Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

Are you responsible in some way for a festival or special event, and would like to get jump-started using social media to promote it?

I always advise including social media as an integral part of your overall marketing plan, not sticking it on as an afterthought, but sometimes you do need to push the train forward a bit even if all the track isn’t laid to the end.

Hey, it worked for the US Transcontinental Railroad….

If your festival or special event is coming up quickly, here are some things you can do to enhance your online presence, and then you’ll have a platform to build on more thoughtfully for next year:

1)  Get a Facebook Page.  Not a Group – a Page. Give more than one person administrative access to it. Your event logo is fine as an avatar. Put it in the Organization-NonProfit category; that’s probably the one that applies best to festivals.  Fill out the Info section thoroughly, with event dates, location and times, simple directions from the main access points, links to your website and any other social media sites you have, and a contact email and phone number.

Put up a few Wall posts, especially some photos and short videos from last year’s event if you have them, and get the word out to your networks that some “Likes” of your Page would be appreciated. Once you get to 25, um, “Likers,” you can switch the Facebook URL to a more personalized one with your name.

Connect with your local CVB, DMO, state tourism office, town government, Chamber of Commerce and the businesses that sponsor your event, at a minimum.

Here is why special events expert Penny Reeh likes Facebook (direct link to the video on YouTube if you can’t see it below)

2)  Get a Twitter account. Make sure it’s something that approximates your event name, but is not too long (that uses up valuable characters and you only get 140 per tweet.)  Make sure that more than one person can tweet from the account, and that you’re set up to tweet from mobile devices.  Don’t worry about amassing a ton of followers right away; many won’t be the right folks anyway (unless you want to lose weight with acai berries.)  You want people who care about and want to connect with your event.

See the Texas Book Festival – @texasbookfest – as an example.

Connect with your local CVB, DMO, state tourism office, town government, Chamber of Commerce and the businesses that sponsor your event, at a minimum.

3)  Create a hashtag for your event.  You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to do so. A hashtag is a unique identifier for tweets related to your event, plus it can go in the descriptions of Flickr photos, YouTube videos, etc. Pick something short.

Take a look at #TBEX (a travel blogger’s conference) tweets as an example of a very engaged bunch following a hashtag.

Make sure your followers know to use it; if you can get folks to use it, it will be easier to monitor your event as it occurs (I use hashtags all the time to follow conferences from a distance.)

4)  Start thinking visually about coverage.  Not a photo or video expert? Don’t let that stop you. Simply think hard about what sort of compelling visual opportunities may be coming up in your event….backstage excitement? Anything you can catch up close in rehearsal? Fun moments at the cotton candy concession?  Get that digital point-and-shoot camera in your pocket and remember to use it liberally, including the video function that most of them now have.

Photos and videos are popular and evoke emotion and interest. They really amp up your Facebook Page and can also go up to Twitter via services like TwitPic and TwitVid.

If you have a smartphone, learn ahead of time how to shoot a photo and upload it from the phone to Facebook and Twitter. You can’t beat the ease and convenience of such coverage.

5)  Tell your fans and supporters where to find you online.  Put it up on posters, at the event entry and exit points, print it out on flyers and the festival map, announce it on the PA – let visitors know that you’d like to hear from them (before, during and after the fun) on Facebook and Twitter, and that they can post their best photos and video to your Wall.

Did that about cover it for quick-launch?

I’ll be speaking at the 2010 TFEA (Texas Festivals and Events Association) annual conference this week about social media for special events;  say hello if you see me there, or please leave a comment below if I missed a good tip.

How can you make a fun biker event even better? More effective integration of social media platforms.

Don’t bolt them on as an afterthought – tie them together and ensure that they feed off of one another.

I was traveling through Front Royal, Virginia recently before a short drive down to Luray. At the local visitor’s center (while putting up a TwitPic of the nice staffer helping my Dad) I noticed a poster for the Motorcycle Grand Tour of Virginia.

According to the website, bikers can enjoy….

“A motorcyclist’s dream tour of the Commonwealth! The ride includes stops at 82 destinations and tourism attractions all across Virginia. The more places you visit, the more fun you’ll have as you collect points for special prizes….The program kicks-off April 10, 2010, and official Virginia Grand Tour passports must submitted by Nov. 1, 2010.”

