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.)

Some days, the ideas come pouring out of your head and it’s hard to get them recorded fast enough.

Other days, not so much.

An editorial calendar can really help with “blogger’s block.”  It’s simply a calendar (looking forward through the next few weeks, at least) of which topic you’re going to write about on which day.

Sit down now and project through 2010 what you’ll want to write about and when, in very general terms. You know you’re going to do something related to July 4, 2010 if you’re located in the US, right?  Commonwealth nations will have something about Remembrance Day every year, and so on. Then, break it down by month and then week.

You can have a rolling schedule of “video post on Monday, highlight our latest package deal on Tuesday, photo of the week from our Flickr Group Pool on Wednesday,” etc. if that helps.

For those days when the creativity fountain is dribbling rather than gushing, here are some post ideas to help kick-start your keyboard:

1. Itineraries.  Give visitors eat-sleep-play itinerary ideas for your destination. Go hyper-focused and do specific ones for foodies, history buffs, families, adult couples, birders/nature lovers, sports fans, genealogists, photographers, geocaching fans, etc.  Do seasonally tailored ones for spring, summer, fall, winter.
2. Coming attractions, highlighted by using photos or video.  Yes, of course, talking about upcoming events is a no-brainer, but make it fresh. Use one WOW! photo or a fun, short (2-3 minute) video, with a link deeper into your blog or Web site for more info. Let the graphics sell the event without you pumping out marketing text.
3. “On this day in 1841 (or 1917 or 1969….)” You know what to do with this one, right? Short and sweet.  Make that history come alive.
4. Breakfast with/Lunch with/Dinner with one of your distinctive local eateries. Economic redevelopment bonus: feature one in your historic downtown. Include drool-worthy food photos, videos of the chef at work, photos of locals eating there. Bonus round two: put those same photos on your CVB Facebook Fan Page and tag some of the people in the photos.
5. Promotions and package deals.  Don’t overdo this, but it can’t hurt to remind people to check your site for exclusive deals and packages. A lot of people really have no idea what a CVB/DMO does and don’t think to check your site for offers (which is why I wrote this reminder post on my family travel blog.)
6. Answer a frequent visitor question.  You know the ones that you keep hearing over and over in your Visitor’s Center.  No, not “Do you have a bathroom?”  The other ones.
7. Introduce one of your frequent visitors.  Have them talk about why they love your destination or attraction, and why they keep returning. Bonus: shoot a video of them for your YouTube channel. Double bonus:  upload the video to your Facebook Fan Page and tag them in it. Of course, you’ll link back to their Web site or blog from your blog post, right? Right.
8. Create a custom, targeted Google Map (here’s how to do it plus more background info.)  Make one with fun spots to visit on a weekend in your town.  Consider one with all of your local microbreweries, or your antique shops, quilting places or bars with regular live music.  Create one with your ice cream shops and bakeries; call that one “Sugar Shacks.”     How about your coffee shops and inns with free WiFi;  that one’s called “Blogger’s Heavenly Spots.”
9. Explain how to use Twitter as a “Twisitor Center”, so visitors can ask you questions (sometimes by including a dedicated hashtag in their tweets.)  Need an update on the concept?  See this Twisitor Center site, and also how Abilene, TX or Kissimmee, FL or Portland, OR do it.
10. How does your community support the arts?  Profile a local glassblower, painter, potter, dancer or musician – photo and video opportunities abound.  Is there a special museum exhibit or gallery opening?  A concert with the new work of a local composer?  A book by a local author that has a setting you can talk about? What’s your town’s equivalent to what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil does for Savannah, GA?

Good tourism-related blogging is helpful information and story-telling that gives a sense of place.  Do what blogging thought leader Liz Strauss recommends: capture the irresistible ideas and tell your story.

Yesterday, I sat down and began writing a post for one of my two travel blogs.

It was a post topic that I’d been meaning to cover for years, an annual January literary event at a museum.  Every year I’d blow it and forget to write the post until it was too late, but this year I put a big fat star on my calendar for the end of December, so I wouldn’t forget.

