Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

So, I’m writing this using my phone. Mercy it’s slow when you’re using tiny keys.

I’m not sure which app I’m using right now, though.

Weird, I know, but I’ve been playing with the SoundCloud app for Android, doing a test audio recording. When I poked at a “Share to WordPress” button in SoundCloud, and logged into this blog, I saw a bunch of posting options that go way beyond audio, so now I’m wondering if I’m actually in the WordPress app I downloaded awhile back but have never used.

See, I need to get a life, if this is my idea of fun on a Saturday.

Audio seems like a really underutilized type of content, so when I go to Alberta, Canada next week (disclosure: I’ll be a guest of their tourism board) I want to be able to record audio on the spot from my phone if I come across something cool.

I must be in the WordPress app; can’t see any way to add an audio file to this.

Just a blogger, wandering the digital wilderness….

Update from my laptop:  OK, I was in my phone’s WordPress app, not the SoundCloud one. The big “W” logo was the hint. *eye roll*  Unless I’m missing something, the only way to send my SoundCloud file to this blog is to record from the phone, then go get the embed code later and add it to the post, like the one below….

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I know, tough gig when you have to go to Hawaii to speak, right?

Thanks very much to Technology News Bytes for inviting me out to Honolulu for the Hawaii Social Media Summit; there was a diverse and interesting speaker lineup (including the wonderful Nathan Kam and Liz Strauss) and the event was sold out.

My topic was social photography, particularly the many ways we’re starting to share photos from phones and mobile devices.  Pictures are a story in and of themselves, and they’re an easy, time-saving way to share in a world that is bombarded with text and “messaging.”

In addition to covering a bit about Instagram, Foodspotting, photo walks, Postagram, Pinterest and some other tools, I talked briefly about elements of good photography (lighting should fall onto the subject, fill the frame, lead the eye, steady the camera even without a tripod and experiment with the Macro setting) plus the SEO benefits of adding a simple title, description and tags to your photos.

I’d write more, but hey, I need to hit the beach over on the windward side of Oahu, so here’s the slide deck for you on SlideShare….

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(Part of the “Better Online Content” series of posts: quick tips on creating more effective content that takes advantage of the social web’s unique publishing environment.)

Here is how to use any available surface as a way to steady your camera….

Blurry photos are sometimes unavoidable, but most of the time they are the result of not taking the time to hold one’s camera, including phone cameras, as steadily as possible.

This is particularly critical in low light, when people are moving or on the Macro (close-up) setting.

The answer is to prop your camera against or on something.

A wall. A door jamb. A telephone pole. A fence post. A Stop sign. A window frame, as author Becky McCray is doing in the photo above.

I’ve also taken photos from restaurant tables by setting my camera or phone across a water or wine glass.

Just don’t drop it IN the glass. One of my smartphones met its demise in a gin and tonic.

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Get a smartphone if you don’t already have one.

Like, NOW.

Having access – in your purse or pocket – to the web, plus your entire social network, is the biggest game-changer since we decided that personal computers in every home wasn’t as stupid as it sounded.

The shift to a mobile life is happening, and it’s happening screamingly fast. Tourism, travel and business overall are changing forever, right this very minute, but it’s hard to truly grasp what that means until you use a mobile device regularly yourself (hence my insistence that you go shopping.)

No, your expertise in checking email on a phone is not what I mean.

Below is the slide deck from my new keynote presentation titled, “Mobile: Is That The Internet In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Glad To See Me?” (hat tip to actress Mae West.)

I gave it for the first time at the Annual Meeting of the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania regional tourism organization; they were marvelous hosts and I hope they found it helpful. Later I realized that I’d forgotten to mention two specific resources: Tom Martin on QR codes, and Aaron Strout on location-based services. D’oh!

There are short speaker notes on each slide, and hyperlinked sources at the bottom of the stats slides.  Here’s the direct link to the deck on SlideShare.