This year’s special emphasis is recognition of the 75th Anniversary of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

I’d been thinking about bikers and tourism because of Joanne Steele’s excellent post on her Rural Tourism Marketing blog – are motorcycles a good match for your rural tourism town?

What I like about Virginia’s tour is that social media channels are included in the communications effort.

What They’re Doing Right

There is an active Motorcycle Grand Tour of Virginia Facebook Page, with people who are excitedly talking about picking up their Tour passport stamps at various stops (there are over 500 registered riders,) telling stories about their experiences and uploading photos of their bikes in different towns.

There is a Tour Twitter stream at @MotorcycleVA, too, plus a Forum within the main website.

3 Suggestions for Improvement

The efforts would be even more integrated if the Facebook logo, link and feed activity widget were included on the website, so that people didn’t have to hunt around themselves on Facebook to find the Page. It’s the most mainstream social media channel right now, and if you want people to interact with your organization there, then cross-pollinate that presence on your other sites.

I’d love to see a much more interactive tour map, with photos and links back to at least the CVBs of each destination town….the current Tour map is a static JPG photo.  Again, Joanne Steele to the rescue with her RippleNW post about how to create a customized Google Map.

Finally, when I checked with my Android smartphone, I found that the main Tour website is not optimized for mobile users, which I’m sure includes a lot of those riders out on the road.

I’m not a biker myself, but I am certainly a fan of backroads and Virginia has some gorgeous ones. I wish the Tour great success!

Here is CouchSurfingOri, a traveler on Twitter, asking for information about a local coffee shop:

And here is what he decides to do when the right folks who could give him an answer don’t happen to see his tweet, or see it but don’t have the information needed:

He goes to the community review site Yelp to find answers from other travelers.

Do your CVB, DMO and Chamber of Commerce members know about Yelp, or are they “too busy” for such things? Naturally, we can’t be everywhere all the time, but we need to be in the important places.

If your visitors are looking for information on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, it does your members no favors to ignore that and hope it will go away.

Hmmm, I sense another section being added to our Tourism Currents lessons about online presence….

Remember that old saying (maybe from your parents) that there’s a reason you have one mouth and two ears?

It certainly applies to online communications.  Try to listen more than you talk….I know, I know, rather strange advice coming from a talker like me, right?

The first thing to do before jumping into the social Web is to listen (one of our Tourism Currents newsletters has a few tips for better Google Alerts.) Pay attention to the chatter that relates to your destination:  the tweets, the Facebook Wall posts, the blog posts, the photo uploads to Flickr, etc.  Be a “lurker” for awhile, as you might at a party with unfamiliar people.

It’s still very important to continue listening even after you’re comfortable using social media tools.  A lot of hassles and embarrassments can be forestalled by paying attention.

Here’s a tweet that I saw from a well-known tech journalist about the Outrigger Reef Hotel in Honolulu:

“No one should *ever* stay at the outrigger reef in honolulu. We’ve been cheated and abused *daily.* outrageous. Full [blog] post to come.”

When I saw that, I figured that Outrigger management (although they’re on Twitter) probably had no idea that this person was angry and was going to get vocal about it.  So, I sent a quick Twitter DM – private direct message – to a friend in Hawaii who works in tourism PR, giving him a heads up that he needed to go warn someone at the hotel just in case they’d missed the brewing storm.

Funny how that works, because here is the next tweet about the issue from the angry journalist:

“just got a nice call from the Outrigger’s GM [General Manager.] Very responsive and nice about all the problems we had. i think he really cares.”

Here’s the takeaway:  part of the listening process is having your connections out there listening, too, and making sure that important information gets to your digital ears quickly.

You need an army of listeners who care about you.  It’s called a network, and you probably already have one.

Just make sure that they have their listening ears turned on and tuned in.

While checking Twitter the other day I saw a tweet from the Beaumont (TX) CVB that they were live on a local AM radio station in town, and they invited their Twitter followers to listen in.

Since I went to high school in Beaumont, I clicked the link in their tweet out of curiosity. I’m not a big talk radio person (don’t have a commute and prefer music while working at home) and like many people today I rarely listen to AM radio.

But this was AM radio for geeks, because AM 1300 KSET also live-streams shows to the Web.

