Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

Although it’s not on the official schedule for this week’s first-ever Symposium on the Use of Social Media in the Tourism Industry where I’ll be speaking on travel blogging (follow the #SoMeT hashtag on Twitter or the SoMeT Twub for related tweets) I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that hallway and evening social discussions will include this topic….

Brain drain.

Those who understand, appreciate and embrace communicating with visitors on the social Web are getting really tired of working for and with those who do not.

I hear the same plaintive words when I speak about social media at conferences….and not always from young people, either….

“Would you please tell all that to my boss?” “How can I succeed at this when Facebook is blocked at my office?” “My boss only wants copy from our website on our Facebook Page, not conversations with anyone on our Wall.” “My co-workers say that Twitter is dumb and no one who visits us is on it.” “I wish I could work with people like me.”

Three things are going to happen in the near future:

1)  As soon as the economy improves, the best and brightest social media communicators, at all levels, are going to leave their tourism organization as fast as they can, to work somewhere that appreciates and supports their skill set.

2)  Organizations that grasp the opportunities presented by social media will poach the best and brightest from “Slowville CVB” as soon as finances permit, and the poachees will gladly go somewhere that appreciates and supports their skill set.

3)  Organizations not currently onboard will get it. They’ll realize that social media is not “something the intern does,” but rather now a core communications and marketing capability. They will appreciate, integrate and fund it accordingly.

That Number 3 option?  Often, it won’t happen. Those are some of the same folks who blew off the impact of the Web and mobile phones.

The first-ever SoMeT conference in Loudoun County, Virginia this week – you can still drop everything, look at the speakers and register here - will be attended by people who very much “get it,” and are on the front lines with visitors every day both online and off.  I give full credit to the organizations that are paying the way of their hard-working employees, or that would pay for them to go, if they could afford it.

There are, however, other tourism professionals who are taking personal leave and paying out of pocket to attend – not because of funding restrictions, but because thanks to a recalcitrant boss, there’s no other way to get there.

It’s lonely at the “tip of the spear,” but those who are there right now need not despair.

People will either catch up with you and laud your sense of vision, or you will end up someplace that is happy to have you precisely because of who you are and how you connect online with your visitors and supporters.

(If you like this post, please consider subscribing to the blog via RSS feed or by email – the email signup box is on the right sidebar near the Search box. Thanks!)

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Just released yesterday:  a 31 second video from Florida tourism that encourages visitors to check the Florida Live site for real-time updates on beach conditions (an example of using social media for crisis communications.)

The gist is that there are hundreds of miles of Florida coastline, so visitors should not assume that every inch of it is oil-covered.

Here is the direct link to the “Need to Know” video on YouTube if you can’t see the embed box below.

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Over at our Tourism Currents learning site (are y’all reading our monthly free newsletter on social media for tourism?) Becky McCray and I are PUMPED to announce a new initiative….

The two of us will teach a one-day workshop for CVB, DMO and other tourism folks on October 13, 2010 as part of the BlogWorld and New Media Expo tech conference at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada.

This is a big deal because we’re always telling clients and Tourism Currents members that to really understand what’s going on with tech and social media, you have to “go where the geeks are” – events like South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi,) BlogHer, SOBCon and BlogWorld – and be immersed in how they communicate.  I’m always chuckling when I listen in on non-geek conferences via Twitter hashtag and hear them exclaiming over tools and methods that they’re hearing about for the first time, but I was exposed to 12-24 months earlier at some nerd fest.

Tech and social media stuff moves fast; you need to keep up in order to make intelligent decisions about whether to incorporate something into your marketing efforts.

We wanted tourism people to check out BlogWorld because it gives them a chance to connect with thousands of bloggers, podcasters and other online content creators (plus there’s a travel blogger track kicking off the day after our workshop in addition to food bloggers, sports bloggers and more.) These are your potential online champions; the people who are fans and supporters of your destination or attraction and who can help spread the word about you online.

Rather than have people come to such a huge event and be rather overwhelmed, we’re working with BlogWorld founder Rick Calvert (a travel enthusiast himself) to design a social media seminar that will introduce tourism folks to our “geek world” and how it can upgrade their communications work.

