Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

For me, the most engaging and powerful Facebook Pages have a distinctive, friendly, human voice. They nurture their Page community, share all kinds of helpful information (plus the occasional just-for-fun item) and post often enough that I see them fairly regularly in my News feed.

This does not require money, or being a big city DMO (Destination Marketing Organization.)

It requires energy, commitment and planning. The “big guys” sometimes have the most boring, plastic Pages, so never let yourself be intimidated if all you have is you. Small is often better!

Here is a sampling of a few of my favorites….

**  The Southern Oregon Coast (one of the Admins, Katherine Hoppe, is a dynamo.)

**  Famous for Route 66 and painted murals – Cuba, Missouri

**  California’s Paso Robles

**  A mid-sized town, but excellent – Beaumont, Texas CVB.   Disclosure: I went to high school there and couldn’t wait to get out, and now they’re one of my go-to examples for social media in tourism. Never say never!

Not small towns but not expected, either, these Pages impress me with how they share  interesting items:

**  Fabulous photos from the US Fish & Wildlife Service Midwest

**  Super at sharing what’s going on with their members – the Dude Rancher’s Association

**  All located on their town’s central square – the Historic Granbury (Texas) Merchant’s Association

**  The charming Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri

So, what are some of your personal favorite Pages that aren’t from a big city tourism organization?

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Screenshot of what a CVB or DMO Twitter stream looks like when it is auto-posted from Facebook

This is what a Twitter stream looks like when Facebook updates are automatically shared as tweets (screenshot doctored to spare embarrassment.)

Because of the 140 character limit on Twitter, most Facebook updates are too long, so they are cut off and the reader must go to Facebook (via the dead-giveaway “fb.me” URL) to read the rest of the post. Other tweets are just links going back to Facebook.

Does any of this gibberish look helpful to a visitor who is trying to connect with a destination on Twitter?

There is no indication that this account is interacting in any way with its Twitter followers, or doing anything but staying in one-way broadcast mode via the auto-posting megaphone….and that is totally ineffective in social media.

You wouldn’t run a radio spot on TV.

You wouldn’t submit a brochure as a magazine ad.

Don’t ruin your power to tell your destination’s story to the world by “saving time” with auto-posting. Craft the content to fit the platform.

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Yes. Yes, they are. I don’t even much like advertising, and I’m enthralled by the specificity of what you can do on Facebook.

I’m using a freebie US$50 coupon right now from this blog’s host – Bluehost – to run a Facebook ad campaign. I keep an eye out for such coupons and rarely pay actual money to do this, because I’m bootstrapper-cheap.

When someone Likes our Tourism Currents Facebook Page, a “Sponsored Story” ad with our logo that says, “So-and-so Liked Tourism Currents” will be shown to other people on Facebook who meet the following criteria….I selected each of these, and anyone setting up a campaign can do this….

The ad will be shown to people who:

A) Live in one of these countries: United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, United Kingdom, Ireland, Netherlands, India, Israel, Philippines, Malaysia, Sweden, France, Spain, Greece or Estonia.

**  Reasoning:  I picked English-speaking countries around the world plus countries where I know we already have Facebook Likers and Tourism Currents newsletter subscribers. Too many forget that it’s the World Wide Web.

B) Are 23 years old or older; male or female.

**  Reasoning:  I usually skew the ad target ages older starting around age 30 and only show the ad to women, because Facebook Insights tells us that our largest group of Likers are women ages 35-54, but this time I decided to go for some more young ‘uns and some more men.  :)

C) Have some indication already in their profile and/or Facebook activity that they have these specific interests: Tourism, Hospitality, Economic Development or Destination Marketing Organization.

**  Reasoning:  Those are the exact markets for the social media training that my business offers.

D) They cannot already be connected to/have already Liked the Tourism Currents Page.

**  Reasoning:  Why would I spend money to attract people who’ve already Liked us?

E) They have Facebook friends who are connected to Tourism Currents.

**  Reasoning:  It’s called “social proof;” people tend to trust their friends, so if they see via our Sponsored Story ad that their friends have Liked our Page, it’s more likely that they’ll see that as a vote of confidence and Like us, too.

How Many Will The Ad Reach?

Given all of my selections, Facebook estimates that the ad could be (not definitely will be, but could be) seen by 115,520 people.

Gosh, that’s rather small for an ad with worldwide reach, isn’t it?

No. It’s perfect.

I never go for big numbers when I create one of these campaigns, and neither should you. Put your offer in front of the right people, not a whole bunch of people.