That means that not only can people in Beaumont and a few surrounding southeast Texas towns like Lumberton, Orange, Nederland and Silsbee listen in, but the entire planet can get involved!   The station also keeps an active Facebook page and they’re on Twitter.

THAT gets my attention.

Just a few days before I’d bookmarked a PRSA San Antonio blog post on our Tourism Currents Delicious page – the post was titled Why Radio Will Survive the Media Shake-Out of Our Decade – so I already had radio on the brain.

Appearing on a live-streaming radio show means that you can remind your locals of what you offer (get those folks to visit more in their own backyards – the Beaumont CVB did a great job of plugging their online events calendar on the KSET show) but you can also reach out to your “expats.”

These are people who perhaps grew up in your town but moved away, or maybe they visit regularly (years ago as children, now as snowbirds, to visit relatives for the holidays, etc.) and they already feel an affinity for you.  Our latest Tourism Currents lesson calls them part of your “online champions network” if you can get them talking about you, so reach out and bring them closer to home, through the Web. A “wired” local radio show is one way to do that.

I know that when when I travel and find crummy music options in my hotel room, I tune my laptop into my local Austin classical radio station, FM 89.5 KMFA, which also livestreams to the Web. Ahh, the familiar morning DJs and a taste of home.

Another way to share online is through embeddable widgets like the one below from the radio station (if you click the Play button, you’ll hear the current live-stream from KSET.)   Widgets can be customized any number of ways and are another method of putting your latest information on other people’s sites.  ”Embeddable” means that you find the embed/sharing code where it says Get Widget, copy it, and paste it anywhere that allows HTML code.

Smart radio station, eh?

(Update:  look at this wonderfully-crafted post by Justin McCullough called The Social Web Ties Us Together….it’s about how he as a southeast Texas guy stumbled across this post about Beaumont while he was traveling in Oregon.  It is a dynamite explanation of how information spreads across the Web in ways that we might not expect.  Thanks, Justin!)

There have been some big changes in the world of search engines, and it’s important for the average CVB (Convention and Visitor’s Bureau) and tourism person to understand them, not just “the IT guy” or your hired gun marketing agency.

Google’s site ranking formula is a closely-guarded item, but fundamentally, to rank higher in search engine results you need lots of high-quality sites linking to your site.

Additionally, from Google’s Webmaster Central:

“One of the most important steps in improving your site’s ranking in Google search results is to ensure that it contains plenty of rich information that includes relevant keywords, used appropriately, that indicate the subject matter of your content.”

See how this works?

1. You create quality content, using the same words (called keywords) that visitors use to find you in search engines (i.e., “family vacation packages Toledo”) and….
2. Because your content is high quality and helpful, the humans who run the good sites eventually link to you.  Then….
3. When visitors search, your site comes up at the top of the search results because its content matches what they’re looking for AND your site is seen as having credibility and authority because others have linked to it.

Yep, that’s pretty much the big search “secret.”

It’s all still true, no question, but now there are new elements to consider.

Bing as a Google alternative

Microsoft’s Bing is now the third-largest search engine, behind Google and Yahoo. It’s gaining traction among users partly because of some extra marketing hype, and also because it is now Microsoft’s default search engine and even the default in some Blackberry smartphones.

So what if it’s the default?

Well, how many users change their computer software defaults, and how many take whatever they’re given out of the box?

In a move for more relevancy and cutting-edge “oomph,” Bing was also the first to cut a deal with Twitter and Facebook about featuring their previously-walled-off content in general search results.

There are deep pockets at Microsoft; I would never totally discount them.

Google featuring tweets and Facebook data

Hot on the heels of Bing, the 800-pound Google search gorilla is now also showing individual tweets in search results, and publicly-available Facebook data (meaning mostly Facebook Fan Pages) is coming soon.  You may hear it referred to as “real-time search.”

So what?

So tweets and Facebook chatter suddenly matter beyond simple community- and brand-building and “rainbow Skittles and unicorns.” They matter in how masses of people find information about your destination on Google.

So if you aren’t visible and participating on Twitter and Facebook, you’re missing a newly-significant way of being found by prospective visitors.

