1: Facebook Ads Become Dramatically More Transparent | AllFacebook

Social Mediarology thinks: This is a simple but beneficial change for Facebook users and for advertisers. The ad’s URL only displays if it’s taking you off Facebook.com. So you still won’t know exactly where the on-site ads will take you, but this is a great step forward in transparency for all Facebook users.

2: Windows Live Outsources Blogging, Migrating 30 Million Users To WordPress.com | TechCrunch

Social Mediarology thinks: Four years ago, Microsoft launched Windows Live Spaces, a blogging platform for Live.com users (the successor to MSN and what preceded Bing). Over the past four years, WLS has racked up 30 million users and starting now, those users are being migrated over to WordPress.com – the world’s largest blogging site. This is a great move for Microsoft, because it will give their users more robust features through the WordPress interface and it allows Microsoft to focus their efforts where they’re more urgently needed (Windows 7 phone?)

3: Get at Clue: What do People Remember About Your Site? | ReadWriteWeb

Social Mediarology thinks: Clue is a great free web design usability tool that can help you as you’re in the process of redesigning your website. Enter the URL you want to test into Clue and they’ll spit out another URL for you to share for feedback. Users are given five seconds to view your page then they’re asked what they recall from the page. Each Clue ‘test’ is live for 48 hours and results are easy to view – just add a + to the end of the test URL and you can see the results.

4: Don’t Let the Intern Run Your Social Strategy | Travel 2.0

Social Mediarology thinks: Troy does it again with another great post about managing your company’s social strategy. While interns may have a greater degree of technical knowledge, they shouldn’t necessarily be the front-lines of your social strategy. The first step toward a successful social strategy is buy-in from the top of your organization.

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.

Several years ago, the largest line item in most DMO’s budget was a printed travel guide. Do you see printed publications going away in the near future?

I don’t think printed guides will ever go away entirely. I know there are some agencies out there who have totally dropped it in favor of a all digital guide, which I think is a workable solution, but at this point a printed guide is still important for the people who want them. What we’re seeing now, is a case where 5, 10 or 15 years ago, there was just the printed guide, which was the primary way for people to get information from us, and now there are so many different communication channels out there. With technology itself, particularly social as well as the iPad and the iPhone, people have a lot more freedom of choice about how they want to receive information. From the DMO (Destination Marketing Organization) side, we need to look at it more as a project around information and the content we have, rather than it being just a printed guide project.

If we were to have a meeting about our guide, I’d start with all the information first, then, on the side, we;d discuss where all the different places are that people could get this information. There’s your printed guide, your website, potentially email, social, then you have the mobile side of things maybe with an iPhone or iPad application. It’s just trying to figure out the best way to get all the information to the appropriate channels so people can find it. The challenge with that since the technology is still so young, is that it takes a lot of time and resources to try and break out of a printed publication cycle and into more of an information dissemination cycle.

The iPad is pretty exciting in terms of its potential for digital visitors guides and the interaction we can have with the visitor through it. I think it’s the best example so far that non-technical people within the industry have seen that opens their eyes to the possibilities.

The challenge for a lot of us in the DMO space is that the printed guide is a huge KPI (key performance indicator) for us, and a huge indicator of our success throughout the year, so it’s difficult for us to make that transition and all of a sudden, you’re sending a report to your board that while you printed 1,000,000 guides last year, you’ve only printed 200,000 this year, but here are the reasons why. Without really accurate tracking/education about website visits, social hits and mobile/iPad applications it’s difficult to show people that the number went down so significantly and not have them raise questions.

For a lot of us, it’s still an issue of reporting back to our board and to make sure it still looks like we’re doing a good job. I think it will be interesting in the next few years. I think the iPad is a fantastic device and if you walk by any apple store in the mall, it’s absolutely packed – it doesn’t matter what time of day you go. The interaction that all age groups and demographics have, it ‘s just fascinating. Apple has done a great job with their interface design and have made it easy for anyone to use, not just someone who’s technically inclined. That’s why so many people are talking about iPhone apps and iPad apps all the time because it’s such a successful platform for communicating with people. I’m really interested to see which DMO comes out with their travel guide as a fully-designed iPad app first.