There was no problem finding updated information about the event, and I was particularly pleased to find that the museum also has a blog, Facebook Fan Page, Twitter stream, YouTube channel (only one video, but hey, a start) and lo and behold, a Flickr photostream.  I linked to all of them in my travel blog post, because that’s the power of the Web – the simple act of linking actually helps you pull other blogs and sites up in search rankings, because linking to a site increases its authority in search engine algorithms.  Hey, my whole job these days is tourism and social media, so I love to shine a light on great places.

I ran into trouble when it came to finding a good photo and video to go in the post.   A photo or some sort of graphic is almost a must-have for a compelling travel post, and embedding a short video of this particular event into my post would also make it more intriguing and attractive to possible visitors.

When I don’t have a photo of my own, I always go to Flickr and look for images with the appropriate Creative Commons alternative copyright license (need more ideas for finding photos? Here’s how to find local photos for your tourism projects.)

Since the museum has a Flickr account for their own pictures and a Flickr Group Pool for others to contribute their personal photos, I figured I’d have an embarrassment of riches for wonderful pics.

No such luck….I struck out in the Group Pool and even though the museum had plenty of nice photos taken at the annual event, I couldn’t use any of them in my blog post because they all had the default Flickr Creative Commons license of “All Rights Reserved.” For this particular travel blog (which is ad-supported and for which I’m paid per post, so I consider it commercial) I needed an image with one of the least-restrictive CC licenses, simply “Attribution.”

That means that when I use the photo in my own content, I give attribution/credit to the original photographer, and I also link the photo in my post back to its original URL page on Flickr.  Confused?  Just look at the Whistler’s Mother spoof photo above in this post. Mouse over it to see the attribution, and click it to go to the source page.

Yes, if I contacted the museum and asked, they might let me use one of their photos, but it was New Year’s Eve and I wanted to post that day. I didn’t have time to wait around playing “Mother May I.”  I’m a blogger and I want it now, and I want it at 2 a.m. if that’s when I’m writing the post.  You can see our obsession with speed as either a total pain in the neck or a totally great opportunity to get the word out, fast.   I vote for Option B, of course.

If you want me or any other wired writer to have great material to highlight your destination, help us out.  Make it easy for us to toot the bloggy horn about your destination, attraction or event.

Give at least some of your Flickr photos the simplest license, “Attribution,” or even “Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivs” would work for many blogs. Put a link to your photostream on your Web site or blog, to help us find it. While you’re at it, put a nice selection of available-for-media-use pics under the Media tab on your site. Yeah, ’cause we are media – even though you may never have heard of us, I guarantee you want our coverage and links.

Give us a few decent videos to help show off your goodies, about two to three minutes long, with titles and credits that say who you are and list your URL.  Make sure we can embed them, whether you use YouTube or some other service like Blip.tv, Viddler, Vimeo, etc.  They do not have to be professionally produced, but they do have to be interesting, with decent audio, and easy to embed.

Most bloggers could care less about email blasts (“delete, delete, unsubscribe, delete” describes much of my day) or pretty Flash-based Web site pages that we can’t link to or some giant press packet on a CD.  I know exactly what I want to write about and I do it on my own schedule.

Learn to think like a blogger and provide those nuggets that help us tell your story, because we want the world to know about you.

Feel free to let me know in the comments if I’m off my rocker and missing some obvious impediment, or if you have additional thoughts. Thanks!

Update:  Kudos to the museum! After I asked them on Twitter to switch some of their photos to a less-restrictive license, they did it, so here is the blog post that I updated to include two of their images and here is their whole set from the event.

If you have an account on the Flickr photo-sharing site – like the Pacific Aviation Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii or South African Tourism – it’s easy to make one of your sets of pictures into a little rotating gallery.

You can do this in a number of ways….in a blog post (the way you see it below in this post,) in a wiki page like this one for Jelly Coworking in Round Rock, Texas, or anywhere else that allows you to embed HTML code, which are the letters and numbers that are seen as text or graphics on a website.

Here’s how I did the Christmas ornament one featured here….