In addition to our daytime classes on the best ways to connect with online influencers, we’re planning networking meetings, tweetups and possibly “speed dating” sessions to help destination marketers network with the people who can provide them with online coverage.

This is still in the very early stages so I’ll let you know when we get more details worked out, but put October 13, 2010 on your calendars!

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PR practitioners, if you remember this, you’ll be a lot less frustrated….

Unless you have a signed contract with a blogger for advertising or some sort of goods/services exchange, bloggers owe you nothing.

Nada.

Zilch.

Not one tweet. Not one Flickr photo. Not one Facebook mention. Not one blog post.

They do not owe you “buzz” just because you fed them tacos or beer at some event.

You want a tit-for-tat arrangement, go buy advertising or set up a contract that they will tweet X number of times about your brand in exchange for Y sponsorship money (or whatever.)

PR folks are paid to figure out how to build relationships with bloggers.

Bloggers are not paid to figure out PR (um, they’re usually not paid at all for blogging.) They do not blog to build your brand. They blog for themselves and their readers.

I’ve been stewing on this since reading Amber Naslund’s excellent A Dear John Letter to PR Folks. My favorite quote in her post:

“My blog is an intellectual adventure for me, not a channel for you. (emphasis added) I intend to keep it that way.”

Yes, it’s a pain, but if you want what bloggers already have, then you’ll have to do what we did – work for it.

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One of the great benefits of hanging around with tech-savvy people at events like Social Media Breakfasts, tweetups, SOBCon, etc. is that I’ve picked up some very helpful tools for communications and information sharing.

These are in the “toolbag” of just about everyone who is active on the social Web….

1)  Skype (with headset) – Skype is the telephone of the Internet. This basic “let’s talk” tool costs nothing to download and install on your computer, and you can use it for free one-to-one conversations or group conference calls around the world.  I’ve used it for almost two years with a monthly business mastermind group, plus one-off calls like a recent one with my fellow Perceptive Travel Blog writers (scattered across Tennessee, New York, Texas and New Zealand.)  You can use Skype with your computer’s built-in microphone, but there are feedback/audio problems. Buy a $20-30 headset at an electronics store before that first call (I use a comfy one from Logitech that plugs in via USB port.)

2)  Google Docs – Again, free. All you need is a Google account (which also gives you the well-regarded Gmail email, another geek staple.)  Google Docs allows you to share and edit a document, simultaneously if you’d like, across multiple users. No more emailing that .doc or PDF back and forth!  You can also create presentations, forms and spreadsheets. Did I say:  free?  You can also password protect your creations.  How do Becky and I run Tourism Currents? We use Skype video meetings and Google Docs.

3)  Webcam – You may have a webcam (Web camera) already installed at the top of your screen or monitor, or you can buy an external one that you plug in (I use this one from Logitech.)  With a webcam you can livestream to the Web using UStream (geeks are always livestreaming stuff) and you can also do Skype video calls.

4)  SlideShare – After a presentation to a techy audience, I almost guarantee that someone will say, “Will this be up on SlideShare?”  Don’t look at them blankly; have an account set up and upload your presentation slides.  No more emailing huge Power Point slide files.  SlideShare costs nothing; here are my uploaded presentations.  Here’s what you get on SlideShare when you search for presentations on tourism and social media.  Nice, huh?

Did I miss any obvious ones?  Please chime in with your suggestions in the comments.

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Look, I understand that there are still organizations that haven’t even reached the Cluetrain Manifesto stage – they still do not understand social media and they’re still scared of it.

That’s precisely why Becky McCray and I do social media training through Tourism Currents, with a “teach you to fish” philosophy.

I mean, I freak out about cooking and I’m still scared of math after making a blazing grade of “13″ on my first college pre-calculus test.  We all have our problems.

But this is ridiculous.

If you are a professional tourism person, you are by default a professional communicator. Representing a destination, attraction, hotel, shop or restaurant means that you communicate with the public (and hopefully do it well) in a proactive manner.

Professional communicators don’t let someone else horn in on their conversations. They may not always have positive conversations, they may step on their own tongue occasionally, but it’s their conversation.

