Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

Fourth and final post in a series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s.

The right question is not, “How do we get more Twitter followers?” or “How do we get more Like-ers/fans on Facebook?”

The right question is, “What do we want to DO with our followers and fans?”

Counting heads is fun – we’re all guilty of it, including me – but unless those people are helping you achieve stated objective(s) for your organization or business, you’re fooling yourself that anything is accomplished by totting up raw numbers.

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  As you gather more supporters in 2012, have plans for what you want to do for them, and what they could do for you.

—->>  On your blog – do you want readers to sign up to get your posts by email or RSS?  Take a hard look at whether you have made that signup process as simple as possible, including on a mobile device.

—->>  It’s Facebook Page 101:   make sure that people can sign up for your email newsletter right there on your Page.  On our Tourism Currents Facebook Page, we use a tab and a short signup form via our MailChimp email service.

Are you trying to build your own list, or are you busy building Mark Zuckerberg’s list?  Use Facebook for your own business success!

—->>  On Twitter, periodically let followers know how to sign up for your email updates.  Note: Send them directly to your signup page – don’t dump them onto your homepage and hope they find it.

—->>  What are you doing with your email newsletter list?  What’s your point to cranking it out? WHY should people open up their already-overloaded IN boxes to you?  Ask yourself those tough questions….often.

Back to numbers:  if you suddenly picked up 1000 more fans or followers, what would you DO with them that you couldn’t do already, right now?

My own 2012 plan for the fans and followers of this blog

Since I’m asking you about your plans for your platforms, here are mine for Sheila’s Guide:

1)  Lead the tourism industry away from a somewhat silo’d focus on social media, and toward a more general incorporation of social communications as simply “how we do things.”  It’s like email – nobody has an Email Department, do they?  It’s time for social media to stop being new or special.

2)  Support the growth of my Tourism Currents business with Becky McCray.  We’ve set a performance goal that we’ve agreed to meet by our 3rd anniversary in business (September 2012) or we’re going to radically overhaul what we offer.

3)  Support my work as a professional speaker on tourism and social media.

4)  Support the marketing of my upcoming book, The Elastic Waist Entrepreneur.

Thanks so much for your support, and hope to see many more of you in person in 2012.

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Third in a blog post series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Many people avidly read every one of marketer Seth Godin’s blog posts.

I think it’s mostly because they’re well-written and helpful, but part of the reason is that his posts are often quite short.

As in, a few sentences.

Most of them do not include a photo or video; they’re just plain ol’ text.

But….his readers know that he’ll be pithy, get to the point and not take up too much of their time.

(I won’t go into the fact that he does not allow comments on his posts, which is not how I prefer to blog.  He has his reasons, and it’s his blog, after all.)

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  Go short more often in 2012.

—->>  Just a few interesting sentences can be a blog post for you, too. Try it one day in the first week of January 2012.

—->>  Make every other Facebook Page update a one-sentence declaration or question for a few days.

—->>  Twitter is MADE for pithy thoughts. In the early days of the service, we called an exactly 140 character tweet a “twoosh.”

—->>  Make your email newsletter unexpectedly short one month (and say that it is short, in your Subject line.) See what happens with the open/click rate. Does it improve?

—->>  Challenge yourself to shoot a 30-45 second video, or a fun Google Search Story or a short Animoto video out of photos you already have.

Can you think of any other ways to “go short?”

For more ideas on effective content creation, see Lesson Two of our Tourism Currents online course, Building a Home Base. It includes a video of our own blogging lessons learned.

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Second in a blog post series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s.

If you have a fairly recent point-and-shoot camera, then you have a Macro setting for closeup shots.

How often do you use it?

Macro gives you another way to take what might be a ho-hum, expected photo and turn it into something more interesting.

The picture you see here was taken with my little Canon PowerShot Digital Elph;  it’s one of the handmade green icing trees, dusted with sugar “snow,” that surround the holiday village made of gingerbread in the lobby of the Four Seasons hotel (this one in Austin.)

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  Play a bit with close-up photography in 2012.

—->>  Find the Macro setting on your camera (often a flower symbol.)  Look for interesting little details around town to photograph – perhaps that includes a mouthwatering close-up of a chocolate milkshake from the real corner drugstore that you still have downtown.

—->>  Put the milkshake photo into a round-up blog post that calls attention to fun, quick, family-friendly downtown places to eat. Link to each of those businesses in your post.

—->>  Link to your blog post in a Facebook Page update. Tag the place where you took the milkshake photo, and the other eateries, too.

—->>  Tweet the link to your post 2-3 times on Twitter, over a few days, at different times. Include the Twitter handles of those downtown businesses.