Go to the page in your Flickr account where you’ve grouped your set – here’s mine for the ornament pictures.  At the top right you’ll see a clickable link labeled “Slideshow.”  When you click that, it will open in slideshow mode.

Look again in the upper right corner, where it says “Share.”  Click that, and you’ll see two options: a URL to copy and paste somewhere, and “Grab the embed HTML.”  Copy the embed HTML to your clipboard (or right click the text to copy it) then paste the whole thing it wherever you’d like to show off your gallery.

In a blog post or wiki, for example, paste it when your draft is in “HTML” or “Source code” mode (the pasted code doesn’t seem to “take” in other modes.)  Include a direct URL link just before the gallery graphic – as I’ve done in this post –  in case the slideshow box can’t be seen on some readers’ computers.

That’s it! You’re a genius!  Happy Holidays….

For RSS readers and anyone who can’t see the box below, the URL for the slideshow is here.

Blog Carnival

carnival of cities

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Welcome to this edition of the Carnival of Cities, where we tour the world in a single blog post through the eyes and words of contributing bloggers.

The focus is on any aspect of one, single city (or a fair-sized town.)  Any blogger is welcome to submit a post for possible inclusion. It’s normally posted every other Wednesday, but I was tied up with another project yesterday.

I’ve been running this blog carnival off and on since February 2007. It’s often found on the “host blog” (currently my BootsnAll Family Travel Guide) but like any carnival it moves around, and other bloggers take turns hosting.

Today I’m hosting it here on Sheila’s Guide so that my tourism and travel readers can see a wide variety of blogging topics and talent.

Off we go….

Cities in the Americas

San Juan, Puerto Rico BW presents La Bombonera Old San Juan posted at Visit The Coqui, saying, “one of the most popular places with locals and visitors to grab a quick snack or a hearty meal in Old San Juan.”

Washington, DC Jon presents Celebrate New Year’s in 1960s Mad Men Style posted at The PlanetEye Traveler – Washington DC, saying, “Here’s a fun was to spend New Year’s Eve in Washington, DC.”

Los Angeles, California Peter Kimmich presents Top 5 Los Angeles Breakfast Restaurants That Won’t Break the Bank posted at TryOurLA, saying, “Some of the favorite local breakfast spots in Los Angeles.”

New York, New York A NY Nerd presents Crocodile Lounge Trivia Night posted at Nerd-NY, saying, “A review of a really fun quiz night in New York City.”

Washington, DC Jack Norell presents Holocaust Museum, Washington D.C. posted at Eyeflare – Travel Articles and Tips, saying, “DC’s Holocaust Museum is one of the more sobering institutions in a city which has a wealth of reminders of human folly and pain. Well worth a visit and the impact will remain with you for a long time.”

Bogota, Columbia Filip Ziolkowski presents Colombia, Bogota, Streets of Candelaria vol.1 posted at South Central North America, Asia, Australia, Europe: Backpacking around the world, saying, “Round the world in Bogota.”

Tallahassee, Florida Joe Manausa presents Erwin Jackson Asks Tallahassee To Demand More posted at Tallahassee Real Estate Blog, saying, “The Tallahassee City Commission cooked up a plan to give themselves an unlawful raise by calling it something else. They called it “deferred compensation.” Yet they deferred no compensation, they continued to cash their fully-funded paychecks, and they each received an additional $22K per year!”

Burlington, Vermont Miss Magpie presents Downtown Charlie Brown posted at FindandGoSeek.net, saying, “Just a few family friendly things I love about Burlington, Vermont.”

Cities in Africa

Swakopmund, Namibia Emily Hutto presents Swakopmund posted at Global Osmosis.

Cities in Asia

Taipei, Taiwan Sander presents Wanhua Buddhist Festival posted at Searider Zander, saying, “Here’s what’s happening in Taipei recently. You probably won’t get to hear about this kind of festival unless you live here yourself, as you kind of have to have grown up here to know about it – unless someone tips you off.”

Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Jonny presents Museums in Saigon posted at Vietnam Travel, saying, “A blog post covering the museums of Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City. Cheers! Jonny.”

