Social Mediarology

If you’ve attended any of the conferences or sessions that Indiana Office of Tourism Development has recently hosted, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been talking a lot about online and social media marketing.

• 2008 Indiana Tourism Summit: We brought in Josh Hallett, who talked about Flickr and other social media platforms.
• 2009 Hoosier Hospitaliy Conference: IOTD hosted a blogging seminar (featuring Doug Karr, Paula Werne, Jeff Robinson and myself) where the panelists talked about the importance of blogging.
• 2009 June Tourism Council: We hosted a panel (featuring Jen Perry, Bruce Hetrick, Erik Johnson and John Palmer) about Marketing in a Recession that talked about different social media initiatives to get you through in this tough economic climate.
• 2009 Meet The Media: This event occurred just a few weeks ago. We had sessions about Social Media from Erik Deckers and Duncan Alney as well as a Twitter session from James Burnes and an Indiana Insider Bloggers Panel that featured each of our Indiana Insider bloggers.
• 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit: This upcoming summit will be completely web-focused and will feature such topics as web research, online optimization, social media and permission email. (Click here to register for the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit – PDF form)

We’re choosing to focus on web-based and social media marketing so much because it is such an important part of an effective marketing mix, especially in today’s economy. All of these sessions and conferences provide a great opportunity to hear directly from some of the  smartest minds in online and social media marketing, but what do you do between sessions? Who should you pay attention to? Who should you go to with questions about online marketing?

In addition to the Tourism Tech Corner, we’ve compiled a short list of other great resources for social media and technology questions. Several of them are even located here in Indiana. Here are some of my favorite blogs to follow as well an excerpt from each:

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We’re not usually the type to toot our own horns, but we got some fantastic news yesterday that we can’t keep to ourselves. Gammet Interactive, a marketing firm in Michigan that focuses on travel and tourism just released what appears to be the first study to look at the use of social media by each State’s tourism office. On founder Dave Serino’s blog, he explains the methodologies that were used to determine and rank how social each State DMO is.

There we are, Indiana is at #2 out of all 50 states! Huge congratulations go out to Pennsylvania, Florida, Oregon and Nevada for their top five finishes. Each of these states does a fantastic job with social media and we’re absolutely humbled to be included in such great company. If you’re interested in seeing the full report, click here for the PDF.

We’ve worked hard at the Indiana Tourism to provide content that people want through our various social media channels and we’re very excited to be recognized for the job we’re doing. This is a great example of how, even in a time of decreasing budgets, you can still promote your destination in very effective ways for very little money.