(This is a guest post by Jody Halsted about a cool conference in Iowa that is all about connecting and educating Midwest bloggers. I followed the conference hashtag on Twitter during last year’s version of it and was impressed, so I asked Jody to tell us a little bit more about it.)

In an effort to change the perception of the Midwest from a place to get away from to a place to explore and discover, the Destination Midwest event at the I_Blog Conference will bring together Midwest bloggers and Midwest destinations for an evening of (virtual) travel, networking and the opportunity for mutually beneficial relationships!

According to the 2010 Ypartnership/Harrison Group 2010 Portrait of American Travelers, “1 in 4 family travel planners consult a blog before booking” a vacation.  According to the Edelman Trust Barometer 2010, people trust “people like them” more than TV news, search engines, and newspapers.

Blogs create community, build friendships and foster relationships. In our ever-increasingly connected world, a good blog will open your eyes to a world you never imagined and lead you places you never knew you wanted to visit!

Blogging has grown to include more than just written words on a page and is now the center of the social media wheel.  By utilizing images, video techniques, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare and Gowalla – just to name a few – a blogger can become a tour guide, travel resource, location expert and handy reference.

The Ypartnership/ Harrison Group study also shows that family travelers are more likely to have taken a vacation in their local area as an alternative to vacationing in a destination that would have required traveling a greater distance.  By connecting with bloggers within a day’s drive from your destination, you will reach their local audience and increase your chances of being the “local area” vacation of their readers.

The Destination Midwest event at the I_Blog Conference takes place Saturday, November 6 from 6-10pm.  Space is limited to 20 destinations; cost is $250 per destination.

Please visit http://iblogconference.com/destination-midwest for more information and to register for Destination Midwest, or contact Jody Halsted via email (jody@iblogconference.com), Twitter (@I_BlogConf and @iatraveler) or by phone at 515-707-6547.

If your destination is interested in learning more about social media, conference tickets are available at a discount for participants in Destination Midwest.

Note: Jody Halsted is working very hard to change the perception of the Midwest from a place to get away from to a place to explore and discover through her website Family Rambling and articles she writes for other travel publications.  She loves to work with destinations and share the unique adventures that are found only in the Midwest.  As an example, she worked with the St. Louis CVC last summer; you can see the series she wrote about it here: http://familyrambling.com/index.php/exploring-st-louis/usa.

It’s a simple formula, really.

To create and publish great content (blog posts, Facebook Page Wall notes, videos, tweets) you need….

1)  Lots of good ideas about something that interests you, a way to record those ideas and time to do so

2)  An editorial calendar to coherently organize and schedule the ideas – expanded into content – for publication, and time to think about and work on the calendar

3)  Structured blocks of time to create all of the great content that you’ve thought of, then organized and scheduled

Three simple things, and time ties them all together.

Number One is doing fine for me;  I have a whole notebook of blog post ideas that I carry around, and I keep notecards by the bed in case of late-night rockets of brilliance to the brain. Read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life for more insights into organizing your ideas.

I used to be pretty good with Number Two, then fell off of the planning wagon, got tired of pulling content out of my left ear at the last minute, and stumbled wearily back to the calendar.  The key is to schedule time to think through and craft the calendar, organize the content ideas and fit it all into your workflow. Go read Becky McCray’s post on the six most important things; it will help.

I am not doing so well at Number Three.

My basic schedule for keeping up with 3 blogs means a post for one of them each day, Monday through Friday (this blog is scheduled for every Tuesday and Friday. Ain’t happening, is it?)

This means I need a more functional schedule. It also means I am considering dropping one of the blogs for which I’ve run out of creative energy. In my Navy shipboard engineering days, the electricians called that “load-shedding”….dropping noncritical items off of the power grid to ensure power to vital systems and equipment.

It does not mean I need to “make time.”

You can’t “make time.”  That goose is already cooked. No one gets extra helpings of time or special favors from the Wizard of Time.

24 hours. That’s it.

As usual, strategist and thinker Chris Brogan has a thoughtful take on time. Here is the direct link to his video on YouTube if you can’t see the box below.