—->>  Pop the chocolate milkshake photo into your email newsletter.

—->>  Shoot a short video of a drugstore employee showing how he/she makes the perfect chocolate milkshake, then put that on YouTube, with a link back to your eateries blog post in the video description.

Can you think of any other way to use Macro photos to entrance visitors with an unexpected close-up view?

For more ideas on using one piece of content multiple times, look in the Solutions section of our Tourism Currents Store for a two-page download titled Create Once, Use Many Times – How to Think Like an Online Publisher.  It includes lots of different ways to use photos.

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First in a blog post series for the get-revved-up week between Christmas and New Year’s

Here’s a way to reach fans of your destination who live far away, but still want to connect even when they can’t visit …. tell them how to find and listen to your hometown radio stations that stream online.

People who enjoy familiar music, a long-time DJ’s voice or a particular show may not even know that they can now hear those sounds on the web, even when their regular radio is nowhere near the station’s terrestrial broadcast tower.

For example, my at-home radio is always tuned to FM 89.5 KMFA in Austin. It’s a public, listener-supported station that plays classical music in Central Texas. Unlike KUT, the other public station in town, KMFA does not have standard NPR fare like All Things Considered. It simply provides a wide variety of classical music, 24 hours a day. I love it.

When I’m far away from home in a hotel room, I do look for local stations, but even in music-rich places like New Orleans I seem to have a heck of a time finding them (or getting the hotel’s bedside clock radio to pick them up.) Often I default to playing KMFA in my room through my laptop, which is a nice homey Austin touch on a busy morning when I’m prepping to speak at a conference, for example.

Rev-up recommendation for you:

**  Do a little destination marketing with radio in 2012.

—->>  Write up a blog post that tells visitors where to find 3-4 of your best local radio stations online. Include their AM and/or FM station numbers for people to dial into when they are physically in town. Link to each of the station websites in your post.

—->>  Put a link to the post in a Facebook Page update. Tag the radio stations in your update.

—->>  Tweet the link to your post 2-3 times on Twitter, over a few days, at different times. Include the station or DJ Twitter handles.

—->>  Summarize the post as part of your email newsletter.

—->>  Ask the stations if your CVB or DMO can be a guest on any of the shows that cover local events or festivals, then make sure that your blog/Facebook Page/tweets/newsletter let people know when to tune in to hear you talk up your town. Shoot a short video of you on the air, and put that on YouTube, with a link back to your blog post in the video description.

Can you think of any other way to use radio to connect with visitors?

Oh, and I did finally find a great New Orleans station that streams local music and shows:  WWOZ online, or dial up 90.7 FM when you’re there.

Want more help and training in social communications, tourism and hospitality?  That’s why we started Tourism Currents.

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I saw a question by a New England DMO (Destination Marketing Organization) in the LinkedIn Group “DMAI Convention and Visitors Bureau Network” about how to best use online video – they had a few ideas but wanted to ensure that they “maximized potential reach.”

In the spirit of reusing content you’ve already made, here is my answer to them, made into this blog post:

Are the videos available on your YouTube channel?

If so, they can help you with SEO if they are titled, described and tagged with the applicable keywords for each particular video.

Make sure you allow sharing.  As a blogger I like to occasionally share good videos, either embedded in a blog post of my own – like I did with a Guerrilla Packs video in this year’s Passports with Purpose prize post - or, if it’s tourism-related, on our business Facebook Page.

I’d also recommend captioning them for the deaf/hard of hearing – the transcript attaches to the video description, which also helps SEO. Google offers an auto-transcript for some videos that are in English, but the voice recognition is a work in progress (to put it charitably) so you’ll need to heavily edit the text to make it accurate.

For more help with web accessibility issues like captioning, I cannot recommend Glenda Watson Hyatt enough – she’s dynamite.

Videos do very well on Facebook, especially if they’re short, and you can tweet about them as well (the shortened youtu.be URL will open and play right in TweetDeck, for example, so I’m more likely to watch it if I see the tweet.)

If the video would appeal to meeting and event planners, put it on your LinkedIn Company Page for your DMO. You can always get more out of LinkedIn than you think.

I’d have a blog post to go with every video, and of course that post itself will help with SEO. Nothing elaborate; just a little background about the video and then the embed box. Always include a direct text link to the video’s page on YouTube, in case someone is looking at the post via RSS (which won’t show embed boxes) or the embed box goes on the blink.

Once you have the permalink URL to your blog post, go back and add it to the video description on YouTube.  That’s one more way to close the communications loop so if someone finds the video directly on YouTube, they can click through to your blog from the video description. The link is No Follow, but humans can follow it, which is what really matters.

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It can be difficult to keep up with current trends in tourism, hospitality, travel and technology….unless, of course, sleep is optional for you.