What are your recommendations on first steps in social media?

My first recommendation for a DMO in social, is to get started with either Twitter or a blog. Twitter is a very easy interface and program to learn and understand once you get started. It also gives you a good look into the social world and how people communicate and how people engage in that world. Whether or not Twitter works for every destination is still to be determined. Some destinations tend ot be more successful with Twitter than others, but I think a lot of that has to do with content.

I still really like the idea of a blog. It’s probably not as sexy as Twtter, Facebook and others now, but I like the communication channel of blogs. I think it works really well for the destination model. There are a lot of things going on in a destination – a lot of things we don’t typically get to talk about on the homepage of the website. The rodeo may not be large enough to go on to the official state tourism website, but that’s a great topic for a blog post.

My third suggestion would have to be YouTube because of the engagement you can get on YouTube. I wouldn’t recommend it first, only because it can be a challenge for DMOs to come up with the video content. That’s always the challenge – you have to have good video content to put up on youtube.

You didn’t mention Facebook at all, does Facebook have a place in DMO marketing?

I’ve been a slow adopter to Facebook. I wrote several posts a few years ago that outlined why I didn’t think Facebook was right for the destination industry and I’m still not 100% convinced that it’s right for us in the industry.

There are obviously a lot of people on Facebook – 500 million people are sure to garner some attention – but I have yet to see anyone feel that their Facebook campaign has been really successful.

I don’t know if it’s simply because ther isn’t enough research around it, but I feel that a lot of DMOs are on Facebook because they’ve seen other DMOs on there.

I also think a lot of the fans of the individual organizations (like fans of Visit Indiana, or Florida, or Atlanta) are just “bumper-sticker fans”; of the state. it’s like when you see a car full of bumper stickers. They’re aligning themselves with a particular brand or organization, but that doesn’t make they’re going out and giving money to or financially supporting that organization. I think its similar on Facebook – people want to say I’m from Florida, I’m a fan of Florida, I’m just not necessarily going to do anything with the state. I get the feeling there’s a little bit of that. I struggle with whether or not its a good place for marketers to be.

There’s been a lot of conversation about how some marketing teams are pushing a lot of things to Facebook. Facebook has almost replaced the call to action in TV commercials. Like when people’s commercials would say “find us at AOL keyword: travel” or 4-5 years ago when organizations would say “visit our website at myspace.com/OrganizationName“. I still have a issue with putting a majority of my marketing influence on someone else’s website

I’m a huge proponent of protecting your brand on Facebook. I think there should be a Visit whatever page, a Visit Indiana Page on Facebook. I think you should own it and use some service that lets you update Twitter and Facebook at the same time. There are a lot of good things you can do with Facebook, but I’d definitately diversify my campaigns so not everything‘s focused on Facebook. I’d even spend some time on TripAdvisor or WikiTravel, the sites that tend to get left out of the Big Three conversations (Facebook, Twitter and YouTube). I think the forums on Trip Advisor alone, you could build an entire social campaign around those.

How does blogging fit in to a digital strategy?

I think blogging is a great opportunity to give your destination a personality and to give an actual voice to the people who make up your community. A lot of us have made it a bit difficult for consumers to find the people behind the DMOs and attractions – primarily because of spam and email concerns, more than anything else. Blogs allow consumers to see that there are real people behind the organization, people who are passionate about the destination and they’re they local experts.