Those are 115,520 people who are PRECISELY the kind of folks who would be most interested in the training we offer. When did you last buy an ad where you could pick who would see it?

This is a no-brainer.

 How Long Will My US$50 Freebie Last?

In my experience, not very long.

We’ll get excellent response and clicks because the ad will appear in front of the sorts of people who are most likely to be interested in it.

I will only pay (from the coupon, till it runs out) when someone actually clicks on the ad, called PPC (Pay Per Click) in industry lingo.

Facebook estimates my Cost Per Click (CPC) to be about 41 cents per click. (Update: I messed this up. Facebook’s bid algorithm suggested that I pay no more than 41 cents per click, so I said OK. Now that the ad is approved and the campaign is live, I’m actually paying about 25 cents per click.)

If each click costs me 41 25 cents, and I’ve allocated a maximum spend of US$10/day until the US$50 freebie runs out, then do the math – I’ll run out of money each day after about 24 40 clicks.

Update one day later, as of 13 September:  I’ve spent US$11.69 of my US$50 freebie coupon, we’re at 38 new Likes for our Page, Cost Per Click is 21 cents, Click-Through Rate is 0.264%

What Really Matters In All This

I’m spending the $50 coupon to figure out how Facebook advertising works (on Mark Zuckerberg’s dime, not mine) and to hopefully attract a few more Likes to our Page.

However, raw numbers of Likes is a totally useless metric for success on Facebook.

What really matters is how well we converse with, encourage and help our Like-ers, how many of them come “into the fold” by allowing our email correspondence into their IN box, how many of them recommend us to their peers and how many buy the training services and products we sell (because ultimately, nothing really matters to the success of our business except cash flow.)

Anything else is Horse Manure ROI.

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It’s been a few weeks since the inaugural tourism bloggers conference in Malaysia (MITBCA 2012), but now that I’ve stopped running around the globe for a few days, here are some takeaway thoughts:

**  The Minister of Tourism for Malaysia, YB Dato’ Sri Dr Ng Yen Yen, can rattle off statistics about the social media spend by her neighboring countries, and she’s quite comfortable discussing how Facebook, Twitter and blogs can help tourism in Malaysia. Leadership starts at the top, and she made the conference happen (even hand-selected some speakers, I’ve heard. Glad I made the cut!) A CVB, DMO or Tourist Board should not have to drag the boss along to the future of communications; I loved being someplace where it was quite the opposite.

**  The future of CVB and DMO staffs, in many cases, are the students who are currently taking college courses in tourism, recreation and hospitality. At MITBCA, the Minister herself insisted that local tourism students attend, plus as many of her own staff members as she could spare.  Just because students may use social media for personal communication does not mean that they understand how to use the same tools for destination marketing with a worldwide reach.

**  The opportunity to connect and develop friendships with fellow bloggers from Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Australia and more was simply priceless.  I’m deeply grateful to have had the opportunity.

**  My Day Two keynote talked about “regular folks” who understood the power of social media early on, and have raised the profile of their town/country by using it in a personable way. Folks like Cody Heitschmidt in Hutchinson, Kansas, Liza Pierce in Maui, Hawaii, Doug Anweiler with the Authentic Seacoast Resorts in Nova Scotia, Canada, and the #ScotlandHour chat on Twitter. One of the highlights of that session was when both Cody and Doug jumped into the #MITBCA2012 hashtag during and after my presentation, and responded to the attendees who were tweeting that I was talking about them.  I did not expect such a quick response (Liza chimed in later from Maui because of the time difference) but it made a HUGE impression on the conference that those two guys were paying attention and were happy to converse with everyone.

**  I’m just me, no big deal, but at this event I was an “international expert.” I mean, I know some stuff, but I did feel a little odd when people lined up to speak to me. Finally I decided to quit feeling awkward about the hoopla, answer every question as best I could, and humbly accept that I’d become something of a guide and mentor to a few lovely people.

**  If I’m going to do more speaking at international events (and I’d love to!) I’d better figure out how to get around jet lag a little better. Of my two keynote presentations, I felt that the first one was weaker than the second because I was in a bit of a fog and a couple of times I caught myself not moving very logically from one point to another. Note to self: do extra rehearsals when you know that jet lag will hit. I literally MUST be able to “do the speech in my sleep.”