For the rest of us mere mortals, fast-paced Twitter chats are invaluable.  They are some of THE most useful hours I spend online researching industry happenings and discussions.  You’ll get help from peers and network with fellow professionals around the world (here are 9 tips for following hashtags.)

I offer my own list of resources below that I use for speaking and Tourism Currents online training.

I’d love to hear more ideas from you down in the comments.

If you follow no other chat….

New chats pop up all the time – some Scotland-based tourism businesses just launched the #ScotlandHour travel chat, for example – but for tried and true value, don’t miss #tourismchat.

It’s usually biweekly, at 2 pm CST on Thursdays. Check the #tourismchat Facebook Page for dates and topics.

Chat co-founder Anne Hornyak summarizes a #tourismchat session here, if you want a sense of how it works.

Other good tourism chats

Keep an eye out for the hashtags for conferences like ESTO, #SoMeT (this hashtag is active year-round,) PRSA Travel, eTourismSummit and the annual state/province Governor’s conferences.

The conference calendar on DMOPro can help you keep up with these.

Get some hybrid vigor

Following non-tourism hashtags ensures that I don’t get stuck in a stale echo chamber listening to the same people over and over. Mixing it up fosters what my Tourism Currents business partner Becky McCray calls “the hybrid vigor of ideas.”

Some of these chats include:

**  Crazy-fast #blogchat on Sunday nights, 8 pm CST.

**  Tech conference hashtags like #BWEchat (year-round for BlogWorld and New Media Expo East and West)  #SXSWi (mostly active January through March for South by Southwest Interactive) and #SOBCon (year-round for the SOBCon business blogging conferences.)

**  Since search engines are so integral to online activities, I keep an eye on hashtags for Search Marketing Expo / #SMX events worldwide, especially #SMXEast and #SMXWest.

**  I’m not a gadget person, but the annual Mobile World Congress in Barcelona / #MWC12 for 2012 and the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) / #CES in Las Vegas are worth a look, if only to find links to good event round-up blog posts towards the end.

How to keep track of all this chatter

You can follow and participate in chats with regular web-based Twitter, but I prefer a dashboard to keep things sorted. I use columns in TweetDeck for each hashtag, adding and removing as events come and go.

Others are fans of HootSuite;  since it’s cloud-based you can get around any IT download restrictions in your office, and multi-person team accounts seem to like it.

When the chat is actually in progress, I log into TweetChat to keep up with the conversation flow and add the hashtag to my tweets automatically.

Which chats or tools am I forgetting? Let us know in the comments….

Still a bit unsure of the value?  Here’s 60 seconds with Beth Conway from the St. Joseph, Missouri CVB on how she uses Twitter (direct link to the video on YouTube if you can’t see the embed box below.)

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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.

Someone floated the idea recently (in a Facebook Group) of writing a textbook on social media for tourism.

My first reaction:  We’re already collectively writing it as we do it. The problem is capturing the best thoughts in one place.

Even if you wrote it as an ebook, you’d have to keep updating/rewriting/re-uploading the document (just like we do with our Tourism Currents online course, which fortunately uses WordPress publishing software so it’s easy to update.)

On the one hand, it’s not about the tools – which change constantly – it’s about how we use those tools as communicators.

How about a hybrid product: communications fundamentals in a book, with accompanying blogs that speak to specific areas like mobile, social, general digital, email, offline/print, etc. Maybe someone could build out an already-solid product like Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day.

How would you teach this topic, Professor? Let’s talk in the comments….

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This is a combined post written with Troy Thompson of Travel2Dot0, my co-presenter at the excellent, wide-ranging eTourism Summit.

We spoke together about blogger outreach at the conference and here are a few of our follow-up thoughts….

Troy, on things to consider before working with a blogger

As part of my eTourism Summit schedule, one fateful session had me teamed with the America’s Blogger, Sheila Scarborough [ note from me - Troy says that this is like America's Team, but that I don't throw interceptions.  ] Never one to pass up an opportunity to express myself, nor is Sheila, we decided to take a couple of themes and thoughts from our presentation and through the magic of the internets, turn them into an article.

Sheila is covering relationships, I am covering evaluation. Two posts for the price of one.

How To: Evaluate and Select Bloggers

It was a popular question during our recent eTourism Summit presentation: How do I evaluate bloggers? Or, more specifically, how can I tell the good bloggers from the freeloaders?

An excellent question and one that everyone in the tourism space will eventually deal with. While the correct answer is based upon your needs and goals (sorry), I do have a few tips on how to evaluate and select the right blogger. Used in conjunction with other sources these tips should provide the foundation for your own blogger evaluation algorithm.

