Social Mediarology

As a follow up to my What Are Blogs post a couple of months ago, I’ll give you a quick tutorial about how to get started blogging and how to keep a blog going.

Getting a blog started is very easy. There are myriad free options available and if you’re interested in more robust options, you can also pay for some blogging services.

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Technology doesn’t come naturally to me, but I realize that the Internet offers one of the most effective, most targeted and most cost-efficient ways to reach visitors. For about six months, I’ve been buying keywords through Google Adwords for the Columbus Visitors Center.

Google Adwords is an online advertising product that allows you to identify keywords that visitors might be using to find your products when they search on Google.  When a user “googles” your keyword, your short text ad appears on the page with search results. Users can click through to your website.  At this point, your account is charged.

The click-thru rate depends on the popularity of the keyword.  I find that I am paying an average of 0.84 per click.  You can put limits on how much you are willing to spend.  For just a few hundred dollars a month, our ads are getting tens of thousands of impressions.

You can also refine your campaign to a geographic area to keep a more regional focus. I have focused on the Midwest where most of our traffic originates.

I am currently running two campaigns on Google Adwords.  In the first campaign, I have purchased words that are related to modern architecture. Architecture is a niche market so I was excited about the possibilities of reaching out to fans of modern architecture using the internet.  I selected the names of the architects who have buildings in Columbus.  I also picked some generic terms like “modern architecture” and “mid-century modern.”

In the second campaign, I have purchased terms that someone looking for Edinburgh Premium Outlets might use.  The outlet mall is one of our biggest attractions.  Since it’s on the outer edge of our county, many visitors don’t know about all the great things they can do when they are in the community. My campaign featuring Edinburgh Premium Outlets has outperformed my starter campaign.  Here I selected “discount shopping,”  “outlet shopping,” and “Edinburgh.”

There is no limit on the number of keywords you select.  You can always delete and ad words as you wish to make changes.

I have a few tips for folks who want to give this program a try.

1. Think like a visitor. Pretend you know nothing about your destination.  I decided that most visitors probably can’t spell Edinburgh.  Why would it end in an “h”?  So, I signed up for keywords that include “Edinburg.”  Four of my top five best-performing keywords have a variation of Edinburgh that is incorrectly spelled.
2. Fish where the fish are. Remember the competition.  We offer a popular architecture tour.  So, does the Chicago Architecture Foundation.  I added ”Chicago Architecture Foundation” as one of my keywords.
3. Edit, edit, edit. Your ad can only be two lines long with a short headline and your URL. Say what you need to say with small number of potent words.  This requires tremendous discipline and creativity.
4. Be flexible. You can change your ad or your keywords as often as you wish, unlike those print ads that have a long shelf life.   So, mix it up.  Test different messages.  Find out what works.  If you set it and forget it, you’ll be missing out on one of the great advantages Google Adwords offers.

Digg, SumbleUpon, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, reddit, addthis…What in the world are these websites? You may have heard of one or several of these recently, or you may have no idea what they are. Have no fear, the Tourism Tech Corner is here to help you out.

These are all social bookmarking sites. Have you ever come across a website or an article that you really enjoyed, and wanted to share it with a friend? If you’re like many people, you probably copy and paste the website address into an email and shoot it out to the friends who you think might enjoy the article. This works just fine if you have a small group of friends to share that link with. What happens if you wanted to share that article with more than just that small group of friends? That’s where social bookmarking comes in.

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What is RSS? It stands for Really Simple Syndication and Wikipedia can give you more technical details, but what you really need to know is that RSS lets you “subscribe” to frequently changing website (like blogs) and read them at your leisure without having to actually visit the website. This can be very helpful with parts of your website that you update frequently like a blog, Press Release page or an events calendar.

It’s extremely easy to set up an RSS feed on your website, and there are several ways to do so. We use FeedBurner here on the Tourism Tech Corner. FeedBurner is great, not just because they’ve recently been acquired by Google, but because it gives you tons of options about how you want your feed displayed. It is also very simple to put a feed up and will certainly work without having to go through too many of the details. FeedBurner also allows you to set up email alerts for your page in addition to RSS feeds. You’ll notice that on the left hand side of the Social Mediarology, you can click on RSS or on Email. One great feature that FeedBurner offers is the ability to track RSS readers and email subscribers. You can see who has signed up to subscribe to your feed and keep tabs on them.

Updated (10/22): There is one other great feature about using FeedBurner for your RSS rather than a standard domain-provided RSS feed. If, for some reason, your blog ever moves from it’s current place, everyone who is subscribed through the FeedBurner RSS won’t have to re-subscribe. So, if I moved the Tourism Tech Corner blog from WordPress to Blogger, the RSS transition would be seemless. All I would have to do is log into my FeedBurner account and change the blog address. Most of you won’t change your blog address once it’s set up, but this is a good safeguard, just in case! Updated (10/22)

Now that you’ve got RSS feeds set up on your website or blog, your next question is probably, how do I read RSS feeds?