Here are some of the wrap-up blog posts by my fellow speakers and attendees; I do recommend that you take a look at a few, because they provide some wonderful additional perspective on this special conference:

—>>  From Indian travel blogger and conference speaker Anuradha Goyal, on the event as a Malaysia Marvel

—>>  From TravelBlog founder, adventurer and event sponsor Ali Watters, on his ….first big conference after “10 years of hiding on islands or mountain tops”

—>>  From a local tour guide: MITBCA coverage and impressions by the owner of Alan’s Malaysia Tours & Travel

—>>  From speaker Shane Dallas, “The Travel Camel,” his delightful Confessions of a Briefly Famous Travel Blogger

—>>  From attendee Jessica Tan, “The JessiCat”, full coverage plus photos of the MITBCA Blog Awards and evening gala event

—>>  Attendee Emila Yusof found the conference an eye-opener

—>>  Speaker Nisha Jha from India thoroughly enjoyed her MITBCA experience

—>>  Thoughts from one of the blogging award winners on MITBCA

—>>  I had fun meeting one of the bloggers who had commented on my original announcement post, Zahari Unczee who wrote about the conference on his ….as I travel blog

—>>  (Addition)  Media Monitors/Asia had a Global Connections post about MITBCA

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Does your organization have a plan in place for content creation and social media monitoring during holidays and weekends?

You know….that time when people travel to your destination, stay in your hotel, look for things to do, places to eat, etc.?

Is someone “answering the social media phone” during those times?

Customer Service

The social web is a place to put content, sure, but it is also becoming a place where you must be ready to provide customer service.

Visitors and guests expect that someone will answer their questions and respond to them even when it’s your “day off.” It’s not much fun for the destination marketer or hotelier but it is what it is; you’ve got to plan for it.

Working one person to death on social media because everyone else waves their hands helplessly and says, “Oh, but I’m not a techie!” is horse manure.

I’d say, cross-train your staff in social media for tourism to build a deeper bench.

Answer The Social Media Phone

Holidays and weekends are a massive opportunity to:

1)  Make solid connections with new visitors.

2)  Reconnect with and welcome those former locals who are returning home for a visit.

3)  Reconnect with and welcome repeat visitors who are not new to your destination/hotel, but ARE new to your Facebook Page, Twitter account or blog.

4)  Chat online with those “expats” who aren’t physically in town but are talking on social media about their memories of you; they would love it if you’d say hello in response.

You can build a whole army of supporters who will go back home and sing your praises, online and off.

Or, you could “not answer the phone.”

Your call.

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Yes, Facebook is bringing its new Timeline feature over to business and brand Pages. This was expected to happen sometime after Timeline came to personal Facebook profiles.

Yes, the explanatory posts are already hot-n-heavy for how to prepare for Page changes.

One change that everyone notes is that Page Admins won’t have a choice of landing tabs (for Welcome landing pages or marketing campaigns of various sorts.) Like-ers will go straight to your Wall.

I’m not convinced that much of any of this really matters (yes, I’m an Admin for many Pages) and here is why :

1)  Most activity and interaction with your community takes place on the News Feed, and hardly ever on your Wall once your new supporter presses that Like button.  Your presence on the News Feed is driven by the EdgeRank of each of your updates, which is a bit of a crapshoot similar to SEO for search engines.  Basically, the Wall is really not that important except for initial impressions.

2)  Most failures I see on Facebook Pages have everything to do with lack of interaction, no strategic planning and abandoned Pages with no updates for months, and little to do with how your Page is tricked out. Brands and businesses get on Facebook without a plan, can’t figure out how or why to build or sustain community, and then they flame out. There isn’t a Page tweak in the world that can save them.

3)  I fundamentally do not care about Facebook.  Any significant effort expended there benefits founder Mark Zuckerberg’s newly-IPO’d pockets, not mine. All of the 1,000+ lovely Like-ers on our Tourism Currents Page could go “poof!” tomorrow and we’d have no say in it. The only data and community that we have any control over are our Tourism Currents clients and our email list.  We are VERY careful to only allow double opt-in subscribers to our list, and we are super-picky about what we send to them. The fact that they’ve shared their email address means a lot to us. Growing that list – plus improving and enriching our website, online course offerings and monthly newsletter – are what we do care about, because we have complete control over all of it.

Never let your interaction with customers, visitors or guests be controlled by someone or something that is out of your hands. The day Mr. Zuckerberg’s machinations drive the success or failure of my business is the day my business partner Becky McCray should shoot me over a cliff, Thelma and Louise style.