I found it helpful, and hope you will, too.

At the recent TACVB (Texas Association of CVBs) annual conference in Lubbock, my business partner Becky McCray and I negotiated a trade show booth for our Tourism Currents online course in social media for tourism as part of our speaker fee.

The only problem was that we had never put anything in our marketing budget for booth decorations or signs. We’ve never planned on doing trade shows; such events are probably one of the most expensive ways to market (booths often cost $500 and up) and our network seems to be building pretty well via word-of-mouth, social networking, current customers and our speaking engagements.

How could we put together something engaging without looking, well, cheap and pathetic? We’re a startup, but we have some pride! We decided to shop my stash of personal possessions for decorations, and not sweat the small stuff.

I was the only person at the trade show because Becky wasn’t able to arrive from Oklahoma until the conference opening reception.  I’ve never done a trade show in my life; it was homework time.

First, I read an old article that I’d torn out of Inc. magazine and saved just in case I ever needed it – How to make the most of trade shows.  A quick trip through the article archives of the TSEA (Trade Show Exhibitors Association) was also helpful, and I like Make Your Booth Stand Out at a Trade Show from The Entreprenette.

Based on that research and my own experience as a trade show attendee, I could see that we didn’t need to get too fancy with the booth, but it did need to be eye-catching. We needed something to fill physical booth space since our main product is online training.  I looked around my house for things to use – as a globe-trotter, I’ve done a lot of shopping over the years and have figured out how to find travel souvenirs when you’re on a budget.

Here’s what we did:

***  Assess the amenities already provided. We would have a skirted 8 foot long table, head sign with our company name, two chairs and a waste paper basket.  There was power available.  We also ended up with a terrific location, right by the trade show entrance.

***  The table was pulled back into the booth about 2 feet so that I could stand in front of it. I never used the chairs because it’s best to stand up to chat and engage with your visitors. Wear comfortable shoes and a perpetual smile when you’re the “booth babe.”  :)

***  Pick a color scheme.  Our Tourism Currents website designed by Kim Fenolio has a lot of blue in it, so I brought my blue-and-white patterned table runner (originally purchased at Pier One) and two blue tablecloths – one from Kenya, one from Egypt to fit the conference travel/tourism theme – to drape over one of the chairs and over one side of the side drapes. There are a few touches of orange on our website, so I wore an orange jacket.

***  Fill empty space.  I brought a large, tall blue-and-gold cloth umbrella that I’d bought years before on a Navy port visit to Bali, Indonesia. When opened, it looked festive, matched the color scheme, fit the travel/tourism theme and drew a lot of interest. Driving my little Hyundai sedan to Lubbock with a pole running up the middle seemed a small price to pay (I can fold down part of the back seat to accommodate long items. I’ve even gotten a Christmas tree into that car.) I was also going to buy and blow up a bunch of blue balloons at a local grocery store to fill space, but the umbrella did enough.

***  Give people something to fiddle with.  I used what I had – my bag full of tech accessories became a “Geek Gear” display. Many people picked up items, looked at them and asked questions about my external webcam, pocket video camera, tripod, Skype headset, etc. I had to trust that the gear wouldn’t walk off, and none did, but you have to know your audience. I also set out a bowl of Werther’s hard candies brought from home, guarded by a small plastic Japanese Godzilla doll just for fun.

***  Nice colorful flyers (mostly blue) run off at a Lubbock FedEx/Kinko’s were our only out-of-pocket expense:  US$38.32 for 60 of them, which was about 30-40 too many. Becky designed the flyer to include course information and a discount code for the TACVB event, plus some info and another code for our upcoming tourism workshop at BlogWorld and New Media Expo on October 14.

***  Stack of business cards.  I already had plenty, made by moo.com, which lets you do a lot of customizing and use many different photos on the backs. I use the regular business card-sized ones, not the mini ones that fall out of card decks too easily and annoy me.

***  My laptop, with tabs already open to our Tourism Currents course details page, our Facebook Page and our Twitter stream.