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Thanks to a request by Pat Jenkins on my previous post about getting a tweet to spread further, here are some ideas for getting more mileage out of Facebook updates.

I’m currently actively managing two Facebook Pages (one for Tourism Currents and one for my Elastic Waist Entrepreneur book project) plus my personal account, so it’s important to me that I put content in the right place at the right time. Just tossing it out everywhere is ineffective AND annoying to those who follow me.

Having a smartphone gives me a potent piece of equipment for making content on the fly, particularly since photos are one of the best ways to increase EdgeRank and interaction on Facebook.

Let’s walk through an example:

Send a good photo from your phone to your Page

Opportunities to create content are everywhere.

As I left the ProductCamp Austin marketing conference last Saturday, I walked past the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum enroute my car. There were several brightly-colored decorated cows scattered around the lawn in front of the museum – it’s the Cow Parade Austin public art project.

Public art has a tourism angle, so this would be a fun update for our Tourism Currents Page.

Smartphone cameras don’t handle tricky lighting situations very well, so I had to do some maneuvering to get an image that wasn’t too dark (the sun was at a bad angle,) showed off the cow’s colorful Picasso-esqe design and also included the well-known giant bronze Lone Star behind it. The star is a recognizable landmark that sits in the front plaza of the Bullock Museum. Here’s the photo on our Facebook Page.

My Android Facebook app is pretty worthless, so to send the photo to a Page, I have to send it as an attachment in an email, to a special email address just for that Page.

**  You can do this, too:  as an Admin, go to Edit Page, look to the left sidebar for Mobile, click that and you’ll see a unique Page email address to m.facebook.com that you can use to send email updates from your phone.  I haven’t tried this with a regular cell/feature phone, but since even my old flip phone could send emails with photos, I’ll bet you can.

To think about:  If you think your personal Facebook friends would also enjoy your photo subject, then feel free to send a pic up to your personal profile as well, but here are two suggestions:

1)  Send a photo of a different subject, or at least a different angle on the same subject. Some of the same people may follow both your personal profile and business Page, and duplicate content at the same time can clog their News feed and is, well, kinda boring.

2)  Once something is posted, I prefer to Share content from my business Pages to my personal profile; it gives business content EdgeRank “oomph” the more often it’s Shared, Liked and/or commented on. If my phone app was better, I could do this from the phone, but for now I have to wait and do it on my laptop.

Always Be Tagging

The ability to tag, or link to, whoever or whatever you’re discussing on Facebook is a powerful tool, so take advantage of it. Tagging means that you’ll show up on the Wall of the person or brand you’ve tagged, plus it gives your followers an easy way to find the entities you’re talking about without making them hunt around Facebook themselves to look for it.

This is sometimes easier said than done. The tagging function – put an @ symbol and then right after it type the name of who/what you wish to tag, and you can’t tag people when you’re acting as a Page – has been really balky for me lately. It also means that you may have to find and then Like the tag-ee’s Page; a requirement before you can tag them, and then you may need to reload your Page for it to “take.”

Who could I tag in this photo?  Ideas include the Cow Parade organization, the Bullock Museum, the City of Austin, the Austin CVB, the Dell Children’s Medical Center charity that benefits from this particular art project and news organizations like the Austin American-Statesman that have given it media coverage.

Again, this is easier for me to do once I get home on my laptop. You can tag brands in photos (when the feature is working – grrrr) or I can add a comment to the photo and tag in that, or I can Edit the photo later and add the tag then.

Side note:  the Cow Parade Facebook presence is wrong so I did not tag them – they’ve set up a personal profile rather than a Page, which goes against Facebook’s Terms of Service and means they could be removed at any time. I don’t connect when I see that mistake.

Bonus screwup: I saw on the Cow Parade website that they have a Flickr account. “Great!” I thought, “I’ll go add my photo to their Group Pool.”  No, their account doesn’t have a Group Pool so I can’t share anything with them. I can connect with them as a Contact, but that doesn’t do much for either of us.  This sort of wasted opportunity makes me crazy.