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People may think I’m nuts, but Google+ is going to be the lever that begins prying Google away from total domination of much of our online lives.

What follows is, of course, conjecture, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is that I don’t trust my instincts often enough, so here goes….

They’ve Shot Themselves Over Search, Of All Things

By using Google+ to manipulate their own search results, Google abandons the very core of their business culture – serving up unfiltered, “best” results as they attempt to organize the world’s information.

By telling Google employees who push back to get on the train or get out, they undo their organization’s credibility from the top down. A cushy work environment in Mountain View is just lipstick on a pig if your business doesn’t deliver on its promises.

I don’t know where it’s going to come from (Microsoft’s Bing search engine is not nimble enough, although I’d be happy to be proven wrong) but there will be a challenger to Google that will come out of nowhere and capture those who want to go back to basics.

FocusOnTheUser.org is one example of how that movement has already begun, with their “Don’t Be Evil” alternative search button tool. Tellingly, it was created by some engineers from Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Privacy – Google Is All UP In Your Business

The privacy issues with Google are even more significant than Facebook’s.

At least with Facebook, you can just get the heck off of it, or at a minimum take draconian measures with your settings.

Google is everywhere – our email, our videos, our maps, our photos, our search habits and our Android phones – and you cannot opt out of their creepy data mining.

I’ve been told that many people don’t understand the implications of this, and/or don’t care about privacy issues. Fine, but Congress and the FTC do care.  Someone’s going to move on Google; either the consumer public or regulators or both.

Not Another Social Network!

Google+ is essentially another Facebook with some cool bells & whistles (I do like the G+ video Hangouts) but despite apparently roaring user numbers that don’t add up, I sense that in terms of true mass adoption, the regular Joe Bag o’ Donuts guy/gal is not jumping on Google+ like they are getting onto Facebook.

People go where the people are who they want to connect with;  I saw this in microcosm in 2008/2009 when Plurk failed as an alternative to Twitter.  The Geekerati said that Plurk was so much better organized, easier to use, etc. etc. but the fact is, everyone already HAD networks on Twitter and when they didn’t move over en masse to Plurk, people went back to where the people were.

Does anyone out there really want one more blasted digital thing to manage?  Even a lot of techie types are feeling rather overwhelmed, and many others in the mass market are still figuring out Facebook, are puzzled by blogs and find email challenging.

Not Another Social Network! Except Maybe Pinterest

In contrast to the “no THERE there” that is Google+, I’ve been watching the recent explosion over digital bulletin boards on Pinterest. No one wants another thing to manage, unless they really like the thing, and they like this one.

Fans of Pinterest are truly crazy about it. My own line of work, tourism and hospitality, is diving into Pinterest. I can’t remember when I’ve seen such rapid adoption and wild enthusiasm, albeit still mostly among a more tech-savvy crowd than the mass market.

May I remind you of the popularity of scrapbooking?  The hordes of people who’ve jumped onto Facebook worldwide (it just knocked Google’s Orkut off as the number one social network for Brazil) are perfectly capable of figuring out how to transfer their scrapbooking skills and enjoyment to something like Pinterest.

On the other hand, I can’t see any of them lining up to laboriously sort their friends into Circles on Google+.  Actually, it wouldn’t be that laborious, because no one’s really ON Google+!

Tech journalist Omar Gallaga compared Pinterest and Google+ on his Digital Savant blog, saying:

“Despite the growth of Google+, I have yet to hear a single person say she loves it. The people I see posting more often there are marketers, photographers, social media experts and a handful of media people like me sharing the same kinds of links and jokes they also post to Twitter and Facebook. Google+ otherwise feels like a weirdly active ghost town….”

My geek crowd is saying that they love the visual organizing, inspiration and connections on Pinterest, but most see Google+ as a somewhat bothersome “I have to do it because it’s Google” chore.

A privacy-invading chore is not a recipe for mass adoption.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

We’ve been here before with AOL and Yahoo! and other behemoths who are now pygmies. No one stays on top forever.

Google has self-immolated their corporate values by embracing search manipulation and calling it “social.”  Update: Farhad Manjoo on Slate – “Google just broke its search engine.”

They’ve created something that is mostly a marketing obligation for many, a chance to write a quick how-to book for others and a genuine place of enjoyment for specific niches like photographers, who do seem to like G+.

That’s not much of an endorsement for what will be yet another Google failure at building a social network, and will also lead to the beginning of the end because it is not part of the business culture or values that made their company great.

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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.

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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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