You know that part of CVB that deals with meetings? CVB stands for Convention and Visitors Bureau, after all.

How can you find and connect with the right people and encourage them to consider your destination or venue for their event, when there are so many social media channels – blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – and so little time?

Join us for a special Tourism Currents webinar on Wednesday, May 18, 2011 starting at 2 pm Central, and we’ll show you how to book more meetings using focused and intelligent social networking with the event planners you want to reach.

We’re excited to be partnering with DMAI (Destination Marketing Association International) and their empowerMINT one-stop RFP service for meeting planners, to bring you this online session. It’s part of a series of interesting educational events leading up to our Tourism track at this year’s BlogWorld and New Media Expo West 2011 (Los Angeles CA, Nov 3 – 5.)

The webinar includes an hour with me, my Tourism Currents co-founder Becky McCray and our (always entertaining!) insights into social networking to connect with meeting planners, then 30 more minutes of Q&A….90 minutes of solid info.

Sound good?  Let us help YOU fill those meeting spaces!

Here’s the Book More Meetings webinar info and signup page - the event is FREE for empowerMINT members and $47 for others.

(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!)

After our great experience holding the 140 Characters Conference Small Town in the restored Fox Theatre in Hutchinson, Kansas, I began thinking about how small towns with the right timing, venue, networks and entrepreneurial spirit can host more tech- and social media-related events.

The result of my musings was an article I wrote for the January 2011 issue of PCMA Convene (the magazine for the Professional Convention Management Association) and a guest post on the PCMA blog: “Small-Town, Not Small-Time.”

An excerpt from the post:

“Some tips on using a small town venue for digital gatherings:

1) Don’t make assumptions about which places can and can’t host. The 140 Characters conferences, for example, “are usually and most effectively held in theaters; in fact, the very first one in New York was based on the idea of [a Twitter-like] one hundred and forty characters gathering together in an off-Broadway theater,” said SmallTown’s lead organizer Becky McCray, who has also spoken at 140 Conferences in London and Detroit. “All we had to do was bring WiFi (wireless Internet) into Hutchinson’s Fox Theatre, and it was perfect.”

For the rest of the tips, see the full article about how an Art Deco theater hosted a bunch of modern geeks, in “Small-Town, Not Small-Time.”

So many small towns and rural areas fight the image of being backward, and they find it tough to draw and hold onto talent.  The web and social media changes that, and consequently can have a big impact on economic development.

For more on that, keep an eye on the next 140 Conference Small Town, again in Hutchinson, on September 20, 2011.

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.

(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!)

Although our Tourism Currents online learning community is a pretty new startup, we decided this month to sponsor an event for the first time.

Now we’re in the “big leagues,” right?  :)

It’s the Get Smart professional development conference run by the very active Austin, Texas AWC (Association for Women in Communications) chapter.

I’ve been an AWC member since 2006 (my journalist Mom is an Member Emeritus, ever since it was an honors journalism sorority in the 1950′s) and it is chock-full of a lot of very networked communicators, many of whom are involved in some aspect of tourism or hospitality.

One benefit of our sponsorship is the chance to provide “collateral” – some swag, a printed handout or something – to be distributed to conference attendees.

Now, I was as clueless about this as I was about how to run a trade show booth on a budget, but after some thought I realized that no one wants yet another brochure or piece of paper with pretty pictures.  They want useful information.

So, I rejiggered a simple Word document handout that I’d done for the Texas Travel Summit on social media resources for CVBs to attract conferences, and made it a more general “Tourism Currents favorite resources and tips for social networking.”

Our favorites for finding blogs?  Alltop.com (here’s the Alltop Tourism Industry channel) and Google’s blog search engine.

Our favorite parts of LinkedIn?  The Groups and Answers sections.

Our best tip for Twitter?  Follow one or more of the many regularly scheduled industry-specific hashtagged Twitter chats.

Why are videos and images important?  Because they are great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) if fully titled, tagged and described.  There is less competition for them than for text in universal search.

None of these are blinding revelations, but if every person who gets one of our handouts learns some tidbit they didn’t already know, then we’ve succeeded in not killing trees simply to get our name out there.  If they contact us for more training….well, so much the better!

Tourism Currents logo, URL, Twitter names and email address at top, helpful info, all on one page  –  BOOM.  We’re done.

What sort of ideas do you have for printed collateral that best benefits your event sponsorship? I’d love to hear from you down in the comments.

It’s easy to see how social media and mobile devices have changed how meetings and conferences themselves are conducted (for more on that see Jeff Hurt’s Seven Tips to Make Your Conference Millennial-Friendly) but how about the idea of using social media networking to attract more conferences TO your town?

I’m speaking on this very topic at a breakout session for the Texas Travel Summit, and here are some of my thoughts….

First, The Fundamentals

1) This is really a networking issue.

Social media is simply another tool to network and connect with the people who schedule places for meetings.  Be a helpful and informative resource, and get in front of meeting planners where they are, online and off.