Understanding the Facebook ecosystem

Key things to remember about Facebook – most interaction happens on people’s News Feed, not directly on their Wall.

Even if someone has Liked your Page, they may never see any of your updates – it all has to do with the relative “weight”/importance of your content to other people, which is based on how much reaction it’s getting, who is connected to who, how often connected individuals and brands interact, how new the content is, etc. That’s called EdgeRank – here’s an EdgeRank explanation and some guidance.

Also remember that the default News feed that people see is Top News, and your content’s EdgeRank determines how often your stuff is seen in Top News.  Many don’t ever click Most Recent to see the unfiltered, chronological listing of updates from their connections.

The Most Recent feed is the default for mobile Facebook users, so that helps, but means that your content timing becomes critical or you’ll be swept away in the stream by the next 14 updates they’re looking at on that tiny mobile device screen.

Key takeaways? Craft engaging content that will bring Likes, Comments and Shares, use your smartphone to create content while you’re on the move, and post daily if you can (at different times, including outside of working hours – Jay Ehret found that his best time to post on Facebook was, yes, 11 am on Saturdays.)  Even more tips from Ohio tourism industry expert Betsy Decillis – Facebook Tips and Tricks.

Remember….

A few minutes of thought – a little extra research and digging – adds up in reach and impact.

All you’re doing is pausing to think, “Who else should know about this content, and what is the best way to get their attention?”

It’s the persistent, relentless mindset needed for winning a marathon. If you’re in the communications game for the long haul, you’ve got to play it that way.

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Does your boss have a smartphone but isn’t really too sure what to do with it, or does he or she not have a smartphone at all?

Time for a teaching intervention, or you’ll never convince him/her about why mobile is so doggoned important to your future.

Some data:

**  427.8 million mobile units sold in Q1 of 2011, a 19% increase year-over-year.

**  By 2014, mobile Internet usage is expected to overtake desktop internet usage, and half of all local search is from a mobile device (Mashable.)

**  1 in 4 Hispanics who access the web do so through a mobile device.

Sometimes, though, a blizzard of stats doesn’t teach lessons as well as personal experience (and gnashing of teeth.)

Here’s how to get “Boss Buy-in” to the importance of mobile in your destination marketing, and the need to get moving on mobile-friendly content….

How to Help the Boss “Get It” About Mobile

1)  Start with having her open the browser on a smartphone and look at your destination/attraction website on it, plus some competitor websites. Bonus if they aren’t mobilized AND they have Flash stuff all over them; now she can see what a pain in the neck this is for visitors trying to quickly seek useful information.

2)  Have him type the words “downtown restaurants in Your Town” or “things to do in Your Town” on the Google homepage in the phone’s browser (as the average visitor might) and see what comes up. Imagine a visitor trying to sort through that.  Make a note to hold member/partner training about getting found in local search.

3)  Have her open the maps function on the phone. Try to get directions from somewhere on one of the highways through your town, to your most famous attraction or museum. Now, imagine a visitor doing that. Is it easy to do?

4)  Then have him look at one of your town’s major museum/attraction websites and try to poke around getting its operating hours, admission prices and directions. Notice how many “How to Get Here” buttons open to pages with useless maps, or a Google Map that you can’t easily manipulate. Imagine a visitor who actually knows the museum is in your town, but can’t figure out on his/her phone how the hell to get there, and giving up in frustration.

Now your boss will be newly-enamored of you and of your efforts to get people to understand why mobile is important, and that it’s not just a small telephone …. it’s a computer in everyone’s purse or pocket.

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This is Woodrow Wilson’s restored Pierce-Arrow limousine, at his Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia.  Nice museum, with a small new World War I exhibit, and Staunton is a charming town in the Shenandoah Valley. (The cat’s pajamas is 1920′s slang for “pretty awesome.”)

