Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

There are a lot of different ways to call attention to your destination or attraction using video, so I’d like to start highlighting some of them on this blog to give you ideas and inspiration.

I found the video below on StumbleUpon, a public bookmarking site where people can literally “stumble upon” content (and share a thumbs up/down) by pushing a button on a tool bar.

The Iceland tourism organization is trying to dig out from under the negative travel publicity from their recent volcanic ash cloud, through a campaign called “Inspired by Iceland.”  I assume they’re using part of the money that Iceland-based marketing consultant Hjörtur Smárason talked about in his post Destination Marketing: How Would You Spend 3 Million Dollars on Publicity?

Lovely people doing a silly dance and making their destination look like fun; why not? There’s even a mildly racy hot springs romance moment that the average CVB in the US wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, but which I rather enjoyed.

Here is the direct link to the video on Vimeo if you can’t see the embedded box below.

More on Iceland from my Perceptive Travel editor Tim Leffel (great example of pulling multiple pieces from one trip:)

• Strange Sensations in Iceland in the Perceptive Travel webzine
• Iceland’s Move From Crazy Expensive to Almost Bearable on his Cheapest Destinations blog
• Interesting insights in Iceland: One Island’s Sprint Towards Energy Independence in the excellent Transitions Abroad.

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!

Last week I enjoyed spending 30 minutes on Blog Talk Radio with Australian entrepreneur and coach Des Walsh.  He has a regular program called Des Walsh and Friends, with a wide variety of guests all discussing some aspect of technology and business.

The noteworthy advantage of Blog Talk Radio (or any “Internet radio” service) is that not only can you listen live, but the shows are usually archived if you can’t be there at broadcast time, plus they’re also downloadable for later listening on your iPod or other digital audio player.

It gives radio/audio the worldwide reach that it never had before, as I discussed in this post about online radio and destination marketing for the Beaumont (TX) CVB.

Des and I talked about my background in travel, how Becky McCray and I launched Tourism Currents to teach tourism professionals about social media, and why businesses need to ensure a strong Web presence as customer search and interaction preferences shift online.

I loved having a fun chat with someone halfway around the world, and the time zones worked in my favor since it was afternoon my time, but very early morning for Des.  :)

Here is our episode:  talking social media, travel and tourism with Des Walsh.

(This is cross-posted on my BootsnAll Family Travel Logue.)

For those of you who are interested in really ramping up your blogging skills, I’ll be participating in a Webinar next week called the Girlfriend’s Guide to the Business of Blogging.

Conference organizer Debbie Lawrence saw me on Twitter – I don’t shut up much there, either  - and was kind enough to invite me to speak.

There are lots of sessions, all online, across three days (Tuesday, December 8 through Thursday, December 10) all for only US$15.  You can even earn a free ticket through their affiliate program.

Speakers include Michael Martine (Remarkablogger) Julie Gallaher (travel site Things You Should Do) a TweetNote keynote by Charles J. Orlando (he’ll be talking about “How to Build a Sustainable Brand from Scratch—for Less Than $250/mo”) and a lively bunch of others.

My speaking session is scheduled for Thursday, December 10 at 9 am EST (yes, that’s 8 am my time in Texas. Blargh. I hope my coffee is strong!)

It’s called “Let’s Get Visual: How Flickr and YouTube Can Amp Up Your Blog.”

We’ll talk about shooting basic video with a Flip camera or using the video function on most digital cameras, minor editing using software like Microsoft’s MovieMaker (which comes with most PCs) and then uploading to YouTube and embedding back in a blog post. We’ll also discuss the importance of images to the power of your blog’s content, and ways to find great photos through the Creative Commons alternative copyright on the Flickr photo-sharing site. Finally, and very important for human and Google-y search, we’ll talk about how to title, describe and tag both videos and photos so that they can help drive traffic to your blog.

You can read more about Flickr in my guest post Every Picture Tells A Story on the Girlfriend’s Guide blog, and I hope you have time to attend some or all of the webinar sessions. I think it’s a ton of good information for an incredible price, and even better, a portion of the proceeds go to the American Stroke Association in honor of blogger Anissa Mayhew, who recently suffered a devastating stroke.

See you next Thursday?

Although my business partner Becky McCray and I were rather hammered by an ambitious schedule of conferences and workshops across the country during October, the good news is that we’ve gathered tons of useful information and insights for the lessons, videos and newsletter that we offer our online learning community at Tourism Currents.

The next Lesson, “How to Listen Online,” is being posted as we speak and will be fully available to paid members by Friday, November 6.

This month, we’re excited to include some very helpful video interviews with Ann Peavey, who tweets for Seattle Tourism as @SeattleMaven.  I shot the video while in Seattle during the Association for Women in Communications (AWC) conference (salmon taco or awesome coffee, anyone?) and can’t wait to share it with you. Ann is a real pro and a dynamite, fun person; you’ll love seeing how she’s mastered Twitter to show off her city!

The bottom line is this – once we finish editing and uploading all of this terrific content,  we are going to close the doors to further paid Tourism Currents members until the next class cycle in Spring 2010.

We’ll still accept more free newsletter-level members, but anyone who wants access to all of our lessons and videos will have to wait until the next class.

Our reason?

We said at our launch in September that we want to keep class sizes manageable, and we want to move our members through the content as a group so that no one feels left behind or overwhelmed by having to play catch-up.

Those who are already paid members are all set and don’t need to do anything else except to continue learning useful social media tips for their destination marketing.

New sign-ups and those who are already at the free newsletter level have until THIS FRIDAY, November 6, to upgrade to our paid Just the Basics level ($45/month for 6 months) or our Regular level ($75/month for 6 months) so that you can really dive into all of our training materials.

We think that these are exceptionally reasonable prices for this kind of detailed, tourism-specific learning material; in fact, we know you can’t beat it anywhere else, because we’ve snooped around to look.  :)

These are the organizations and people that we think would find our training particularly helpful:

• Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs)
• Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs)
• Main Street, historic preservation and heritage trail organizations
• Parks, nature preserves, botanical gardens and other nature/outdoors-related attractions
• Public Relations professionals who do tourism work
• Chambers of Commerce
• Those with niche focus like agritourism, culinary tourism, arts/culture, sports/adventure and educational travel
• Festival and event planners
• Attractions, museums, lodging etc. that depend upon tourist traffic
• Historic highways and scenic byways
• State and city governments who do marketing and outreach related to tourism

Please do consider joining us to start learning – this stuff moves fast and frankly, your tourism organization can’t afford to dawdle. Don’t wait until Spring 2010 let us help you become social media savvy!

Interested?  Sign up here or go here to read more and see if Tourism Currents is right for you.

Thanks for your support.

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.

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.

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.

After a quick Tourism Currents pre-launch meeting with my business partner Becky McCray….

….and did I mention that she’s a BusinessWeek Top 20 Entrepreneur to follow on Twitter? Well, she is!

….and don’t you know it makes her crazy when I do this kind of “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” off-topic diversion….

Anyway, we arranged a one-night planning session in Dallas, meeting roughly halfway between our homes in Oklahoma and Texas (because you can only do so much organizing even with regular video Skype calls.)  On the drive back to my house, I was so pumped up about the great learning material that we’re developing to combine tourism marketing and social Web tools, I just HAD to talk about it.

I used Utterli and my cell phone to call in an audio post (that I can embed in a blog post, as I’ve done here) from the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Waco, Texas.

Because I know how to live it up!

(If you can’t see the audio player box below, here’s the URL directly to the recording.)

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!