From the Tnooz post Twitter, Google and Bing: The Perfect Storm of travel search:

“In one quick stroke the search engines will be including the Zeitgeist of travel:  the here and now of the travel conversation or what the web community is saying about destinations, airlines, hotels, tour operators, agencies and, most importantly,  the reaction to it.

If this is the case, Twitter becomes a powerful channel for travel companies and can no longer be ignored.”

Plain-vanilla Google search isn’t so plain anymore

Until, oh, a month or so ago, you typed in your search terms and waited for the deluge. Anyone else who typed in those same search terms got the same deluge (with some small adjustments based on your geographic location.)

Then came this month’s Googlebomb.

Google now offers search results that are “personalized,” or tailored to your previous personal search patterns (back to about 180 days.) This technically means that 28 people typing in the same search terms might get 28 different search results, based on their previous usage patterns.  The user, by their own history, somewhat controls what he/she sees in search results, which are no longer “neutral” across all searchers. Users can turn off the pattern-tracking cookies or opt-out of this, but I defer to my point above about how many people ever change default settings on things.

So what?

So how do you achieve search engine prominence for your site when the search results are now fractured to match a gazillion different users in “the new normal?”

There is some skepticism that Google is as smart as it thinks it is.  Will the personalization/customization be helpful, or encase searchers in an echo chamber of their own making?  Will serendipity be lost?  Are all of these “helpful” initiatives making Google searches too complex and therefore possibly less trustworthy?  Does traditional SEO even matter in 2010?

So What?

So here’s my advice….

1. As always, produce interesting and helpful content for visitors to your destination or attraction, but don’t produce it just for a Web site.
2. You’ve got to be “out and about” – searchable and findable in more than one way (including mobile, where Google also made some significant search strides.)
3. You need to consider not only the customer relationships and awareness benefits of your Twitter stream, but also the use of keywords in your tweets. Yes, search engine optimization (SEO) has come to Twitter.
4. A Facebook Fan Page, which I recommended recently as a good first step into social media, has now become more than a nice-to-have.  The question should not be “do we need it,” but “why shouldn’t we have one?”

If I missed any significant issues or implications of the many recent changes in search engines, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been globe-trotting….well, more accurately, Continental-U.S.-hopping.

I’ve been keeping an eye on the action at state tourism conferences for Virginia, Ohio, Missouri and Texas, ESTO (Educational Seminar for Tourism) in Lake Tahoe, the Twitter-related 140 conference in Los Angeles, and BlogWorld and New Media Expo in Las Vegas.  I’ve also physically attended the Association for Women in Communications (AWC) conference in Seattle and heard info from panels that I didn’t personally attend, and I’m already waving hello to people at the Oklahoma Governor’s Conference on Tourism in Tulsa, although it doesn’t really start until tomorrow.

Pretty cool, huh?

While I’d love to have unlimited funds, piles of frequent flyer miles and telepathic powers, I have to confess that I’m “attending” these conference by watching their Twitter hashtags, and you can, too.

Hashtags are simply a way of organizing all tweets that relate to one topic or event.  There is a central Web site for them, hashtags.org, but it’s not always terribly accurate or up-to-date. The assignment of a hashtag is often a rather informal, crowd-sourced event, announced in attendee tweets and thereafter appended by each interested person (if they remember) to every tweet that relates to the topic or event.

For example, as long as I remember to do it, every tweet that I send from or about the Oklahoma Governor’s tourism conference will have #OTIA09 in the body of the tweet – OTIA is the Oklahoma Travel Industry Association.

Look at the photo above to see what it looks like in one sample tweet, from central Oklahoma’s Frontier Country region.

At big conferences, individual panels or sessions will sometimes assign themselves a hashtag.  For example, tweets from the panels in the Travel Blogging Track at the 2009 BlogWorld Expo (hashtag #BWE09) had the hashtag #TTBWE09 (TT for “Travel Track.”)

If you attend an event and plan to tweet about it or from it, and there doesn’t seem to be a hashtag already in use, don’t be shy. Create one yourself and announce it in a tweet.

Do pick something that is as short as possible, since every character in your hashtag counts against the 140 character maximum in a tweet. If your event is an annual one by the same organization, simply change the year at the end.

To follow all the hashtagged tweets in action, I use three tools:

• For Twitter on the Web, go to http://search.twitter.com, type in the hashtag and click Search. All results will come up and when others come in, the Twitter search engine will tell you that and recommend that you refresh your screen.

