This is a handmade decorative ornament made from “114 heads representing 5 generations of the Fleming family” in Nolan County, Texas.

Said my daughter in reaction to the ornament:  ”It’d be really pretty if it wasn’t, um, HAIR.”

You can see it in one of the upstairs bedrooms in the Pioneer Museum in Sweetwater, a West Texas town with three big claims to fame: constant blowing wind that is now being harnessed by a booming wind power industry, an annual Rattlesnake Roundup hunting event and Avenger Field,  the original training grounds for the WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) in World War II and now the site of the National WASP WWII Museum.

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It’s the kind of unpretentious downtown diner where the owner pauses at the table of a longtime customer, and they commiserate about how their bum shoulders keep them from playing tennis as much as they’d like.

The kind of place where the coffee in your cup never seems to drop below the midpoint of the mug before the waitress is standing there with a carafe saying, “Wouldja like a refill?”

The kind of place that displays pies behind a long counter, in a rack with mirrored shelves so you can see that yes, the meringue really IS that high.

The kind of place that doesn’t list pecans as one of the options for your homemade waffle, but hey, this is Texas, so all you have to do is ask for them. The waitress will say, “Sure, honey.”

The kind of place that serves ice tea in pebbled plastic glasses the size of a small bucket.

It’s the Paris Coffee Shop in Fort Worth on West Magnolia and it has zero to do with Paris, France (the original owner’s name was Vic Paris.)

That guy talking tennis with customers and making sure you’re happy with your order? That’s Mike Smith, son of Gregory K. Smith who bought the place from Mr. Paris in 1926.

I love restaurants like this, especially for breakfast….unpretentious joints like Lou Mitchell’s in Chicago or the Brookside Restaurant in Luray, VA or Cookie’s Soul Food Kitchen in minuscule Ames, TX.

Here’s what I found frustrating from a tourism perspective, though – I found out about this place from a Frommer’s guidebook. The Fort Worth CVB does have a Paris Coffee Shop listing, but I had to already know what I was looking for to drill down the restaurant listings for it, and I had to know that the location is something called “Near Southside.”

The CVB descriptive listing for Near Southside? It is blank.

There is a CVB website link under Restaurants, for Distinctive Dining. It’s a page with a bunch of logos, many of which are to chain places like Ruth’s Chris Steak House and P.F. Chang’s. I mean, I’m sure they’re distinctive in some way, but how unique are they to Fort Worth….like the Paris Coffee Shop?

Tourism organizations must help visitors (including those who are not determined research-junkies like I am) to find those eateries that make your town unique and wonderful.

The world needs more pecan waffles and waitresses who say, “Honey.”

Update:  This post is part of WanderFood Wednesday over on the Wanderlust and Lipstick blog – check out today’s post, Mini No-Meat Burgers (in Tijuana, Mexico.)

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Yes, Texans can be annoyingly overconfident, but then again, they used to be a republic unto themselves, so I suppose I can understand that attitude.

There is something to be said for a place that knows what it offers and wears a proud you’ll-only-find-it-here air about themselves.

They also tend to have a shop local mentality (because “our stuff DESERVES to be purchased, you pinhead!”) and they have no interest in looking like everyone else.

Some cities in Texas have a bunch of bodies and buildings but very little personality.

Dallas does not rock my boat, for example, but Fort Worth sure does, and the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan reflects both my current home region’s population boom and its fierce self-preservation instincts.

Have a personality. Stand for something. Support and highlight your local talent and businesses….

Or no one will care about you at all, because you can be found anywhere.

When your organization is called a “Convention and Visitor’s Bureau” or “Tourist Board,” it’s hard to see why you should reach out to locals as part of your destination marketing strategy.

What’s the point, right?

They don’t stay in hotels, they don’t “count” in the statistics of people coming in to visit your town (a measure of how well you’re doing) so why bother?

Here is why – because in today’s more connected world, it is critical to realize that your locals have online networks with worldwide reach.  You never know who they know on Facebook, Twitter or through their blog.

Locals don’t stay in hotels, but their visiting friends and relatives do.  Locals recommend your restaurants, shops, museums, parks and music venues to visitors. They talk up the wonders of your town and region….or, well, they badmouth them.

Why does the Austin, Texas CVB have a relatively easy job of selling their city? Partly because tech-connected and very vocal locals NEVER shut up about how great it is there! From the online silence of some of the other cities, you’d think there was no other worthy town in Texas. There’s even a Twitter hashtag appended to tweets about great things in and around the Live Music Capital of the World – #WhyAustin.

The Ripple Effect of spreading buzz and excitement about your town starts with the people who live right down the street.