Cities in Europe

Madrid, Spain Andy Hayes presents A Foodie’s Guide to Madrid posted at Sharing Travel Experiences, saying, “Hungry? Look no further than Madrid, where we’ve got every meal of the day covered (and more!).”

Luxembourg City, Luxembourg Mark presents 1000 Years in 100 Minutes (Luxembourg) posted at Travel Wonders of the World, saying, “A wonderful walking tour of historic Luxembourg City.”

Frankfurt, Germany Martin Andrews presents Amazing Cheap Discount Travel Deals To Frankfurt Germany posted at Globe Cheap Travel.

Vienna, Austria ivanisko presents A Report from Vienna posted at Bookstore Guide, saying, “In the latest addition to our ‘Reports’ section we explore the English language bookstore scene in the city of Vienna.”

San Sebastian, Spain Jeanne presents San Sebastian Tapas Or Pintxos posted at soultravelers3, saying, “We’ve had great tapas all over Spain, but think San Sebastian has the best tapas crawl!”

London, United Kingdom Victoria Wallop presents Christmas Past posted at It’s a small world after all, saying, “A very special musuem in East London celebrates Christmas traditions from 1600 to the present day.”

That concludes this edition, and thanks for visiting.

Please submit your (one, non-spammy) blog post to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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?

I’m often asked by tourism professionals what I would recommend as a good first step in learning how to communicate with social media.

More and more these days, I immediately mention a Facebook Page.

By that I mean a Facebook “Fan” or “Business” Page for your tourism-related organization, not a personal page (although you must have a personal account/page in order to start a Fan/Business Page.)

Why do it?

• Social networking dominance – over 300 million worldwide Facebook users as of this writing.  Go where the people are, because….

• Your prospective visitors are probably there already. Facebook is no longer a “young person’s thing” – the fastest-growing demographic is aged 35 and older (with a big spike from women over 55….women outnumber men on Facebook.)

• It’s free. Whose destination marketing budget doesn’t love that?

• It’s a flexible platform to post not only written news and updates, but also the all-important photos and video. More importantly, your Facebook fans can also share their thoughts/photos/videos about your destination or attraction, so it’s great for building a sense of community (one that has worldwide exposure.)

• It allows information and content to spread rapidly. For example, if I do something as simple as “Like” or “Comment” on a Wall post on the American Indian Cultural Center Museum Facebook Page, that will show up in the Home page news feed of everyone who follows me on Facebook, and it also shows up on the Wall of my personal page.  If I do that while signed in as Tourism Currents (we have a TC Facebook Fan Page) it does the same thing.

• It’s hooked right into the explosive growth of mobile and smartphones. This is a no-brainer, folks.  Worldwide Facebook mobile usage is up 300%….combine that with the sense that we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of mobile/smartphone growth across the board.  You need to be in this space. Like, yesterday.

Now, I know this sets your hair on fire and you’re ready to go sign up for a Page right now, but the next step is to make sure that this fits into your organization’s communications and destination marketing strategy.

This isn’t play (although it IS fun!) – this is professional communicating.  It needs to be integrated into your overall marketing plan along with the press releases or brochures or billboard buys, but remember, the social Web is different.

It is two-way, social communications with human beings; if you just pour stuff out into a broadcast pipe like you may be used to doing, your Page will fail. Your fans want to interact with you, not read your regurgitated press releases, so get some responsive personality in there.

Think of your Facebook business page as a “digital storefront” extension of your “home base” website.  Try not to clutter it up too much, show up regularly to say hello and interact, and make sure that your fans and customers can find the page.  Put prominent links to it on your home page, in your email signatures, mention the Page occasionally on Twitter and blog about it.

Need some kick-off ideas for your posts?  Here are 30 content ideas for your organization’s Facebook Fan Page.

Now, go knock ‘em dead (and leave a comment below if you have any questions or further suggestions – thanks!)

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.

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/twitter 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.)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued clarification on new rules designed to force more complete disclosure of payments, freebies, endorsements and product review procedures on blogs.  Here is the FTC file (a PDF) for download.  The rules take effect on 1 December 2009 and involve fines of up to $11,000 for violators. Yes, of course enforcement seems impossible, but the rules are there.