• For a Twitter organizing application like TweetDeck or HootSuite, set up a column just for that hashtag along with your other columns for Mentions, Direct Messages, etc.  The column will refresh itself automatically and this is an easy way to watch the action in progress.

• Another service by my Round Rock-based friend and techno-whiz Brooks Bennett is TweetChat. It is like using Web-based Twitter Search, but it auto-refreshes and if you reply or retweet while in the hashtag’s “tweet room” the software automatically adds the hashtag for you.

Word of warning – Twitter search only works for a week or two back, so your stream of hashtagged tweets will “evaporate” after awhile. If you want to capture the action for posterity, take some screenshots.

(Update – a new deal between Microsoft’s Bing search engine, Twitter and Facebook was announced 21 October at the Web 2.0 Summit, so now you may want to also go to Bing at http://www.bing/com/twitter and see the search results for your hashtag of interest. I’m hoping they keep results around longer than Twitter so that I can “dig in the search engine closet” further back than a few weeks.)

What do people who live and breathe travel have to say about Twitter?

Look no further than a recent survey of members of the Travel Insights 100.

It’s a group of 100 travel writers, bloggers and thought leaders across eight travel categories, and yes, I am honored to be a part of the 100, a wonderful project co-sponsored by Tips From the T-List, the BootsnAll Travel Network and UpTake.

So, what do we think about Twitter?

Bottom line: it is here to stay, and we like it for finding travel tips, deals, information and connections, insider tips and recommendations and sometimes to connect with Twitterers in the places where we travel.

37 – 39% of us recommended that consumers use Twitter to follow the hotel where they will be staying, and follow the destination management organization/company (or CVB) to learn about the destination.  Don’t you think that percentage should be higher? I do.

How do we decide who to follow?

As fellow 100 member Vera Marie Badertscher pointed out in her analysis post about the results:

“When asked how they decide who to follow, NO ONE said they follow only those that they know.  Twitter is a place to break new ground and find out about new things….They are looking for intelligent people with interesting posts.”

Most respondents aren’t just looking for tweets about travel, but some want only that information. We’re a diverse group with diverse interests, like any bunch of humans. One respondent said, “I follow people who seem interesting” but another said, “Must be 90% tweeting about travel.”

To each their own on Twitter. Do your thing and be yourself; those who don’t like it, don’t have to follow you.

When asked who others should follow on Twitter, this is what I said (we could only pick 5 and there are a ton of others who are worthy, too….)

***  @Marilyn_Res because she casts a wide net & works for a magazine I love (National Geographic Traveler.)
***  @nerdseyeview because she writes like she talks, which is a great compliment.
***  @WyomingTourism because they sell their destination with poetic thoughts.
***  @SeattleMaven because she sounds like your best friend who just happens to PWN the city of Seattle.
***  @CoffeeGroundz because you need an awesome coffee shop and wine bar in Houston TX.

What we tweet about varies as well – travel industry news, our latest blog post, links we like, general travel and event information. My favorite summary from one of the 100 was, “Is it a 140 character postcard? If so, it’s on.”

What did I say about what I tweet as @SheilaS? “People get (mostly) the Whole Me, and I’m chatty.”

I also tweet as @TourismCurrents and @FreelanceAustin, and I try to keep those tweets specifically focused on their respective topics: tourism/social media and freelance tips/opportunities.

Don’t over-analyze it, though.

The other day I was reading this excellent interview with the guys who do social media outreach for New York’s Roger Smith Hotel (@RSHotel on Twitter) and one of the two hoteliers said:

“I did a sort of Twitter 101 course for a bunch of hotels in the region and I said, “Reach out to this person. Ask them if they’re coming in this weekend. Ask them what they’ve got planned.”  I could see them [the audience members] cringing. “I don’t know if I could say that or do that.”

OK, come on, you’re in the tourism and hospitality business and you don’t know how to interact with customers?  Of course you do; that’s your bread and butter! With Twitter and other social media tools, it’s simply digitized and has an incredible reach that you’ve never had before.

Want to dig in further about what the 100 say regarding Twitter? Here’s a SlideShare presentation with more of the results:

Travel Insights 100 Media Page.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks, Berlin Tourism.