That’s why tourism people must understand why something like Seth Godin’s “Brands in Public” is taking them down a fool’s path.

Sure, it looks like the “Brands” idea – having a single page with most Web mentions of your brand aggregated into one spot – would make it easy to “manage” conversations. Here’s the page for the Best Western hotel chain, so you can see what I’m talking about.

Update: Brands in Public is apparently now defunct.

Herd all those cats onto one page and give ‘em the spin, for only $400/month to Mr. Godin.

Don’t be a sucker, folks. The Web does not work that way. It’s messy. It’s splattered. It’s people in all their messy, splattered, opinionated selves.  To respond to their gripes, compliments, observations and suggestions, you must engage them at the source of the discussion.

It might be on Yelp or the Chowhound forums. It might be on TripAdvisor. It might be on their personal blog, whether they have positive or negative things to say about you. It would be great if lots of the conversations were on YOUR tourism blog or Facebook Page, wouldn’t it? You know, like the Arkansas tourism blog or Iowa’s Facebook Page.

I guarantee you that the conversations of value are not going to be on some aggregator Squidoo page like “Brands in Public,” and I don’t care if it is a product of Seth Godin, the marketing and philosophical wizard (who does not allow comments on his blog posts, but I digress.)

There is no magic social media bullet. It is your basic communications roll-up-sleeves-and-engage work, with two-way tools like Twitter and Facebook and souped up to a demanding 24/7 cycle.

You can do this. You might have to spend a little money to learn things and move your online communications strategy down the road, but don’t blow $400/month on attempting to herd a pile of Web links on Godin’s site.

You’re smarter than that.

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I almost didn’t take the time to write this post.

I mean, it is Saturday. The house needs major vacuum love (hey, four cats, two kids, what can I say….) and there are piles of things to sort, file, toss and put away. Laundry. Mail. Dishes.

Our weed collection on the front lawn is doing great, thanks.  The mower’s ready to go, but whoops, need to make a run to fill the gas can, first.

And so on….

But, you know, none of that is as important as supporting special people who do special things, and one of the most unique and special people I know is Boston-based Chris Brogan.

Yeah, Mom, he’s one of my “Internet friends.”

Sure, we’ve chatted in person at numerous geeky events like SOBCon (for Successful and Outstanding Bloggers, not that other SOB) and South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) but since we’re a half-continent apart, I mostly keep up with Chris through his Twitter stream and his consistently thoughtful and articulate blog. You’ve never met a more giving, friendly guy and he’s a dynamite speaker as well.

He’s also something of a travel/tourism buff; I’ll bet you’d enjoy his blog posts like Tourism Bureaus and Bloggers and Social Media Starter Moves for Tourism.

Chris and co-author Julien Smith have a new book coming out this week (which is a lot more exciting than dealing with my laundry pile, so I’m blogging instead.)

The book is called Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust.

What’s it about?  Breaking through the noise, essentially.  From the book’s inside flap:

“There’s no question that the Internet has changed the way we do business—especially when it comes to marketing. Consumer environments are short on trust and populated by consumers who are cynical, savvy, and informed. Though it’s easier than ever to reach your customers, it’s less likely that they’ll listen. Today, the most valuable online currency isn’t the dollar, but trust itself.

At the same time, social networks and personal connections have far more influence on consumers than your marketing messages ever will—unless your business knows how to harness them. In Trust Agents, two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of these networks to build your brand’s influence, reputation, and profits.

Trust agents aren’t necessarily marketers or salespeople; they’re the digitally savvy people who use the Web to humanize businesses using transparency, honesty, and genuine relationships. As a result, they wield enough online influence to build up or bring down a business’s reputation. This book will show you how to build profitable relationships with trust agents, or become one yourself.”

I unequivocally recommend his work, and if you have a chance to hear him speak, be sure to get a front-row seat.  Here’s Chris talking to Book Expo America about the ideas behind Trust Agents…. (the direct link to the video is here for my RSS readers and anyone who can’t see the box below)

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Many tourism organizations have asked me lately how they can find bloggers (and others active in social media) who might be interested in covering their destinations.   I thought it would be helpful to write up a quick reference list.

