Welcome to our series of interviews with local (and sometimes national) leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Troy Thompson of Travel 2.0, a Denver-based blog and digital consulting company focused on the travel and tourism industry

Troy Thompson – Travel 2.0

Troy has been involved in interactive marketing for the past 13 years. After starting his career at NASCAR in Florida, he was integral in launching their interactive department in the late ’90s. After nearly a decade with NASCAR, Troy moved to Arizona to become the Advertising Manager for the Arizona Office of Tourism. During his time at AOT, Troy headed up the social media division and recently moved to Denver to manage Visit Denver‘s interactive marketing department, including social media, mobile, SEO and more. Earlier this year he decided to break out on his own and dive into tourism technology consulting.

The Travel 2.0 blog started while Troy worked for Arizona Tourism as regular email updates about interactive marketing to the AOT staff and quickly evolved into a blog that could reach people far beyond the Arizona Office of Tourism. Now, thousands of people throughout the world read the Travel 2.0 blog each week and Troy is considered a thought leader in the interactive travel and tourism community.

The consulting arm of Travel 2.0 launched in June, 2010 and focuses on social media strategy/social media audits, mobile strategy including iPhone applications, statistical analysis, training and tourism marketing plan development.

What are some current and upcoming trends in the travel industry as it relates to technology?

The two trends we’re in right now that are still progressing are mobile and location based services (LBS). They certainly go hand in hand, but mobile feels a lot like it did in the late ’90s and early 2000s, when everyone realized the web wasn’t going away so they started to shift more budget and create functional websites. I see this a lot within the mobile space. It’s following a very similar pattern where people are saying "I think this mobile thing is going to stick around, I think the iPhone is going to be a solid platform to build on" and they’re shifting some dollars over to address that need. The challenge is that you don’t want to fall into the same trap we all did when we built our first websites – looking for the cheaper option, just doing the basics and not thinking long term. I think a lot of us built a website in 10 years ago and have had to rebuild the site every couple of years, and I think we’re now getting to the point where people are thinking more long term and more strategically about what the site is and what it needs to be. I’m hopeful that we’ll start to take that same approach with mobile – thinking long term rather than short term. While I think there will be a lot of transition within the mobile space in the next decade or so, building a good base at the beginning will help set you up for success in the long run.

As far as location-based services go, Foursquare seems to be the media darling of LBS.

If 2009 was Twitter’s year, it’s fair to say that 2010 is shaping up to be the year of Foursquare. I think with the recent launch of Facebook Places, LBS’s will just become more important, particularly for the travel industry.

The fact that you’ll be able to have geographic information about your visitor while they’re in your area becomes very powerful. Right now, while the tools aren’t there to completely take advantage of that, those tools will surely come about soon. Taking advantage of a one-on-one communication with someone visiting your local Art Museum will be just as easy as setting up an email campaign or a Google Adwords campaign.

The final trend I’m seeing is tracking. It’s been the big demand of everyone, not just within the travel industry, but everyone who’s been involved in the mobile or social media field. How do we track all of these these things and connect the dots between websites, SEO, mobile marketing, social media marketing, and how do we get the accurate tracking to be able to quantify the ROI that we’re putting into these new spaces. I feel like that’s coming along. It depends on how much information the consumer wants to give out about themselves, but I think that’s an area where we’ll see some more big strides over the next two or three years.

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I spent Friday at Blog Indiana, a great social media and blogging conference  based in Indianapolis. It was a great chance to run into some social media and tourism people from Indianapolis and a chance to finally put a face to some names I’ve gotten to know through social media.

Day 1 Highlights:

• Getting the chance to “tag” ourselves by wearing buttons that described what we did and specialized in – such a great idea.
• Getting to hear Jason Falls (@JasonFalls – Social Media Explorer) speak about conversational marketing
• Listening to a panel of Jason Falls, Chris Baggott (@ChrisBaggott – Compendium) and the newest Hoosier, Jay Baer (@JayBaer – Convince and Convert) speak about blogs and your blog readers and how to reach them.
• Lisa Vielee (@LisaVielee – Gracie Communications) mentioned the Indiana Insider Blog as an example of how to build a blogging community.
• Catching up with Doug Karr (@DouglasKarr – DK New Media) and hearing him mention the Wibiya bar as a great tool to use on a website – I’ve been using it for a while now.
• Finally getting to meet Chris Theisen (@CJTheisen – Hare Chevy), Heather Richey (@hnrichey – Conner Prairie), Josh Humble (@tkographix – TKO Graphix) and Lisa Vielee.

Thanks to Noah Coffey (@NoahWesley) and Sean Plew (@HoosierPlew) as well as all the other presenters for putting on a great conference this year.

A colleague at a local Convention & Visitor Bureau (CVB) recently mentioned that their office wanted to include a blog in their social media strategy, and she wanted my thoughts about which blogging platform they should use.