I had a CVB ask me recently how to start connecting with bloggers. I told them to go to Google Blog Search and type in “YourCity blog” and see what pops up for blogs about/written by locals in that town.  When I did it, I found some really trenchant, well-written blogs by locals. No, they aren’t travel or parenting blogs (the current flavor-of-the-month that many PR people are looking for) but I found posts that indicated the authors really care deeply about that town.  The CVB should know those guys.

You connect with your local newspapers, TV and radio stations:  add to that mix your Web-based content publishers (yes, whether they themselves realize it or not, they are writers and publishers, too.)  Look on Twitter for people who list their location as your city. Find them on Facebook. Ask around.

Then, have them into the CVB and get to know them.  Tell them what you do, what you want visitors to know and how they can help by becoming your online champions.

Two examples:

1)   My own Round Rock (Texas) CVB had some local bloggers and social media-savvy people in for a casual weekday breakfast taco gathering recently and a chat about their “Sports Capital of Texas” branding efforts.  They also demo’d the CVB Twitter stream, Facebook Page and YouTube channel and asked for feedback and suggestions.

I attended this gathering (yes, I knew all the geeks there since I’m one of them, and many attend Jelly Coworking Round Rock with me) and it was a lot of fun. Think of it as a free focus group for market research, if “fun” doesn’t interest you.

We even started our own hashtag:  #WhyRoundRock

2)   The Beaumont (Texas) CVB has locals in on a regular basis to talk about what the CVB does, how they can help and make sure they see the town through a visitor’s eyes.

They include a whirlwind tour of some major regional attractions, many of which the locals themselves have never gotten around to visiting (I love Becky McCray’s post about this phenomenon - Never Been There.)

Here’s a video telling you more about Beaumont’s tour for locals….direct link to it in case the embed box isn’t working….

Think about how you could do something like this in YOUR town.

I’ve been working with my local Convention and Visitor’s Bureau (CVB) in Round Rock, Texas to create some fun videos that give a personality to the city.

As I discussed in my post Look before you leap into HD video, it’s been a bit of a learning curve to “up my game,” but we’re just about there and today I uploaded the first three videos in a series that we’ll be producing for the foreseeable future.

The video below (here’s the direct link) is an interview with our Mayor. It has a few glitches that my perfectionist self wrestled with, but I’m reasonably happy with it and wanted to share it with you.

Our Sports Capital of Texas YouTube Channel awaits your subscriptions and comments – thanks!

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)

While checking Twitter the other day I saw a tweet from the Beaumont (TX) CVB that they were live on a local AM radio station in town, and they invited their Twitter followers to listen in.

Since I went to high school in Beaumont, I clicked the link in their tweet out of curiosity. I’m not a big talk radio person (don’t have a commute and prefer music while working at home) and like many people today I rarely listen to AM radio.

But this was AM radio for geeks, because AM 1300 KSET also live-streams shows to the Web.

That means that not only can people in Beaumont and a few surrounding southeast Texas towns like Lumberton, Orange, Nederland and Silsbee listen in, but the entire planet can get involved!   The station also keeps an active Facebook page and they’re on Twitter.

THAT gets my attention.

Just a few days before I’d bookmarked a PRSA San Antonio blog post on our Tourism Currents Delicious page – the post was titled Why Radio Will Survive the Media Shake-Out of Our Decade – so I already had radio on the brain.

Appearing on a live-streaming radio show means that you can remind your locals of what you offer (get those folks to visit more in their own backyards – the Beaumont CVB did a great job of plugging their online events calendar on the KSET show) but you can also reach out to your “expats.”

These are people who perhaps grew up in your town but moved away, or maybe they visit regularly (years ago as children, now as snowbirds, to visit relatives for the holidays, etc.) and they already feel an affinity for you.  Our latest Tourism Currents lesson calls them part of your “online champions network” if you can get them talking about you, so reach out and bring them closer to home, through the Web. A “wired” local radio show is one way to do that.

I know that when when I travel and find crummy music options in my hotel room, I tune my laptop into my local Austin classical radio station, FM 89.5 KMFA, which also livestreams to the Web. Ahh, the familiar morning DJs and a taste of home.

Another way to share online is through embeddable widgets like the one below from the radio station (if you click the Play button, you’ll hear the current live-stream from KSET.) (Update – the widget seems to be “dead,” so I had to remove it. Here is a direct link to the radio station livestream.)

Widgets can be customized any number of ways and are another method of putting your latest information on other people’s sites.  ”Embeddable” means that you find the embed/sharing code where it says Get Widget, copy it, and paste it anywhere that allows HTML code.

Smart radio station, eh?

(Update:  look at this wonderfully-crafted post by Justin McCullough called The Social Web Ties Us Together….it’s about how he as a southeast Texas guy stumbled across this post about Beaumont while he was traveling in Oregon.  It is a dynamite explanation of how information spreads across the Web in ways that we might not expect.  Thanks, Justin!)