More Local Social Media Resources
31 Jul
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:
Check out Firebelly
8 Social Ettiquette Suggestions You Can’t Live Without:
- Be on time
- Say please and thank you
- Be nice
- Don’t be a monologue
- Caring matters now more than ever
- Don’t be a hater
- Don’t share every detail
- Think before you retweet
Kyle Lacy has great thoughts on his personal blog, KyleLacy.com and his company
3 Steps to Being Productive in Social Media:
Step 3: Be Authentic
I get numerous e-newsletter in my inbox everyday, most of them vary from mundane to outright boring. When posting on your social media applications, try to add some authenticity and personality to the information you are sharing. When I am reading blogs and posts on social applications the last thing I want to read is an impersonal e-newsletter. I want to know that the keystrokes behind the information is an actual person. Be personal. Be Authentic.
MediaSauce keeps you up-to-date on the latest in interactive marketing
Why Should You be Using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for your Business?
Listen, these technologies are just tools. Just like your fax machine (if you still have one of those) or your email.
It’s a tool for communication with other people. When email came out (does anyone remember life without email?), some people embraced it. But others, you know, struggled, they fought it, but then they finally had to give in. And, of course, there were those that got confused and accidentally spammed the entire company. That still happens. But it doesn’t happen so much anymore. And what companies do actual training on how to use email? It’s just a part of life in the office environment and you should know how to use email.
LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can all be the same thing – even if it isn’t called by these specific brand names in a few years. Think companies won’t have an internal Facebook for communicating? Think a LinkedIn type tool won’t hold all your business and personal information? What we are seeing is just the first shots at these tools. Email has come a long way in a short time. Don’t think that these tools won’t evolve as well.
Mashable is the definitive guide to social media - while not based in Indiana, Mashable has a wealth of information
HOW TO: Get Retweeted on Twitter:
Retweeting, as we explained in our article How To Retweet on Twitter, has evolved as the main way to reshare content you like on the social media service. There’s also a great deal of data we can glean from retweeting behavior, as we outlined in the article The Science of Retweets.
But apart from the obvious, what makes a retweet different from a tweet? What makes some types of tweets get shared more than others? And what can you learn from that data if you’d like to get retweeted more?
This week viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella dug into the data on retweets and published some interesting stats about retweet behavior. These help us understand why people retweet things, and might help you too.
Noobie is an Indy-based company that helps people with tech-related questions. If you
Find and Share the Best of the Internet With Digg:
Digg.com is a free web site that lets its Internet community rank pages on the Internet. As account holders find web pages with articles, blog posts, videos or pictures that they like, they can “digg” the page. The more diggs a page gets, the higher its popularity rank. After enough diggs, a page can earn its place on the “popular” page.
So, Digg.com primarily appeals to two different kinds of people: Those who find interesting Internet content while browsing, doing research or reading daily online news and can’t wait to share it, or their opinion about it; and those who want to keep their finger on the pulse of public opinions. Chances are good that if you try Digg.com you will really, well, dig it!
The MTB is very focused on the hard numbers of web marketing and is a great resource.
Putting a Value on Social Media With Tourism:
Tourism is a difficult entity to monetize and specify a value for. Tourism departments spend money, but don’t have any revenue directly associated with those expenditures. Revenue is seen by the destinations of the hospitality industry… resorts, shopping, hotels, restaurants, etc. All of those sources will rarely report revenue (or can pinpoint revenue) attributed to tourism expenditures. We know there’s a return on investment – but tracking that expenditure was difficult to tackle… until now!
One method that I provided the team with was to put a value, instead, on the visitors who arrived at their websites. Luckily, there’s an entire industry out there that pinpoints the value of a web page visitor – and that’s Pay Per Click!
Smashing Magazine goes amazingly in depth on a range of issues, from web design to programming. This is a resource for the more tech-savvy, but can still help those getting started.
Social Network Design: Examples and Best Practices:
According to Nielsen Online, social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular kinds of online activities. 67% of the world online population are now visiting them and the time they’re spending on them is growing by three times the overall growth rate of the internet. Social networks are now visited more often than personal email is read. Some social networks have grown to such enormous proportions that they rival entire countries in terms of population—if Facebook, for example, was a country, it would be the fifth-most-populated in the world (right between Indonesia and Brazil).
There’s a lot of variety out there in the realm of social network design. Some sites keep a very professional approach (like LinkedIn) while others have a more organic, free-form look (like MySpace). Most sites fall somewhere in between, mixing professionalism with personalization (like Facebook). But what’s the best way to design a social network? What are the elements that make a social network more user-friendly and more attractive to users? Read on to find out.
Those are just a few of my favorite resources for all things web and social media. Remember that you’re always welcome to email me any questions you might have regarding online marketing or social media (after all, we did just get ranked #2 out of all 50 states for our social media strategy). The reason I write on this blog is because I want to be able to help CVBs with their technology- and web strategy-related questions.
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