2)  You still must ask two basic, old-warhorse questions (social media does NOT change the need to ask them)

——–>>  Who is your market for meetings?

——–>>  What does your town have to attract that market?

3)  Figure out who plans meetings. One good place to start is associations, and there is an association for just about every trade, industry and interest that you can imagine.

Where can you find decision-makers from associations? In the US, start with the ASAE (American Society of Association Executives.) Look for information about associations in your prospective meetings market.

Another place to look is event professionals and meeting planners.

Now, the Social Media Stuff

Here are some ways to connect with these folks, using social media.

1)  Read their professional and industry blogs.

***  Start with the Alltop Event Planning channel or the Trade Shows channel.  Find a few industry blogs, keep up with them, make comments and interact with the authors. Over time, let them know that your destination is the sort of place that they’d love for their meetings.

2)  Connect on LinkedIn.

***  Go beyond filling out your personal profile (although a complete one is important) and also create Company profiles for your CVB and your Convention Center. Here’s the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority Company profile.

***  Find, join and be visible in Groups that relate to your market.

Start looking at Groups like the DMAI (Destination Marketing Association International) empowerMINT Group for CVBs and Meeting Professionals, MPI (Meeting Professionals International,) the Association Resource Group, PCMA (Professional Convention Management Association,) Event Peeps (for Live Event Industry Professionals,) Corporate Event and Meeting Planners and the IAEE (International Association of Exhibitions and Events) Group.  Just pick a few for active participation or you won’t be able to keep up.

***  Pay attention to, and provide assistance when you can, in LinkedIn Answers – a Q&A section of the site – particularly in response to questions and activity in the Conferences and Event Planning section.

3)  Go find the meeting planners and associations on Twitter.

Use the LinkedIn list above and find @ASAECenter, @MPI, @CVBConnect, @PCMAConvene, etc. on Twitter. Interact, say hello, retweet their good stuff.

Here’s where you can really dig in:  hour-long, regularly scheduled hashtagged Twitter chats. Introduce yourself at the start and watch the tweets fly on the topic of the day.

There are two chats you should know about and possibly join when they happen….

• #assnchat for associations is Tuesdays, 1-2 pm CST.
• #eventprofs for event planning professionals is Tuesdays, 8-9 pm CST and Thursdays, 11 am-12 noon CST.

4)  Show meeting planners your town and your conference venues with video and photos.

Videos can go on YouTube, Vimeo and your Facebook Page. Photos can go on Flickr and your Facebook Page.

• Create videos that show conference facilities in detail, inside and out and a bit of the surrounding area. Cover transportation to/from it. If you don’t want to hire pros to do this, use a handheld camera like the Flip or the Kokak Zi8 and do it yourself. Another option is making videos out of photos using Animoto.
• Create videos during a few events as they are in progress at your venues. Show actual people during an actual meeting, and include a few short interviews with people who like your convention center and your town.  Have them sell your offerings!
• Take photos, too. Here is the Flickr page for the Virginia Beach Convention Center, and the Rhode Island Convention Center photos on Facebook.

Summary

It’s not a magic bullet. It is building relationships and networks with humans and it takes time.  Social media is the tool you’re using to network. It’s a means, not an end.

Bonus:  social media profiles help your Web find-ability and SEO (Search Engine Optimization.)  Hurray! You’re making people AND Google happy. Even better, it helps your disabled folks find you online because it helps meet Web accessibility standards.

Any town can do this….the possibilities for hosting meetings are pretty endless.

How else do you think that the 140 Conference SmallTown tech conference ended up in Hutchinson, Kansas?

Update: here’s the presentation as it was presented at the TTIA Texas Travel Summit 2010 – the slides about blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and Videos/Images have embedded links that you can click through.

(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!) 

My Tourism Currents co-founder Becky McCray and I decided last month to make our monthly newsletter fully available for anyone to view on our website, without a login (although we still take signups for you to get it first, via email.)

We’re pretty proud of our work and thought you’d like a quick update on the last two issues:

• April 2010 – LinkedIn for tourism – Most everyone is on it, but many wonder how to really use it….we talked about the LinkedIn social networking site and how it can help you for tourism and destination marketing. Includes some Twitter hashtag tips, travel writer/blogger info and our recent Tech in Twenty interview about Tourism Currents.

• May 2010 – Social media and tech conferences for tourism pros - What is one of the best ways to figure out tech and social media? Go OFFline to attend a tech or social media conference.  We give concrete, detailed suggestions for the most useful events to attend in order to learn plenty of things that can help with destination marketing (to say nothing of some pretty amazing networking and brand-building for your town, region, city or attraction.)  We also included some tips to amp up your LinkedIn profile, as a follow-up to April’s newsletter.

We are reopening our online classes later this month (multi-part lessons, videos, a forum, live Q&A with us – all about social media and tech for tourism.)

I’ll put up a post here the minute we’re open, or you can get on our Early Bird list. Thanks!

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 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.)