Sheila's Guide To The Good Stuff

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.)

You won’t find a more powerful advocate for making the Web accessible to everyone than Glenda Watson Hyatt.  She has cerebral palsy but is able to control her left thumb, so that is how she does all of her typing and work on her terrific Do It Myself blog.

All of it.

With her left thumb.

It was particularly mind-blowing when she used a variety of technologies (including an electronic voice named Kate to sync to her slides) to give a presentation last year at the Chicago SOBCon social Web conference about how to make one’s blog accessible to those with disabilities.  (Here is a quick recap of Glenda’s presentation from WordPress blog publishing software expert Lorelle VanFossen.)

Glenda really opened our eyes that day to how the disabled often struggle to access the Web for work or personal enjoyment.  She has a wicked sense of humor, too; we all left her presentation laughing and enlightened (and many of us, myself included, considerably chastened by our own blindness to our disabled readers.)

We learned that the blind and vision-impaired can’t see our photos and graphics because we don’t include simple coding to describe them through the ALT tag (used by screen readers) and the deaf and hard of hearing can’t hear the sounds in our videos or podcasts because we don’t caption them or provide transcripts.

The disabled travel, too, and there are millions of them.  Have you thought about whether your tourism-related Web site gives them the information they need to plan a trip?

For example, even if your whole lovely historic downtown is ADA-approved (Americans with Disabilities Act that requires buildings to accommodate wheelchairs, etc.) fewer will visit if they can’t get information or trip-planning assistance from your inaccessible Web site.

People use the Web to plan trips, and that includes the disabled.

Lorelle VanFossen points out in a Web accessibility article in the Blog Herald that….

“The Ever-Shifting Internet Population reports that 38% of Americans with disabilities surf the web and almost 20% of them say that their disability makes web browsing challenging. There are a wide range of estimates, but at least one in four visitors to your blog are disabled.

That’s a huge customer base you might be missing and not serving.”

The indefatigable Glenda never stops working to make the Web available to everyone.

To that end, she is launching the 2010 Accessibility 100 book with tips for simple ways to make your site more accessible, and she issued a writing challenge in support of the book launch:

Write 25 words about what accessibility means to you.

So, I did, and here’s my 25 word contribution:

“As the Web becomes more available across the world,  I don’t want my little pieces of it to be inaccessible through my own thoughtless ignorance.”

Take a moment to think about whether your destination marketing Web sites market to all of your possible visitors, including the disabled.

I’ve embedded a short video below that Lorelle shot during Glenda’s talk – you can see her equipment setup and hear some of her suggestions.  If you’d like to hire Glenda to work with you to improve your sites, she can do that, too.

(Here is the direct link to the video on Viddler if you can’t see the embedded viewing box.)

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.)   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!)

While doing a live Tech in Twenty show last night on Blog Talk Radio (our topic was women in social media in 2010 and you can listen or download it here) I noticed that my fellow panelists Colleen Pence and Holly Hoffman both had the same answer when our hosts asked us to tell the audience where they could find us online:

“Just Google me.”

When you’ve worked long and hard and consistently to establish your Web site, blogs, LinkedIn profile, Twitter account, Flickr photostream, Facebook profile, YouTube channel, etc….plus you’re talked about and linked to online….then it is easy to be confident that not only are you “at the top of Page One of Google,” you can FILL that page.

How broad and deep is your destination or attraction’s presence in search engine results, especially with all of the recent changes with Google and Bing?

Does your tourism organization’s material pop up at the top of Google search results, or is there some commercial site or savvy local blogger who trounces you with a better online presence?

How can I help you rise to the top?

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.

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.

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.

This quote from essayist and programmer Paul Graham is about publishing, but it could apply to tourism and destination marketing or travel services in the “war for eyeballs” and attention….

“When you see something that’s taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn’t have before, you’re probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that’s merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you’re probably looking at a loser.”

Is your organization’s approach to technology going to help you win, or help you lose?

(Hat tip to mediabistro.com’s BayNewser blog for first introducing me to the Paul Graham quote, in this post.)

Does part of your destination marketing include trying to attract “leaf-peepers”  –  visitors who particularly enjoy traveling to see autumn foliage? (Soon I hope to visit the Lost Maples area here in Texas for those pretty reds and yellows.)

Why not steal a page from one of the latest uses for Twitter – roving location/update reports from food trucks, like this insanely popular Korean BBQ truck in Los Angeles – and use social media tools to provide timely reports of leaf color for your location.

Some area color displays change very quickly in the fall, and prospective visitors may make last-minute travel plans based on the most timely and complete reports.

The weekly color updates that many tourism Web sites offer are nice, and many have elaborate whiz-bang display interfaces, but that seems a slow and clunky way to make these reports in 2009 (plus it means you have to wait on your Webmaster to do all the work.)

Use the social Web to your advantage!

Some locations and regions already have foliage blogs, like Yankee magazine’s New England Foliage Blog or Oregon tourism’s Fall Foliage Report blog, but it would be even easier and faster to use Twitter for quick updates by your staff out on the road.

In fact, Oregon is already there with their @ORFallFoliage Twitter stream.  Good for them!

Any of your staffers with halfway well-equipped cell phones can snap photos when they’re out and about, and then send them in from the mobile device straight to TwitPic or YFrog for posting on Twitter.

I did this myself with an absolutely ancient Samsung flip phone, using it to take a photo of a bougainvillea plant in my back yard and then email it, from the phone, to a special email address that links to my TwitPic account.

• Here is what the tweet looks like, with the TwitPic link embedded, emailed to TwitPic from my phone.
• Here is what the photo looks like on its specific page on my TwitPic account (every photo has a URL.)

What about it, tourism gurus? Why or why not is this a good idea for your organization? Your comments below are welcomed.