First, thanks for asking, because blogger outreach is one of the main topics that Becky McCray and I plan to cover when we launch our Tourism Currents social media learning community for tourism professionals in September 2009.  If you want to be kept informed about it, there’s an email signup when you click the Tourism Currents link.

Secondly, Becky has already started a new series on her Small Biz Survival blog called Tourism Tuesdays.  For example, here is her dynamite post Never Been There, about incorporating local folks into your tourism outreach campaigns.  I read Becky’s work because she always finds the nuggets that others might not think about or notice.

Want more? Go to the Twitter Search Engine and type in #tourismtuesday to see general tourism chatter (this is called a hashtag and groups together all tweets with the same hashtag marker.)  If you want to see general travel tweets instead, try #travel, #traveltuesday or #TT.

Finally, here’s my quick-and-dirty list of other ways to sift around online to find bloggers and the social media-savvy amongst us:

• The Travel page on Alltop.com – it features the latest headlines from tons of hand-picked travel bloggers.  Use the Search function on Alltop to find bloggers in just about any area of interest, like food or music or Cleveland.
• Travel Blog Exchange – a relatively new forum for travel bloggers, they just hosted a successful TBEX blogging conference that will no doubt become an annual event.
• Google Blog Search – this only returns search results from blogs, so it’s a nice filter rather than using the Big Google haystack to needle-hunt.
• Travel Blog List – this Invesp Consulting list of general travel blogs is sorted every which way and is a bit too unwieldy for finding the smaller gems, but it does contain lots of the major travel blogs.
• Travel Bloggers on Twitter – a blog post by Condé Nast Traveler editor Wendy Perrin, What You’re Missing if You’re Not on Twitter, includes many travel bloggers.
• Update Dec09:  If you’re mostly looking for amateurs – like this Latin America/Spain travel company that is thinking of offering free holidays to bloggers in exchange for content – the BootsnAll Travel Network has lots of bloggers around the world. Disclosure: Boots has hosted my Family Travel Guide since Feb 2006.

Hope that helps to get you started, and if I missed any resources, please note them in the comments below. Thanks!

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I recently received an email from a senior executive at a mainstream public relations (PR) firm.  She said that she has clients in the travel industry and they’d like to know how to reach out to bloggers, and specifically how to get a mention on my BootsnAll Family Travel blog.

You know what’s next (bloggers are a different breed because we’re public, rapid and sharing) so to save myself from drafting an entirely new blog post when I’ve already written what I want to say, this is what I told her, shared here with you….

“In response to your question, the answer is yes, I do get a ton of PR/marketing emails and end up deleting most of them, and blocking those that are totally unrelated to family travel, sent to me 4 times or with giant attachments that clog up my life.

It is too hard (and not worth it for my [travel blog] readers) to keep up with the rising, ever-more-desperate stream of notices (desperate because of the economy) about hotel packages, good deals on ritzy, live-in-a-bubble resorts in Cancun (I’m not a resort kind of traveler, as any reader of my blog knows,) how CVS Pharmacy products can help my family road trip, blah blah blah.

The flood is really starting to impede my ability to see/respond to important emails that involve actual writing or consulting work for pay.

I want to blog about places I personally visit and things I do with my own kids, not regurgitate – for free – press releases about resorts that I’ve never been to and will never visit.  I write for two travel blogs, two blogs about social media and another about drag racing – I don’t have time to plow through all that junk.

The few emails that resonate indicate that:

1. The sender actually reads my blog, and not just to get my name to “personalize” their email blast. I particularly like the copy/paste of my name such that the greeting is one font and the press release pasted below is another.
2. The topic ties into a place that I’ve been to and written about. I’ll admit that the current template on my Family Travel blog is NOT search-friendly and I’m addressing that with BootsnAll, but my topic categories can be found through Archives at the bottom of the front page.  You can’t read my mind to see where I’m going that I haven’t visited before, obviously, so PR might get lucky and hit me with something about someplace I happen to be planning to go (but I doubt it, so why waste your time?)
3. The email topic ties to my focus of budget, independent, family-friendly travel. I’ve lived in the Middle East as a preteen and with my own kids in Asia and Europe, and have traveled all over the US.  I am so NOT the kind of person to stay in some all-inclusive package place in Cancun or Jamaica, so don’t inundate me with off-topic pitches.
4. I would much rather support state/county/city tourism organizations than more commercial travel businesses.
5. I’d rather deal with someone who has already “hung out” on my blog, by leaving a comment or two on some of my posts. Problem is, hardly any PR rep who’s blasted an email at me has ever stopped by and left a helpful comment and participated in the blog’s conversation BEFORE filling my IN box.