Google Analytics

Yeah, numbers. Start here. The numbers will not tell you a whole lot. Frankly, audience size should not be a top priority…quality over quantity, right?…but asking for Google Analytics will provide two clues about the blogger. 1) Are they willing to share statistics. And 2) do they have statistics. If the answer for either question is no, then you can move this candidate to the bottom of your list.

Klout

Ah, Klout. Half of you just cursed out loud, while the rest of you are frantically Googling the word Klout. The social ranking system has strong supporters and loud detractors, but it does provide another piece of your blogger evaluation puzzle. Check the score. Again, this is just a basic test. Klout of 5? Red flag. Klout of 54, continue the evaluation investigation.

Writing Style

Take the time to read the writer’s work, and not just the most recent post. The first post, the most popular most, a random post. Understand their perspective, writing style and technique. Does it fit with your brand, goals or campaign? Does the blogger tell a complete story. Do they use images, video and other content to complete the narrative. Is it a good story? Check, check, check…okay, let’s keep moving.

Being Social

Yes, we already looked at the Klout score, but that is not the end of the social investigation. Klout can be fooled. Look on the blog; are social network icons present? Are they active on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.? Do they promote their writing via these channels? Are they actively communicating…and, are readers communicating back? Are there comments on the blog posts? Does the blogger respond? How social are they? You want someone who will carry your message and story beyond a single web page. You are hiring a digital advocate for your brand. The question is, are they an advocate?

Network

Going a step beyond just being social, you need to know who they are social with. A bit selfish on your part, but hey, a comp [complimentary hotel] room is a comp room. Is the blogger talking with other bloggers? Are those bloggers or writers potential connections for another story about your destination? What about building their network. Is the blogger active in Twitter chats or Facebook groups? What about on Disqus? Is there an opportunity to not only benefit from the direct network of this blogger, but their indirect network as well? Yes. Perfect. Comp ‘em that room.

While our five tips are a great start, they are just that, a start. Your goals are likely different from a retail store, internet start-up or another destination and therefore your evaluation criteria should be different as well.

But, as long as you are researching against goals…and not looking for a quick Klout rating…the right blogger is just a tweet away.

Me, on growing a blogger network, or Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty

I can’t claim credit for the “dig your well” idea – it’s the title of a book by Harvey Mackay – but when it comes to building a network of online connections and resources, it is definitely true.

(Head over to Troy’s blog to read my unicorn blogger advice….)

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Create once, use many times.

That’s the key to creating more content in less time, but here is what you must also do….think like a multi-platform, multimedia online publisher.

Here’s an example:

This morning, I was trying to get some itinerary ideas for an upcoming road trip in a state where I don’t have a lot of recent travel experience.

I go to the state tourism website, and there’s gobs of great stuff on there, including a section called Trails that should have given me what I wanted – highlighted places thematically grouped together, and then laid out on a map so I can visualize driving around to them.

Instead, when I drilled down, all I got was what I get way too often from tourism websites:  an alphabetical list of places.

Do you know how discouraging it is to see a list starting with “A” places – Aardvark Restaurant, Al’s Chicken Wings, etc. – and look at the bottom of the website and see that you’re on Page 1 of 10 of these listings?

Forget it.

So, without naming the site in question, I griped a bit from my personal account on Twitter. Theresa Overby from the Baton Rouge, Louisiana CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau) saw my tweet and began asking me usability questions, in light of an upcoming re-do of their website.

How Did a Twitter Discussion Become Content?

We went back and forth, exchanging good ideas, and then I began to think like a publisher….”Where else online would this info be useful to people?”

In 30-40 minutes, I had posted:

1) On the Tourism Currents Twitter account, of course, where we talk about social media and tourism. I went to Twitter’s search engine, gathered the relevant tweets together in a search string, and captured the conversation. Then I took that link and tweeted it on Tourism Currents‘ stream.

2)  On Facebook. Since Facebook and Twitter people are their own communities and you can’t assume people are in both places, I then took the same link and published it as a status update on the Tourism Currents Facebook Page, making sure that I tagged the Visit Baton Rouge Facebook Page in the update, of course.

3)  In the blog post you’re reading right now, with the addition of a screenshot graphic edited in a super-basic way using the Print Screen function, pasting that into Paint and then cropping it the way I wanted it and saving as a JPEG. Boom. Done.

That’s how you get more use out of the content you create, including random Twitter conversations. It’s almost like getting more hours in the day.

That thought process of thinking like an online publisher also happens to be the latest Two Pages of Terrific download available in the Tourism Currents Store, if you want more where that came from (like 9 different ways to use one photo.)

How do you use your content in multiple ways? Let us know in the Comments!

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