Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

I learned about this from the #tourismcollege hashtag stream on Twitter (that’s why Twitter is great for professional development!)

Below are two screenshots of the Facebook Page for the Forty Putney Road bed and breakfast in Brattleboro, Vermont.

The “before Like-ing” photo very cleverly hints at the delights awaiting future fans/friends of the B&B.

The “after Like-ing” shot reveals some of the goodies found after clicking the Like button.

Here’s the inn’s Facebook Page if you want to see for yourself.

Nice work!

**********  Before **********

********** After **********

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This is a photo of my lap during the South by Southwest (SXSW) Global Tech Summit.

Quick photos and some tweets went up on my Android smartphone, plus special check-ins to each session on Gowalla.

Other tweets and watching the conference hashtag happened on the TweetDeck dashboard on my Dell laptop. Most Facebook business page updates for Tourism Currents or Freelance Austin came from the laptop as well.

Great quotes and insights from speakers were often captured via pen and notebook (yes, it’s true, but they always boot up) to become Facebook or LinkedIn status updates or blog posts days, weeks or months later.

Online publishing is best served by whichever tools work for you, and don’t be surprised when one size does not fit all.

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Can’t miss what you’re supposed to do, can you?

(Screenshot of the Nashville CVB landing page on their Visit Music City Facebook Page)

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At a recent  gathering for some Chamber of Commerce staff, I heard one of them say that his boss is rather dismissive of any time spent on the Chamber’s Facebook Page, yet if the Chamber is not successful on Facebook, that is seen as a failure.

Rock, meet Hard Place.

I’d love to tell that boss that if Facebook is part of an organization’s communications strategy, then interacting with customers or prospects on Facebook is work. It is not “goofing off.”

Welcome to the modern world – Facebook for business is work. It is part of that Chamber communicator’s job to connect with not only Chamber members, but also people in the community who might become members, including hardworking entrepreneurs who may have never considered the Chamber as an asset for growing their business.

The Chamber should be the hub of business development and economic growth in a community, and one way to interact with the community is through social media channels like Facebook.

The boss needs to get a clue, and if he or she isn’t careful, they’re going to see brain drain by staff members who understand the social Web.

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You may have noticed that Facebook Pages have a different layout – they look more like personal profiles and you can do some new things while acting administratively as a Page.

For an excellent summary of the changes, see Aliza Sherman’s How Brands Can Make the Most of Facebook’s New Pages (on Mashable,)  plus John Haydon’s Everything You Need To Know About Facebook’s Epic Upgrade to Pages.

Here is what intrigues me about the ability to act as a Page or a brand (representing a CVB, DMO or Tourist Board) and not as a person:  the opportunity for better cross-promotion of your region’s offerings.

Here are a few examples….

**  Heritage trails, wine trails, quilting/craft trails and scenic byways can highlight each of their stops and sights.

**  Chambers of Commerce can interact more effectively as a Chamber with their member businesses.

**  Regional DMOs can interact with the Pages for their towns, agritourism places, trails, attractions, hotels, restaurants, shops, parks and nature reserves.

**  Economic development and downtown development entities can cross-promote their offerings.

Drawbacks?

The usual:  we’ll see ham-handed, intrusive marketing and spammy info broadcasting by people who act like a thing instead of a person.

“Hi, I’m Fred’s Donuts!  Buy me!”

Sherman warned about this on Mashable:

“Posting behind the banner of your brand is fine on your Page, but moving into other spaces as a brand can be invasive and unwelcome.”

What are you thinking about doing with your new powers on Facebook?

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When someone asks me about social media in the hospitality industry, I usually mention the Roger Smith Hotel in New York, AJ Bombers restaurant in Milwaukee and the blog written by Hawaii-based Outrigger Hotels.

Then I wish that I knew more examples.

That problem was just partially solved by this excellent presentation on Slideshare by Lara Dickson, a designer and social media marketing expert based in Vermont. It’s also included in her own blog post, Social for Hospitality 101.

It covers all that any hotel or restaurant needs to know about getting started using social media tools for marketing, and it’s full of ideas and examples.

Thanks a bunch, Lara!

Direct link to the presentation Adding Social Media to Your Hospitality Marketing Toolkit.

For me, content is either preplanned or is triggered by something that bothers me and I simply HAVE to blast out a post.

I often ask myself, “What is driving me nuts right now, or what makes me happy just thinking about it?” and that becomes fresh content.

Several ways to keep feeding the beast….

1)  Use a monthly or weekly editorial calendar, particularly to help you write seasonal, holiday-related or event-specific blog/Facebook posts or tweets.

Why do you think that “get organized” articles come up every January, and “get ready for bikini season” stuff arrives in women’s magazines like clockwork in April or May? Soup recipes in November, fruit tart recipes in July and August….all of it is evergreen content, re-done every year. Same with those “how to get the most out of XYZ Conference” posts you see before events, followed by link-heavy “Here’s what I learned at XYZ Conference” afterward.