Here is a brief rundown of some of the most popular blogging platforms, as well as a few up-and-comers, along with some of the benefits and drawbacks of each platform. I’ll just cover free blogging platforms today, there are plenty of other paid platforms, including TypePad and Compendium.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is a hosted blogging solution. That means that when you create a WordPress.com blog, your address will look like: YourBlogName.wordpress.com. I switched from Blogger to WordPress.com several years ago as I wanted more control over what my blog looked like.

Here are the WordPress.com features available for bloggers.

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Here are some great posts from the past week about social media:

1: How the Old Spice Videos are Being Made | ReadWriteWeb

Social Mediarology thinks: You’ve probably see the commercials on TV, but the agency responsible for this campaign went into overdrive this week and cranked out more than 80 180 customized videos for celebrities as well as big (and little) names in social media. They’ve created a very viral campaign that doesn’t bash you over the head with Old Spice. But, like Doug Karr asks, will people buy more Old Spice because of it?

2: Facebook’s Open Graph and Like Buttons are Going Mobile | Mashable

Social Mediarology thinks: While this article is short on details, the idea of bringing Open Graph and the now-ubiquitous Like button to mobile is enticing, especially for businesses in the travel and tourism industries.

3: New Hootsuite Features Offer More Insight About Your Customers | ReadWriteWeb

Social Mediarology thinks: We’ve written about Hootsuite countless times before, and their addition of filtering by Klout (influence) scores or keyword are sure to help you focus on the right followers to engage.

4: The Top 5 Reasons to Switch from WordPress to Posterous | Posterous

Social Mediarology thinks: While we’re big fans of WordPress here, this post was quite convincing. If you’re looking for a user-friendly, if less robust and customizable, option for blogging, Posterous might just be for you.

If you’ve been online at all in the last 45 days, you’ve likely seen Facebook’s new Like (or Recommend) button on websites all over the internet. In April Facebook released Open Graph (check out ReadWriteWeb’s excellent summary here), which, in short, gives websites – large and small – the ability to integrate some of Facebook’s social features into their own sites.

One of the most useful bits of Open Graph is also among the easiest to implement on your website or blog. Facebook’s universal Like button can be added to your website with a single line of code and can dynamically added to your self-hosted WordPress blog with a simple plugin.

Facebook’s new universal Like button allows users to click that they like or recommend a website. That information is then sent through to your Facebook profile so your friends can see that you enjoyed the site you were visiting. By making it so easy to share things you enjoy with your friends, Facebook has helped increase the viral nature of sharing links.

Install the Facebook Like Button on your Website:

Facebook offers a host of social plugins that you can install on your website or blog, with varying degrees of programming knowledge, but the easiest option is checking out the Facebook Like Social Plugin page. You’ll want to use this method if you’re simply sticking the Facebook Like plugin on your static homepage. If you have a blog and would like the Like button to be on every post, see below.

On this page, simply fill in the website that the Like button will live on, choose your layout style, whether or not you want the plugin to show faces of people who like your site, the width, the verb you want to use (either Like or Recommend), the font you want to use and the color scheme. Then click the “Get Code” button and you can copy and paste the code into your website wherever you want the button to appear. This provides you with an easy way to include Facebook’s new Like feature on your website and can help your web traffic as people Liking your page.

Install the Facebook Like Button on your self-hosted WordPress blog:

If you’re self-hosting a WordPress blog, there are a number of plugins you can use to put the Facebook Like/Recommend button at the bottom of each post, but I use the SNV Facebook Like Button plugin. It’s simple, customizable and works like a charm! As you can see on the Social Mediarology main page and each of the posts, a simple Recommend button shows up below each post. Click it and a link to the post will be fed to your Facebook Profile for your friends to see.

Facebook has made it very easy to add some of their social features to your website or blog. Both the website code and the WordPress plugin include the number of people who clicked the like button, so you can see just how viral your content is becoming!

If you want to implement even more of Facebook’s Social Plugins, check out their Social Plugins Developers page. Have you implemented Facebook’s Like/Recommend button on your site yet?

On Tuesday, I moderated and sat on a panel of bloggers who write for the Indiana Insider Blog, which I manage for work. We had a good discussion and the audience members had some great questions ranging from blogging best practices to FourSquare and the future of social media. The focus of the panel was on blogging, but Facebook was brought up during the session as well. It got me thinking about a best practice for Facebook Pages – feeding your blog posts through to Facebook. It’s a relatively straight-forward process, but there are many different ways to feed your blog content through to Facebook.

There are a multitude of apps that will pull in your feed as well as Facebook’s Notes app, so I’ll go through some of the most popular ways to pull in your Facebook content and give you the pluses and minuses of each.

I’ll detail Facebooks Notes App, the RSS Graffiti and Networked Blogs apps and Hootsuite after the jump…

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