When I DO say “y’all come” to tourism organizations, they are often clueless. They’re so used to broadcasting, they don’t know how to interact in a two-way fashion.

For example, I’ve been running the 50 State Series on my family travel blog for weeks now, taking family-friendly suggestions from Twitter and Facebook for each state. I’m giving state tourism organizations a chance to toot their own horn, but I can’t believe how hard it is to get them to respond. Hel-LO!  Here’s the Vermont family travel 50 states post; that is the kind of stuff I want to blog about. Thank goodness for my Twitter followers; at least they know how to respond to calls for tips or I’d never get a post done each week.

Other insights:

1. I talked about this outreach topic in a podcast with travel writer and blogger Pam Mandel for Canadian tourism tech expert Todd Lucier: A conversation with bloggers about their craft.  Some of your clients might find it helpful.
2. They should also read this guest post by my Perceptive Travel editor Tim Leffel:  6 ways to improve your destination marketing (and why you’re toast if you don’t)

Sorry if any of this came across as excessively crabby, but there’s no magic bullet for blogger outreach. Good PR has always been about knowing your target journalist or writer, establishing a relationship BEFORE you pitch and not pitching blindly.

PR folks Geoff Livingston, Kami Huyse and Jason Falls have met and interacted with me on Twitter, on my blogs and in person at events like the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference. I respect their knowledge, count them as friends and would now listen to most anything they have to say to me. They’re the gold standard.”

That’s all you gotta do, really….

Did I miss anything? Am I, in fact, just too crabby? 

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As soon as our gaggle settled in for the first meeting on the blogger’s tour in Hutchinson, Kansas, we started whipping out the laptops, cameras and other geek accoutrements.

That’s what those who are wired into the social web do – we start connecting immediately.

Bloggers are natural connectors, but we do it differently than some, and we use Web tools in ways that seem strange to the unplugged.

Sitting around the table, we introduced ourselves and ate box lunches while we yakked, tweeted and photographed everything.

At one point, I pulled this enormous cookie from my lunch and made some joke about it, and small business whiz Becky McCray pulled out her camera to take a photo.

You could sense that our Hutchinson hosts thought we were a bit silly, photographing everything, but I said, “Just you wait, this cookie can get around, and we’ll use it to talk about your town.”

• The “Hutch cookie” lives on Becky McCray’s Facebook profile under Photos. More importantly, it’s in the Hutch Blogger Tour set. That set shows people some of the neat stuff we saw in Hutchinson (and every time she uploaded something to it, everyone in her Facebook network saw it.)

• Because I’m tagged in it, the photo shows up under Photos of Sheila in my Facebook profile. It showed up in my Facebook network when I was tagged. It shows up again when I post a link to this post on my Facebook Wall.

• I tweeted that I was writing this post about this cookie.

• I tweeted about the cookie after the “Share your cookies with your imaginary Internet friends” was posted.  Because the post was hashtagged with #Hutch (the Hutchinson-related hashtag) it also shows up in Twitter Search.

• The tweet showed up on my FriendFeed page.

• It’s got a Hutchinson tag where I’ve saved it on my Delicious bookmarking page, and it’s on StumbleUpon as well.

• What the heck, it’s on my Plurk page, too.

Yes, it’s only a cookie. It’s a seemingly pointless photo; but, it will live on forever, and so will our words about Hutchinson, Kansas.

THAT’S why the Web is powerful as hell.

(Disclosure:  My visit to Hutchinson was a press trip sponsored by the Cosmosphere and Hutchinson CVB, who paid for my lodging and expenses while I was in town. They did not tell me what I could or could not write about. I paid my own airfare to/from Kansas.)

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