In our very first Tourism Currents newsletter, we talked about editorial calendars for content planning, because it’s that important to have a strategy for what you publish.

2)  Have some way to track the random insights that pop into your head; they often become popular posts if you move fast to articulate your unique point of view on a topical issue. Some people use electronic services like Evernote to record them; I use a notepad and pen (which always boot up.)

Also keep some notetaking device near your bed, because it’s amazing how many ideas will occur to you as you’re falling asleep.  No, you will not remember them in the morning. Trust me.

3)  Which key words and phrases are people using to discover answers in your industry? What are they asking about on LinkedIn Answers, on Quora, on Twitter, in person at conferences, etc? Your answers to those questions are all potential blog posts. Include the keywords in your headline; that’s great SEO because you are using exactly the same “How do I….?” words that people are typing into search engine boxes, and bots like to bring back results that exactly match queries.

That’s what I did for this post – I did a quick analysis of the phrases people use when they do a search about how to blog, then wrote my title.

4)  Sometimes the best posts are images or video, with just a little text.

Always have a camera with you, and periodically scroll your archives for photos or videos that were buried and never edited. I wrote a post about a simple integrated marketing communication example based on a photo that I’d forgotten I’d taken till I did an archive review.

5)  Never waste content. I took my answer to a blogging question on Quora and it became this blog post.

There’s one more piece of content in the can for me, my thoughts kill two birds, and the gaping maw is pacified for one more day. 

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Meetings are no longer one-off, terrestrial events that happen over the course of a few days and then are done until the next year.

Thanks to social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, you can (cliché alert!) extend the conversation around an event, both online and off, from January through December.

Take a look at the activity and discussions on the Facebook Pages for BlogWorld and New Media Expo or SoMeT.

Take a look at the Twitter hashtag chatter for SOBCon or TBEX or all of the 140 Characters Conferences – and many of the SoMeT attendees met each other first through #tourismchat.

These are no longer just your standard panels/keynotes/rubber chicken lunch/trade show blah-blah-blah where “the really good stuff happens in the convention center hallways.”

These are vibrant, helpful, year-round communities in which the online interaction solidifies and grows the offline, and vice versa. This level of enthusiasm translates into more interest in the event; in the case of SOBCon, they were already registering for the 2011 version the minute the 2010 one finished, and now there’s a #SOBCon chat (you don’t have to have attended to conference to hang out there, either.)

The bar for meetings is raised.  People don’t want a good thing to end, and it doesn’t have to, when you use social networking tools to sustain and grow the connections.

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Connect the offline and the online, and you have yourself a more effective means of communicating with your customers.

Many of this sandwich/coffee shop’s clients sit in front of these napkin holders with either a laptop or a smartphone, or both.  Why not show them where to go with that WiFi?

Props to Star Co. Coffee for this idea (and for supporting the weekly gathering of entrepreneurs, geeks and freelancers known as Jelly Coworking Round Rock.)

After I spoke at the TFEA (Texas Festivals and Events Association) annual conference this summer about using social media for special events, I wandered through their marketing award competition display area to get a sense of how members publicize their events.

I paid particular note of the category for using social media to promote a festival or special event with a budget of $75,000 or less.

Since tools and services like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc. are free, they are often used quite imaginatively by those on a small, strict budget.

Here’s a shout-out to the submissions in this category at the 2010 TFEA conference:

***  Pearland Parks and Recreation Facebook Page – lots of events info.

***  TPWD (Texas Parks and Wildlife Department) “Life’s Better Outside” Experience video on YouTube – Really nice one-minute video evoking the outdoors in Texas and the fun you can have experiencing it.

***  Nacogdoches Facebook Page – (I think I got the right Page; my notes are goofy on this one.)

***  Buzzard Bar Cooking Team Facebook Page – This is a fun gang of enthusiastic cooks who participate in chili and gumbo cookoffs and other culinary events all over the state.  Nice use of photos on their Page.

Congratulations to the winner in the under $75,000 budget category:  Texas Parks and Wildlife Department “Life’s Better Outside.”

The winners for social media marketing by events with mid-sized and large budgets?

Mid-sized event/festival ($75,000 – $250,000) social media winner was the Texas Arts and Crafts Fair, and the large-sized event/festival social media winner (over $750,000) was the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

If you’d like to see some of the things I covered in my all-day technology session at TFEA, we have them at Tourism Currents….Social Media for Festivals and Special Events: A Resource List.

In addition, Lesson Five from our Tourism Currents online course is all about special events promotion.

In another 2010 TFEA workshop session, I profiled three events that I think really nail social media, and here they are….

• the Western Minnesota Steam Threshers Reunion every Labor Day weekend in Rollag, Minnesota,
• the Kansas State Fair and
• the Brady, Texas Goat BBQ Cook-Off.

Finally, here’s the TPWD video mentioned above that won in its category – I really liked it.