I think this will have an impact on tourism industry press trips/”fam” (familiarization) tours, which some (like UK blogger Darren Cronian) consider not much more than blogger payola.

From a CNN/Money article on the FTC guidelines:

“The test here is, if the relationship were known between the blogger and the advertiser, would that affect the credibility of the endorsement?” [emphasis mine] FTC assistant director of advertising practices Richard Cleland told CNN. “That question has to be determined on a case by case basis. What we have produced is a general guidance that says in certain cases receiving a free product is not any different than being paid directly for an endorsement.”

Is a free press trip/fam tour – with lodging, meals, attraction entry fees and transportation all provided by a DMO (Destination Marketing Organization) – considered “payment in kind” and does going on such a trip and writing positive words about what you experience there a form of paid endorsement?

My personal belief….you bet it is.

Other writers and bloggers disagree vehemently with me, and they say that they can maintain their objectivity on such trips. That’s great; more power to them as long as they disclose.  The press trip model works well for a lot of interest groups and I don’t see the market for it going away, although I’m certainly not the first writer to feel uncomfortable about it.

I personally have a harder time with the vaunted objectivity goal, because while it’s easy to write superlatives when you have nice experiences, it is much harder to be critical when your experience is lacking.  What ends up happening is that most writers simply don’t write about “the bad stuff,” out of understandable concern and respect for their kind and generous hosts.

The problem is – just like making no decision is, in fact, a decision – it is in those unwritten posts, those criticisms left unsaid, where at least some of the travel truth lies.  I addressed such issues in detail in one of this blog’s most highly-trafficked posts:  Are blogger fam trips a good idea, or are they Jurassic PR?

I’ve been on three press trips myself: to Williamsburg VA, Hutchinson KS and to Hawaii along with my son.  They were well-run tours, I enjoyed myself and I met many marvelous, hard-working tourism professionals. I disclosed my compensation for each trip to the best of my ability, although I probably need to go back and re-check all of my posts (on two different travel blogs) to make sure I was clear, and add a disclaimer if I wasn’t.

Here’s one version of what I put on every post from Hawaii:  Just So You Know Disclaimer:  The Hawaii Tourism Authority through Cilantro Media is paying my way to Hawaii, and also paying most of my expenses while I am there including lodging.  I am contributing to my son’s expenses. The point of the trip is to bring experienced bloggers and communicators to the islands to talk about what we see; my primary focus will be on travel with kids. No one has told me that I cannot post negative information. No one has told me that I must say positive things.  I will be as objective as I can possibly be.

After putting a lot of thought into the topic while writing the “Jurrassic PR” post, here’s where I stand right now on press trips:

“For myself; I am willing to consider going on future blogger fam trips, but I won’t seek them out. I will still produce content (print/online articles, blog posts, photos, videos) from the Virginia, Kansas and Hawaii trips, and I will still clearly disclose when my travel was paid for, but I now plan to redouble my efforts to make enough money through my consulting and freelance work so that I can pay for my travel on my own.”

Want to help me in that self-funding endeavor? Go sign up for my social media expertise, along with Becky McCray’s, on our Tourism Currents membership site.  :)

I’ve also proposed a blogger ethics panel (Can They Buy Your Voice?) for the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference in March 2010;  we’ll know soon whether it was approved or not. If it is, I predict a lively discussion, which is perfect. The more open discussion, the better.

Meantime, tourism organizations need to take a hard look at how their press trip hospitality is disclosed by the journalists, writers and bloggers that they invite. The days of “wink, wink, nudge, nudge – don’t ask and don’t tell” may soon be over. I’m not so naive as to think that current arrangements won’t persist; I just want disclosure of those arrangements.

Ironically, this means that bloggers now have more stringent disclosure rules than almost any magazine or newspaper I’ve ever read.

Fine.

Tell me your biases and good deals upfront, and I’ll judge your content worthiness for myself. I’d rather see honest blog posts than pretty magazine words and pictures that came from tourism board hospitality, but no one will confess to it.