Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

As a member of the Travel Insights 100 group of travel aficionados on UpTake, I’m looking forward to seeing all of the results of the latest member survey, asking us two questions:

• What trends or predictions do you forecast for the next year within the travel industry? and
• What are the dumbest moments in travel during the past year?

We could answer both questions or just one, so based on my talk at the recent Social Media Breakfast Austin, I chose to tackle the future. Here’s what I said in response to the Insights survey question….

“I predict the mainstreaming of social media into travel, helped along considerably by the cross-generational adoption of Facebook and the explosion of mobile/smartphones.

Not only is Grandma on Facebook, she’s going to figure out that her Blackberry (or iPhone or whatever it is) just put the Internet into her purse as well.

Lordy, now she can upload photos of her grandkids to her Facebook page while riding through “It’s A Small World After All” at Disney World!

Not within this year, but soon enough, social media is going to be “the way we do things” and will be as accepted and ubiquitous as email. No one advertises their services as an “Email Guru,” do they?

Mobile is going to explode because there are going to be multiple handset options available across all of the major carriers, thanks to Google’s Android (I don’t think Palm can recover their dominance, nor Windows Mobile, unless they do something extraordinary very soon. RIM/Blackberry and maybe Nokia have more of a fighting chance for impact.)

Go, Grandma, go!”

I’ll pop up an update post when the rest of the Insights results come out later this week.

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.

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.)

It’s hard to take something called “Twitter” seriously, I know, but the various cutesy-named social media tools and applications are not important in and of themselves.

It is what people are doing with them.

These are early days for Web connection technology, very much akin to the early days of the automobile. Sure, the first cars were loud, stupid and rather unreliable, compared to Ye Olde Horse.

Why bother, said most folks.  Aren’t those silly new machines a ridiculous extravagance?

If, however, one looked beyond how to make the danged things work, and finding decent roads to drive them on, and locating places that sold gas, tires and parts, one could see the Big Picture….fast and affordable personal transportation across vast distances, anywhere, anytime.

That’s the social Web, too: human connection, anywhere and anytime.

Today I’m reading a John Sutter article on CNN.com about Steve Tucker, a farmer in Brandon, Nebraska who sends tweets from his tractor (I learned about the article on Twitter, of course.)

Who the hell cares, you ask? I care. Here is why, from the article:

“Tucker is proof that smartphones are starting to put down roots in rural America. He lives in a 150-person town near Brandon, Nebraska — a place even he calls ‘the middle of nowhere.’ The nearest neighbor to his 4,000-acre farm is about 2 miles away.

Yet, farmers like Tucker are using Internet-enabled phones to gain a foothold on online social networks — both for business and personal reasons. (Follow him on Twitter)

‘I can be in the most remote place and just with the power of having a BlackBerry … I can communicate with anybody at anytime about anything,’ he said. ‘It is just amazing.’

The growth of smartphones on farms is important because many people don’t think about where their food comes from, much less associate a specific farmer with that process, said Andy Kleinschmidt, a farmer and agricultural extension educator at Ohio State University.

‘When you can put a name or personality with someone who’s actually raising corn and soybeans or actually milking cows, that’s the most important thing that’s come about in my opinion,’ he said.”

We are watching our society knit itself together, making far-reaching human connections across timezones and cultures, in totally new and unexpected ways.  I learned about Steve in Nebraska on the same day that I reconnected with a wonderful travel writer in Florida;  I first heard Tom Swick speak at the best annual book festival anywhere, and now he’s figuring out what to do with Twitter, just like Steve on the tractor.

I would not miss this moment in history for anything, even if it does come laden with goofy names for the tools we are using to make that history.