Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

How do you keep up (or even better, stay ahead) in a fast-moving environment?

You pay attention to the important things, while everyone else gets sucked into a noise vortex and wastes time on the unimportant.

BusinessWeek had a cover story in April 2005 – yes, 2005 – called “Blogs Will Change Your Business.”

Then they did a follow-up social media report in May 2008, titled “Beyond Blogs.”

Yet, even today in 2011 (almost 2012) there are still plenty of professional communicators who seem rather gobsmacked by what’s happened to their world.

They would not pay attention, roll up their sleeves and do their homework even a year ago, and now they wonder how they got so far behind.

You fall behind by not keeping up.

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In the wildly diverse and ever-growing world of bloggers and other online publishers, how do you sort through the stack to find the ones who interest you?

The ideas below were adapted from a comment of mine on the SpinSucks post “Blogger Outreach: Three Steps to a Successful Program“….in the spirit of more content in less time, I’m also going to put the same information here as a blog post.

Where do you find bloggers who might want to know about your destination, attraction, product, service or book?

I’m not sure I’d recommend that old warhorse Technorati for much of anything these days – I’d go for Alltop.com instead, if you’re looking for online publishers in lots of different subject areas.

Pssst – there’s an Alltop Tourism Industry channel, too!

Consultant Christina Pappas suggests looking for blogrolls (lists of favorite blogs, usually found in the sidebar) which is good when you can find blogs that still do them. Also look at Twitter Lists on Listorious and the membership of open Facebook Groups (one travel blogging Facebook Group has over 800 members; no harm in asking to join a Group if you have something to contribute, but don’t go in there and start overt marketing or you’ll probably get a digital spanking.)

Consider Twitter chats – many travel bloggers hang out on the #TBEX and #TBU hashtags, for example, and they also attend the associated TBEX / @TBEXEvents and Travel Bloggers Unite / @tbloggersunite travel blogging conferences, so show up there and participate.

It’s very effective to connect OFFline by going where the geeks are;  events like BlogWorld & New Media Expo, SXSWi (South by Southwest Interactive,) BlogHer, SOBCon, the 140 Character Conferences worldwide, Blissdom, local Social Media Clubs and Social Media Breakfasts plus small niche gatherings …. there’s a pet blogging conference, a beer blogging conference, food blogger events, craft blogger conferences….you get the idea.

But yes – meet bloggers on their blog, not in their email IN box (where I spend an inordinate amount of time deleting stupid stuff that I don’t want, thanks to people buying my name from companies like Vocus, Cision and BurrellesLuce.)

Meet bloggers where they are, on their terms. After all, YOU want what THEY have.

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At a recent  gathering for some Chamber of Commerce staff, I heard one of them say that his boss is rather dismissive of any time spent on the Chamber’s Facebook Page, yet if the Chamber is not successful on Facebook, that is seen as a failure.

Rock, meet Hard Place.

I’d love to tell that boss that if Facebook is part of an organization’s communications strategy, then interacting with customers or prospects on Facebook is work. It is not “goofing off.”

Welcome to the modern world – Facebook for business is work. It is part of that Chamber communicator’s job to connect with not only Chamber members, but also people in the community who might become members, including hardworking entrepreneurs who may have never considered the Chamber as an asset for growing their business.

The Chamber should be the hub of business development and economic growth in a community, and one way to interact with the community is through social media channels like Facebook.

The boss needs to get a clue, and if he or she isn’t careful, they’re going to see brain drain by staff members who understand the social Web.

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For a fun update on the week’s news in travel, you might enjoy the “This Week in Travel” podcast.

I was on this past week as a guest for Episode #73 The Travel Blog Game, and hosts Chris Christensen, Gary Arndt and Jen Leo plus my fellow guest Jessica Spiegel were all a rollicking good group. We covered a lot of territory in our news discussions.

Toward the end of the podcast recording we talked about Tourism Currents and which destinations, hotels or organizations do a particularly good job with marketing using social media.

Here was our quick list off the top of our heads:

**  Gary  –  Spain, especially Valencia

**  Jessica  –  Portland, Oregon (she mentioned their Twisitor Center for Twitter updates and news about the city)

**  Jen  –  Downtown Los Angeles on Facebook (nice business district initiative) and the MGM Grand Twitter account for Las Vegas special deals

**  Chris  –  Chicago and Maui (we also discussed the Visit Lanai New Media Artist in Residence program, which Gary will be doing later this month.)

**  Me  –  Well….I got a bit carried away past one or two….so I mentioned Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Oregon’s Coos Bay, @SeattleMaven on Twitter and my “usual suspects” in Texas of Austin, San Antonio, Beaumont and Abilene.

Chris mentioned doing some social media CVB training when he was in Maui, and that local hotels, restaurants and resorts all sent representatives to learn. Smart.

We all gave a shout-out as well to Hawaii-based PR pro Nathan Kam, who does a bunch of tourism work on Oahu.  He’s professional but also very personable and fun, and he reaches out to people online in a very un-market-y way.