I think that in the next 5-10 years, that’s how DMOs will remain relevant. by highlighting and focusing in on that local knowledge. By saying, “here’s Jeremy. He lives in Indianapolis, he goes to these restaurants and attractions, he knows all about them.” Who better to ask when you’re looking to travel than someone who actually lives in the area and talks about these things for a living? The blog is an excellent way to show personality and to show off some of the charm of the destination. a website homepage tends to do very few things – promoting a big event coming up or specific hotels – but if you have space on your homepage carved out for a blog, it helps bring out the smaller things, more of the niche things that are going on. More of the local info and local knowledge that people really want to find out about. It can be a real differentiator between your destination and another destination.

I think going back to your last question about where to get started with social media, and for a lot of small marketing teams, with one or two people, that’s what makes Twitter such a good place to get started. Twitter is, after all, microblogging. I think that gives you a nice intro into what you’ll see and the impact you might have. That gives you the confidences to see that it’s actually worth your time to spend a couple hours a week writing a good blog post and then posting it on the blog. That’s a great way to intro from Twitter, to Blogs then to YouTube and Facebook.

What are some DMOs that come to mind who are doing a great job with social media and digital strategy?

There are a few of them out there. I love what Portland, Oregon is doing a great job communicating with their actual visitor. Not specifically the technical things they’re doing, but they do a great job actually listening and communicating with the visitor – forming the relationship that is the basis of social media.

I like what Columbus, Ohio does – their team does a great job on their blog and Twitter streams. From a state level, not to stroke your ego too much, but I think Indiana does a great job. You guys do a good job with your social presence and the way you go about it. I like what Oregon is doing as well. As much trouble as Florida has had, I really like the way they’ve tackled the oil spill via social media. They’ve really confronted it head-on an haven’t tried to say “don’t tell people there’s oil on this beach”. They’ve actually posted maps that show people where the oil is and I think that’s important to be open and transparent in the social space.

I think that how organizations respond in a time of crisis shows a lot more about their organizational strength than how they do when things are fine.

The oil spill is a great example of that. The volcano from Iceland earlier this year is another example. When we have natural disasters like that, it’s fascinating to look at the Air France Facebook page, which they weren’t really updating at the time – that gives consumers the message of: “Hey, we’re not updating this – go away!” That was their message to people. You can’t really start communicating with people when you want to, then shut things down when a disaster (natural or a PR disaster) occurs. I think a lot of people have overlooked crisis communications as part of their social media strategy. Hopefully, with the example of Florida and the volcano in Iceland people will start to incorporate crisis communications.

Another example is the recent incident with JetBlue where an employee yelled a plane full of passengers, pulled the emergency slide and ran away – JetBlue received a lot of criticism for their slow response to that.

JetBlue (along with Southwest Air) are the two stars of social media in the airline industry. They respond to everything and it was very strange to see something happen to them and they didn’t immediately acknowledge it. Two hours is the maximum amount of time you have to respond to something that has happened. You no longer have a couple days to craft your message. People expect you to respond immediately.

I think a lot of business are struggling with that. For so long you had a corporate communications department and everything went through there, and now you have different communication channels and the public is okay with the transparency. When something bad happens, most consumers realize that people are working at the company and they just want to know what’s going on. For the JetBlue incident, they could have said: “hey, we know there was an incident, our team in New York is investigating it”. That’s okay to say at this point because it’s part of open communication back and forth with consumers.

Any final thoughts?

It’s a very exciting time to be in the tourism industry in general. We’ve always been very passionate about the tourism industry, but it’s even more exciting now with the technology that’s coming into it an they ability for consumers to communicate with us while they’re actually in the destination. It’s really interesting to see how people are using social tools to connect with like minded travelers while they’re on vacation. They’ll take recommendations from a stranger or a local about what restaurant to eat at. The more adoption we see in social, mobile, geolocation and the like, it really becomes a benefit to our travel, and not a detriment.

Troy Thompson, a self-described technopologist, is a respected blogger, consultant and thought-leader in the Tourism / Travel industry. Owner and consultant at Travel 2.0 Consulting, Troy has been providing unique interactive and marketing solutions to a variety of clients for more than a decade. Be sure to check out Travel 2.0. You can even follow Troy on Twitter (@Travel2dot0).