Well, there are a number of great, free RSS readers out there. Typically, whenever you click on an RSS feed link (look for the icon at the top of the post), you’ll be brought to a page where you can decide which reader you want to view the RSS feed through. If you’re interested in a web-based RSS Reader, Google Reader is a great option. It’s free with a Google Account and you can organize your different feeds into folders (tourism feeds in one folder, hotel feeds in another folder, etc.)

If you’re looking for a desktop-based reader, FeedDemon is one of the most popular ones out there for PCs (NetNewsWire is the Mac equivalent). One bonus of a desktop-based RSS reader is that your feeds can be downloaded to your computer and read even if you’re not connected to the internet.

The best thing about RSS Feeds is that they enable you to keep up with websites that talk about things you are interested in without having to visit the sites multiple times a day. Once you’ve subscribed to an RSS Feed, it will automatically update in your reader when the site gets updated.

Do any of you use RSS readers or feeds for your organizations?

Here’s a video that shows you exactly what Google Friend Connect is and how to use it, but I’ll give you a quick run-down. Google Friend Connect provides website owners with the quick and easy ability to implement social networking ‘widgets’ to their website using a quick copy and paste. No coding needed!

Google Friend Connect can help turn your website into more of a community space where users can comment and rate stories, add their own pictures and even see who else is participating on your website. When you come across a website with Friend Connect installed, you can sign in using your existing Google, Yahoo or AOL account information, and you can invite friends from your Facebook, GoogleTalk, LinkedIn accounts and more. Every time you come across a site with Google Friend Connect, you can sign in to that website’s Friend Connect and all your information is right there waiting for you.

Google is looking to the next phase of social networking and the next phase of where I believe the internet is headed. Call it Web 2.5 or Web 3.0 if you wish. I think the internet is heading in the direction where every website you visit can be a part of your community. Rather than having to join proprietary networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn to be a part of a community, it will more like being members of a big public university. You’re all connected, in that you’re all a part of the same University system, but you have different classes with different people, and you spend your free time differently too. But if you meet a new friend in class, you can invite them to be a part of one of your extra-curricular activities.

Maybe I went a bit overboard with my college analogy, but I think it works. Right now Google Friend Connect is only being rolled out to a select group of users, but before long, I expect this will be opened up to anyone interested.

If you read this blog for long enough, you’ll find out that I’m impressed with just about everything Google does. Google Alerts are no exception. Cindy left a comment for me on my last post that mentioned Google Alerts, so I thought I’d post about it.

So, what is a Google Alert? Quite simply, you enter a search term and Google sends you an email every time they find a mention on the internet. You can also set up your Alerts to be sent in a daily “digest” so you aren’t inundated by emails. For example, I have three daily Google Alerts sent to me. One is for Indiana Tourism, one for Indiana Travel and one for Tourism Tech Corner. Each day, I receive a digest containing the top articles, blogs and other mentions on the web for each of my search terms.

Here are a couple of examples:

In my What are Blogs? post, I mentioned the Holiday World blog, the Holiblog. Sure enough, within an hour of that post going live, I had a comment from Holiday World, thanking me for mentioning them on the blog. Similarly, in my Get The Most Out Of Flickr post, I referenced and linked to a great article about how nonprofits can get the most out of Flickr. Again, within about an hour, the author of the blog posted a comment thanking me for referencing her work.

It’s very likely that each of them is using Google Alerts to see when and where people are talking about them online. This works very well for attractions, especially if you have a fairly uncommon name like Holiday World (or Indiana Beach for that matter, who has their own blog: View From the Crow’s Nest). This can also work well for CVBs or other Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs).

The key is how you respond when you get that Google Alert in your inbox. If you just read it and delete it, it’s probably not going to be all that helpful for your business. But if you become engaged with the people who are talking about you, you’ll do nothing but help out your business.

Let’s say that I get an alert tomorrow that someone has mentioned Indiana Tourism on their blog. The best thing for me do to is become engaged in the conversation. I’ll head to the blog that talked about us and thank them for the mention. I might also talk about some of the things we’re working on here at Indiana Tourism to further engage others who read the blog.

Similarly, if I run across a blog entry where someone mentions a bad experience they had in Indiana, I have the opportunity to try to make things right. I can offer information about other trips to take in Indiana or find out what their interests are and suggest that they give Indiana another try. DMOs, attractions and hoteliers can even offer freebies as an apology to a dissatisfied customer.

I think that the use of Google Alerts, and how you respond to them, should be considered part of your customer service plan. If I had a bad experience at an attraction or hotel and they personally responded to me with an apology, I’d be much more likely to either visit again or recommend a friend to do the same. At the very least, I’d respect them for a great customer service effort.

What do you think about using Google Alerts as a part of customer service? Do you think that word-of-mouth (both positive and negative) is the most effective form of ‘advertising’? I’d love your comments.