I took the photo with my Android phone (a Motorola) and have to say that I’ve been more than pleased with its camera. Shutter lag is significant, but picture quality is good enough that lately I’ve forgotten about using my regular Canon digital point-and-shoot camera. Plus, with the phone, I can send things up to Facebook (as this one was sent) and Twitter while standing right there.

A good smartphone camera is really changing how I create content when I travel.

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One of the presentations at SoMeT 2010 (Social Media Tourism Symposium) was from MMG Worldwide and covered a variety of ways that tourism organizations can engage visitors through their mobile devices.

As a travel enthusiast who is beginning to really rely on her own smartphone, I particularly liked the idea of providing location-specific ringtone and wallpaper downloads.

This got me thinking about what I’d like to see, since I have conferences and speaking gigs coming up this fall in:

**  Hutchinson, Kansas – 140 Conference Small Town – some great shots from the Cosmosphere space museum, or Third Thursday in downtown Hutch or the Underground Salt Museum, plus maybe John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” or something from these five songs for Kansas.

**  Tulsa, Oklahoma – AWC National Conference (Association for Women in Communications) – there’s terrific Art Deco architecture in downtown Tulsa, perhaps played to the tune of “Tulsa Time” (did you know that there’s an Eric Clapton version of the song?)

**  Los Angeles, California – BlogWorld and New Media Expo’s Tourism track, yay! – wow, where to start for the wallpaper; the swoopy silver Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Hollywood sign, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, the Capitol Records building that looks like a stack of vinyl records (yes, I remember those.) Good ringtone music is tougher – not sure the Doors’ “LA Woman” works, 10,000 Maniacs’ “City of Angels” is better with the lyrics, not many remember Sinatra’s “LA is My Lady.”  I’m kinda stuck on this one; will hum “California Dreamin’” until someone helps me out down in the comments.

**  Tunica, Mississippi and the Delta - SoMeT 2011 – I’ll land up the road in Memphis and then drive south down historic Highway 61 to Tunica. This area lends itself to poignant closeups rather than panoramic shots (unless it’s an aerial photo of the river) but you could include the Crossroads in nearby Clarksdale, where one legend says that bluesman Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar skills. The whole region is stuffed with music, but I’d go for John Hiatt’s “Memphis in the Meantime,” Paul Simon’s “Graceland” or Chuck Berry’s “Memphis,” then anything by James Cotton, or “Traveling Riverside Blues” or ”Got My Mojo Workin’.”

Travelers like to really experience the essence of places when they visit, so why not use visuals and audio on that phone that they’re never without these days, to make them feel at home in your town?

Bonus idea, although not specifically mobile: put a few destination-related badges or widget downloads on your website, for your supporters to grab and put on their blogs.

What other digital trinkets can you think of that your visitors might enjoy?

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This is a photo of my lap during the South by Southwest (SXSW) Global Tech Summit.

Quick photos and some tweets went up on my Android smartphone, plus special check-ins to each session on Gowalla.

Other tweets and watching the conference hashtag happened on the TweetDeck dashboard on my Dell laptop. Most Facebook business page updates for Tourism Currents or Freelance Austin came from the laptop as well.

Great quotes and insights from speakers were often captured via pen and notebook (yes, it’s true, but they always boot up) to become Facebook or LinkedIn status updates or blog posts days, weeks or months later.

Online publishing is best served by whichever tools work for you, and don’t be surprised when one size does not fit all.

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One of my favorite thinkers in the social media, tech and tourism arena is Canadian consultant Todd Lucier.

We’ve only met in person a few times, but our heads are always locked in agreement on issues like the connection between mobile technology and tourism and the need for video content in your destination marketing.

Todd popped this video rant up on his site (direct link to it on Vimeo) and I think it’s a great way to illustrate his passion for dragging recalcitrant towns and businesses into understanding WHY they need to wake up to people’s desire to have simple Web access when they travel.

This Week in Tourism, November 19 – 2010 from Blue Canoe Video on Vimeo.

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