Of course we left out plenty of other great examples, but still, that’s a pretty good list if you want to check them out.

I’m happy to hear about your favorite social media stars down in the comments, and have a listen to the podcast when you have a chance!

Update: Gary sent me the code to embed the podcast right here….

Subscribe on iTunes | Become a Fan on Facebook | Download the iPhone app | Download

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You may have noticed that Facebook Pages have a different layout – they look more like personal profiles and you can do some new things while acting administratively as a Page.

For an excellent summary of the changes, see Aliza Sherman’s How Brands Can Make the Most of Facebook’s New Pages (on Mashable,)  plus John Haydon’s Everything You Need To Know About Facebook’s Epic Upgrade to Pages.

Here is what intrigues me about the ability to act as a Page or a brand (representing a CVB, DMO or Tourist Board) and not as a person:  the opportunity for better cross-promotion of your region’s offerings.

Here are a few examples….

**  Heritage trails, wine trails, quilting/craft trails and scenic byways can highlight each of their stops and sights.

**  Chambers of Commerce can interact more effectively as a Chamber with their member businesses.

**  Regional DMOs can interact with the Pages for their towns, agritourism places, trails, attractions, hotels, restaurants, shops, parks and nature reserves.

**  Economic development and downtown development entities can cross-promote their offerings.

Drawbacks?

The usual:  we’ll see ham-handed, intrusive marketing and spammy info broadcasting by people who act like a thing instead of a person.

“Hi, I’m Fred’s Donuts!  Buy me!”

Sherman warned about this on Mashable:

“Posting behind the banner of your brand is fine on your Page, but moving into other spaces as a brand can be invasive and unwelcome.”

What are you thinking about doing with your new powers on Facebook?

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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.

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So simple, so straightforward, but I don’t see it often enough.

Integrate your on- and off-line destination marketing efforts. Make sure that people can find you, wherever you have a presence.

This card is the brainchild of Sarah Page, a Texas Social Media Award 2011 nominee and the LCRA (Lower Colorado River Authority) economic development expert.

The only change I’d make would be to add a QR code so that anyone with a smartphone could boot up links to any of the sites above.

But, I know Sarah is already thinking about that….in between True Blue Texas blog posts.

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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.

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As part of US National Travel and Tourism Week (May 8 – 16, 2010) towns and cities across the United States are planning a variety of festivities to recognize and celebrate the importance of visitors and travel.

In Texas alone in 2008, travel spending directly supported over 500,000 jobs and people traveling in the state spent an estimated $60.6 billion.

I’m checking out the scene in Huntsville, Texas, where the newly-designated downtown Huntsville Cultural District is helping the town’s tourism and downtown development efforts.

Helping to kick off the festivities is a new folk art exhibit….Art Matters: Works by Self-Taught Artists….at the Wynne Home Arts Center.

The town decided to use Travel and Tourism Week to draw attention to all of the interesting cultural and arts activities in the area, and the Wynne House folk art event was the jump-start.

I saw lots of wonderfully colorful and imaginative pieces and spoke with several artists at the opening (will post more here later and some pics are going up on Flickr, TwitPic and Facebook as well) but here are three tourism-related thoughts from a few conversations I’ve had today:

• Sometimes it is hard for local people to appreciate their own town.  I’m not seeing this in Huntsville, but at the exhibit opening we discussed this problem. The best wake-up call is visitors who ooh and aah over the things you take for granted.
• Revitalizing a tired downtown is a team effort between “the arty types,” the city government, the Chamber of Commerce, the CVB and all of the people who own businesses in the district.  Everyone has to be on board, and for the long haul, because it can take years to get any traction.
• It is often one or two “crazies” who see the possibilities better than anyone else, and bravely move into the run-down sections of town and open little galleries, restaurants, etc.  For gosh sakes, support them! Support The Crazies!

(Disclosure: my Huntsville trip has been paid for in part by the Texas Commission on the Arts)

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The publication of my Social Media and Tourism ebook yesterday marked the start of an exciting business collaboration with Oklahoma-based entrepreneur and small town business expert Becky McCray.

We are going to work together as speakers, trainers and consultants, showing others how to use social media for economic development.

There are a number of ideas and products in the works including interactive training packages and possibly paid membership to a Web-supported community.

Here at the beginning, Becky will focus largely on small town entrepreneurship and I’ll focus on what we call “Tourism 2.0″ – how travel and tourism can use social media tools to raise awareness of their destinations.

We see them as part of a greater economic development whole for any size of town or city, anywhere.

As a small town entrepreneur herself, Becky noticed lately that many “Shop Local” campaigns seemed to be targeted to larger cities, and she had specific ideas about how to execute such a project in a small town.

Being Becky, she went ahead and wrote the book on it:  a step-by-step guide to starting a “Shop Local” campaign in a small town.   I recommend it for any business person, especially in this tough economy.

I assure you that as we launch the rest of our business, you’ll hear about it on this blog, from me on Twitter or from @BeckyMcCray on Twitter.

Thanks for your support!

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