to avoid Google penalities for paid or “comped” blog posts, every link to the company giving the freebie should be “no follow” so as to avoid giving that company the benefit of your blog’s PageRank or Google “juice”/authority through your links to them.

Disclosing on just the blog posts isn’t really enough,either. As I said in a comment on Roxanne’s blog:

“I put a disclosure of my [Hawaii blogger's tour] paid sponsorship at the bottom of every Family Travel blog post, but for space reasons I had a harder time doing that for my tweets, Stumbles, Delicious bookmarks, Facebook comments & photos, Flickr photos, LinkedIn status items…. we know how to reach out all over the place and full disclosure is still very important, but not always easy to do on every publishing platform.”

Roxanne is toying with the idea of a standard “sponsored item” button for paid content, similar to an orange RSS button; I think it’s an intriguing concept.

And by the way, who’s in charge of blogger ethics?

The answer is….nobody, but the reality is that currently, the driving constraint is probably the blog’s readers. Readers vote with their eyeballs. Lie to readers and you lose them, you lose credibility and your blog goes down with you.

Some see a blogger fam tour as an experiment in social media and therefore exempt from knotty ethics questions, but that’s only if you see social media itself as some sort of newly jumped-up experiment. I do not. I’ve been blogging since February 2006 and I thought I was late by not starting until then. It is not “new media.”

I doubt any tourism organization is going to stop hosting fam tours because of anything I’ve said here, but I would caution them that a lot of writers are perhaps more uncomfortable with the whole thing than we may admit, even to the many cheery, hardworking PR people who are trying to do a good job as destination promoters.

Local Blogger Hosts As A Fam Tour Alternative

I think a destination’s local bloggers, acting as hosts, may be part of the answer.

On the So Much More Hawaii tour, I had family-focused “host bloggers” in Maui (Liza of A Maui Blog) and Oahu (Russ from ParkRat’s Playground) who tied into my family travel topic. The hosting logistics were put together quickly, but my understanding was that their expenses were somewhat defrayed through a partnership with Hawaii-based Pono Media and the Hawaii Tourism Authority.

For example, Pono Media paid for my Maui host family to rent a large van for a day so we could all drive up to the Haleakala National Park summit and then eat lunch together at a place that we chose, the Paia Fish Market. I didn’t feel like such a mooch under such a setup, and I liked knowing that my host family’s time and effort were somewhat compensated.

No one set our schedules with the locals, so on Oahu, Russ took me to Waiola Shave Ice and Rainbow Drive-In because that’s what his family likes, not because anyone official told him to go there (I don’t think compensation for Russ was quite as well organized, so I kept offering to pay for things including gas, but Russ politely declined.)  One evening’s entertainment was watching our kids chase crabs by flashlight at a local beach park.  The Visitor’s Bureau would not have put that on a fam tour schedule, but it was one of my best memories of the trip.

This hosting alternative would require local bloggers to work almost as freelance contractors to the Visitor’s Bureau (they wouldn’t be volunteers like, for example, the Big Apple Greeters in New York City.)  I’m not so naive as to think that problems might not arise on both sides, but I still think the idea has merit based on my experience in Hawaii (and my fellow tour bloggers also loved their time with local bloggers on Kauai, Maui, the Big Island and Oahu.)

It also requires tourism organizations to get to know and then vet those bloggers who wish to participate.  CVBs already vet hotels, restaurants, etc., and they SHOULD know their local bloggers, who can be outstanding destination advocates.

This isn’t the whole answer, by a long shot. A host blogger compensated by a CVB is still a “freebie,” unless the CVB offers the host option to any visitor, not just press, and/or charges everyone a nominal fee for such host blogger services.  I don’t claim that this is the ideal solution, but I want to explore a better way than the fam tour, and this seems promising to me.

In sum, no one has given me rules to follow here in the bloggy Wild West, but I’ve ended up making my own (what others do is their business, of course.)

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.

I’m more than happy to advise on “Tourism 2.0″ and how to interact on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc.,  but there is no social media magic bullet served by any headlong rush to include bloggers in a tourism marketing model that has some serious flaws.

The fam tour needs alternatives, and I hope to help create them.

Next week, my 9-year-old son and I are heading west from Texas to spend 10 full days in the Hawaiian islands, all because of blogging and Twitter.

Through my tweets, writing and particularly my travel blogs, I’ve gotten to know Christine Lu of Cilantro Media and several people who work in tourism for the state of Hawaii.  They’ve gotten to know me and my enthusiasm for social media in tourism.