***  A clear plastic glass brought from home, about half full of water with a light up party reusable “ice cube” in blue floating in it (originally from our family trip to Disney’s Hollywood Studios in Florida awhile back, because, why not?) It was colorful and and caught the eye.

That was it.

The most important thing I did – besides chat with people who came by the booth that day – was to follow up the next week via email with everyone who had left me a business card.

And yes;  it resulted in new paying customers for our business.

This was the generation that saw the Soviet Union launch the beach ball-sized Sputnik I spacecraft in 1957. That moment was a turning point in the life of then 10th-grader Homer Hickam, author of the book Rocket Boys and subsequent movie October Sky.

Sputnik motivated Hickam and an entire nation to embrace technology, kick-start the “space race” and put a man on the moon by 1969.

Boomers were the original geeks.

They watched the earliest television programming (including Star Trek starting in 1966) then bought the first color TVs.  They saw increasingly more sophisticated cars on the road, a telephone installed in every house and electricity delivered to every nook and cranny of the nation.

Their superb tech heritage is going by the wayside, however, as many are letting themselves be Sputnik’d….surprised and intimidated….by thumb-texting, Facebook-ing, tweeting younger folks.

There was a time when this generation led the way in technical prowess, and not just those in their 20′s and 30′s.  Grace Hopper was writing and creating the COBOL programming language in 1955, when she was 49 – which is my age right now.

Too often, I see my peers and older Boomers wave their hands helplessly about computers, smartphones, digital cameras and social media.

They say, “I’m not really a tech person” or “I don’t understand this stuff” or “I don’t want to mess with this. I’m too old, I guess.”

With their combination of life experience, perspective and tech-savvy history, they could run rings around all of the young punks.   Psychology Today says that:

“Baby Boomers are not the Luddites that some media critics seem to suggest, and in fact are very plugged in to technology adoption, something that marketing initiatives have yet to reflect.”

Good!

Show me more of these plugged-in folks, like boomer travel blogger Donna Hull, or business analyst Miss Dazey or communications wizard Connie Reece. Maybe the helpless hand-wavers I’m seeing are not the norm.

I’d love for that to be true.

Most of you know that I’m really big on getting “the ungeeked” to go to one or two tech-related conferences or events per year.

There is no more effective way to figure out how people are using technology and mobile devices right now to communicate; it’s the best market research you can do and it will put you way ahead of competitors who are still scratching their heads over Twitter (which really burst on the scene at SXSWi 2007, the South by Southwest Interactive tech conference, one of the world’s largest.)

I recently wrote a guest post about this on the BlogWorld and New Media Expo blog – Go Where the Geeks Are: Why Tech Events Matter for Tourism and Travel - in support of the all-day tourism workshop that we’re doing at BlogWorld on October 14.

Meantime, the Panel Picker is now open for SXSWi 2011 in March – one of the unique things about “South by” is that part of the panel selection process is pubic voting and commenting on the proposed panels. You can give your feedback whether you’re attending SXSWi or not; there is a quick and painless registration process to do so.

I’ve proposed a panel with myself and two other speakers – my Tourism Currents business partner Becky McCray and travel/tourism entrepreneur Andy Hayes.

It’s titled Tourism Catches On: Old Industry Meets New Media.

Issues we plan to talk about include:

1. How does story and relationship work with new marketing online?
2. Can destinations work with online review sites or is it all out of their control?
3. What roadblocks hold tourism organizations back and how can they be overcome?
4. How can small staff groups possibly implement all these new tools when all this old work still has to get done?
5. What’s coming next in tourism and destination marketing?

If you have a moment, I’d really appreciate your votes, comments and feedback on our Tourism Catches On panel proposal.

Technology is for everyone – we want more mainstream industries and interest at SXSWi and we hope you do, too.

In today’s “CVB 101″ session at the TACVB (Texas Association of CVBs) annual conference, speaker Dan Quandt from South Padre Island CVB spoke of tourism organizations as “scouts” – people who look ahead to the future, try to explore its possibilities and then come back and teach others.

What can your CVB, DMO or tourist board do to be a more imaginative guide to visitors?

How can you show them your destination’s glorious possibilities?

What can you do to find creative ways to help improve the community for future visitors?

Use every tool at your disposal to be a scout;  lean way forward in the saddle in the pursuit of excellence.

Not having a website in 2010 is akin to not having a telephone number.

Why would you make it hard for customers to find you?

Why would you cede your online presence to TripAdvisor, UrbanSpoon, Yelp or Merchant Circle? That’s what I find when I Google you and you don’t have a website.

Yelp is your website? Awesome.

That is bad business, and it is unworthy of you.

(In our Tourism Currents course – which is now open to new enrollments! – we call your online fans and supporters “online champions.” Please join us to find out more about using social media tools for connecting with visitors.)

Spend some time in the online world, and you’ll rapidly discover that those “online influencers” who all the marketing folks are chasing are only a part of the digital communications story.

Even worse, tourism PR and marketing is often fixated only on travel bloggers because they see them as an alternative to something they’re familiar with: print travel writers. They do not appreciate the possibilities offered by niche blogs, or the Long Tail’s impact on travel.

If you look beyond the Hype-o-Meter, there are plenty of people who blog sporadically, if at all, but have a significant online presence in other ways….

• Photography with Flickr
• Video on YouTube or Vimeo
• Podcasting on iTunes or Blog Talk Radio
• On Facebook
• On Twitter

There are even people who are active and engaged in old-school forums and bulletin boards, like this forum on geocaching (and geocachers love to travel to new places to look for stuff.)

If you scoop them all up and dump them in one big “blogger” category like some of your less-savvy marketing peers are doing, you won’t have a complete picture of how to find those online champions.

Be smarter than that; have a more complete picture of the online space where you’re trying to compete for attention.

This is a video tag sort of QR code; you can point your smartphone’s camera to it and with the right app (usually a barcode reader but in this case the Microsoft Tag app) some sort of content will pop up.

Content can be everything from some text describing the item that the code is on, to a URL that will open in your phone’s browser, to the coolest thing – a little video playing on your phone.

I can think of some imaginative ways to incorporate these into your downtown walking tour’s historical markers, for one thing.  My Canadian friend Todd Lucier and I are on the same wavelength about QR codes these days….here’s his recent blog post QR Codes: making interpretive signs come to life.

What ideas do you have? Please share in the comments!

As a visitor to your town, staying in one of your member properties, here is what I’m thinking these days….

Full-service hotels need to rethink what “service” means to the traveler.

My idea of a wallet-worthy full service hotel does NOT include:

• Charges for WiFi, which invariably has a weak signal because you don’t have routers and boosters on every floor. I expect free WiFi like I expect the TV to work (and it’s a lot more important to me.)
• Charges for parking – except for big urban hotels, where space is at a premium and parking fees are more acceptable.
• Those tacky $6 bottles of water in the room.  See Chris Brogan’s Man on the Go open letter to the hotel industry about that….
• No breakfast, not even a muffin and cup of coffee. No, I won’t pay $15 plus tip for your overpriced Continental delivered to my room. That’s not pampering; that’s highway robbery. No, I don’t have time nor interest in eating an equally overpriced plated breakfast in your cavernous-yet-always-empty restaurant downstairs.

No, your fancy sheets, 48 pillows and giant flat screen TV do not make up for the above. Making me join your loyalty program for such benefits seems pretty cheesy, especially if I don’t plan to stay at your properties much in the future.

I’m not that into you, and neither is my wallet.

The Hampton Inn and Suites down the road has you beat on all fronts, and I’ll join their loyalty program because I actually feel LOYAL to them for their high-value lodging experience.

Have you heard? There are some problems with the economy these days. Even expense account travelers, your favorite cash cow, are looking for value.

Get with the program.

In Houston recently, I was so peeved about being charged for parking that I took the time to add a Tip on Foursquare about how to find the free parking garage around the corner. Ironically, my check-in to add the Tip was enough to make me Mayor of the hotel.

If only I really was; the things I would change….