To connect digital creatives with a beautiful place, the Hawaii Tourism Authority is bringing a group of prominent bloggers to Hawaii to “talk story” about what we find on Kauai, Maui, the Big Island and Oahu. I’ll be the blogger who mostly covers family travel.

The tour is called So Much More Hawaii (full Web site up in the next day or so. Meantime, add your best pics to our Flickr pool.)  (Update – here is the So Much More Hawaii blog/microsite that includes our content plus that of local bloggers.)

I was on Christine Lu’s China 2.0 tour in November 2008,  and social media is a common theme in her life for creating those connections.  She writes:

“The upcoming ‘So Much More Hawaii’ tour is meant as a proof of concept that through social media, first-hand insight of Hawaii can create content and outreach that influences those to understand Hawaii better and want to visit the islands…key bloggers in different vertical niche markets [will] experience the islands as a group, with separate sector focuses. Each one has a sector they are known for covering and their visit to Hawaii is meant to share this with their audience.”

Other bloggers on the tour include:

• Rick Calvert, founder, Blog World and New Media Expo – a huge annual blogging conference.  He’ll cover the islands as a business and convention destination.
• Leah Lamb, covering eco-tourism and green travel for Current TV. I know she must be intrigued by Hawaii’s recent efforts to invest in clean and renewable energy resources.
• Jim Turner, OneByOne Media and host of the Social Mediasphere show on Blog Talk Radio.
• Shira Lazar, blogging on solo travel for Jaunted.com, the pop culture travel guide.
• Aric S. Queen, producer, writer, podcaster and value travel blogger for the UpTake travel site.
• Mark Tafoya, our tour foodie blogger. He’s a professional chef and co-founder of the Culinary Media Network.
• L.P. “Neenz” Faleafine, a native Hawaiian, Chief Evangelist for Alltop.com and founder of Hawaii-based Pono Media.

As we all know, the economy is down around the world. The Hawaii tourism industry is in crisis right now and the outlook is grim.  I applaud Christine and others for seeking new, more effective ways to use social media to showcase the islands for potential visitors.

Here are some of the blog posts already online about So Much More Hawaii:

• Chef Mark to see “So Much More Hawaii.”
• Ryan at Hawaii Blog talks about the social media tour Hawaii
• Damon writes that the Mainland bloggers are coming!

Keep an eye not only on this blog but also on the Perceptive Travel Blog, my Twitter stream and the @HawaiiHTA stream (we’re using hashtag #HawaiiHTA.)

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.

As soon as our gaggle settled in for the first meeting on the blogger’s tour in Hutchinson, Kansas, we started whipping out the laptops, cameras and other geek accoutrements.

That’s what those who are wired into the social web do – we start connecting immediately.

Bloggers are natural connectors, but we do it differently than some, and we use Web tools in ways that seem strange to the unplugged.

Sitting around the table, we introduced ourselves and ate box lunches while we yakked, tweeted and photographed everything.

At one point, I pulled this enormous cookie from my lunch and made some joke about it, and small business whiz Becky McCray pulled out her camera to take a photo.

You could sense that our Hutchinson hosts thought we were a bit silly, photographing everything, but I said, “Just you wait, this cookie can get around, and we’ll use it to talk about your town.”

• The “Hutch cookie” lives on Becky McCray’s Facebook profile under Photos. More importantly, it’s in the Hutch Blogger Tour set. That set shows people some of the neat stuff we saw in Hutchinson (and every time she uploaded something to it, everyone in her Facebook network saw it.)

• Because I’m tagged in it, the photo shows up under Photos of Sheila in my Facebook profile. It showed up in my Facebook network when I was tagged. It shows up again when I post a link to this post on my Facebook Wall.

• I tweeted that I was writing this post about this cookie.

• I tweeted about the cookie after the “Share your cookies with your imaginary Internet friends” was posted.  Because the post was hashtagged with #Hutch (the Hutchinson-related hashtag) it also shows up in Twitter Search.

• The tweet showed up on my FriendFeed page.

• It’s got a Hutchinson tag where I’ve saved it on my Delicious bookmarking page, and it’s on StumbleUpon as well.

• What the heck, it’s on my Plurk page, too.

Yes, it’s only a cookie. It’s a seemingly pointless photo; but, it will live on forever, and so will our words about Hutchinson, Kansas.

THAT’S why the Web is powerful as hell.

(Disclosure:  My visit to Hutchinson was a press trip sponsored by the Cosmosphere and Hutchinson CVB, who paid for my lodging and expenses while I was in town. They did not tell me what I could or could not write about. I paid my own airfare to/from Kansas.)