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.

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.

Blogger

Blogger is another popular hosted blogging platform. It’s been around since the late ’90s and was purchased by Google in the mid-2000s. Blogger is where many of today’s blog authors got their start. As one of the first free hosted blog platforms, Blogger is, at least in part, responsible for what blogging has become today. It tends to be the blog platform of choice for many first-time bloggers.

Here’s a full list of reasons to use Blogger.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a relative newcomer to the blogging world, but with more than 6 million users, it’s made quite a splash lately. Tumblr’s strength lies in microblogging. You can very easily post short updates, photos, videos or audio on the fly. Tumblr’s “Reblog” button allows you to re-post someone else’s Tumblr post on your own account with all the ease that you would Retweet a post on Twitter.

Here’s a full list of reasons to use Tumblr.

Posterous

Posterous is another relative newcomer to blogging. The Posterous platform was built on the idea that anyone can blog and it’s as simple as sending an email. You can create new posts via the Posterous back-end as well, but Posterous wants blogging to be as easy as sending an email to your unique account. This enables more on-the-fly posting and doesn’t require nearly as much prep time for posts. However, if you’re crafting a blog for your company or organization, you may want more crafted and detailed posts as opposed to on-the-fly, short posts.

The official Posterous blog has a ton of posts about why you should switch to Posterous.

WordPress.org

WordPress.org is one of the most popular and widely-used blogging and CMS platforms on the web today. If you already have a blog on WordPress.com, it’s an easy upgrade to WordPress.org. You’ll have the most flexibility by using WordPress.org, but you also have to have your own web host and, while the setup is relatively straight-forward, you might want to ask a tech-friend or your agency to help you with the initial setup on your server.

Since WordPress.org is free open-source software, the possibilities of what you can do with WordPress are nearly limitless. This WordPress.org features page is a bit more technical than the others, but here it is.

Conclusion

In the end, the blogging platform you choose is completely up to you and should be based on the goals your organization has for blogging. If you’re looking for a fully-functional, SEO-friendly blog that you have complete control over, you’ll probably want to use WordPress.org. If you’re looking for something more casual, maybe a blog devoted to pictures from in and around your location, Posterous or Tumblr might work best for you.

Regardless of which blogging platform you use, blogs are becoming an important tool for businesses to utilize when reaching out to existing and potential customers.

Have you used any of these blogging platforms? Which do you prefer? Is there anything I missed in this post? Let me know in the comments!

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…

Facebook’s Notes App

This app comes preloaded on your Personal Facebook account as well as on your business’ page. When you’re editing on the back end of your Facebook Page, click on Edit under the Notes icon, then click on Import A Blog on the right side of the page. From here, you can enter your blog’s website or RSS feed. Now your blogs will be fed through to your Facebook page soon after they’re published. Positives:

• Very easy and quick to set up.
• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog.
• Keeps everything contained within Facebook – the title clickthru goes to the full post in the Facebook Notes section, allowing Facebook members to comment and Like your post.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.

Negatives:

• Everything is contained within Facebook – a link to the post on your blog is hidden within the full post in your Notes section.
• Notes is a very inflexible system. The only option you have is whether or not to use it.

RSS Graffiti

RSS Graffiti has become Social Mediarology’s blog feed app of choice. It’s fairly easy to set up and manage and does exactly what we want a blog feed app to do.

You can set up this application by going to facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti and clicking on Add to my Page. From there, setup is pretty simple. Just go fill out the information for your blog (either the URL or your RSS Feed), fill out a few preferences and your posts will start feeding through to Facebook! Positives:

• Fairly easy and quick to set up.
• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post.
• Allows you to set how frequently the app checks to see if you have new posts. I have it set to “As Soon As Possible”.
• Application easily manages multiple blogs and allows for posting to your personal profile as well as any pages or groups that you manage.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.

Negatives:

• Slightly more difficult to set up.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post – this could be a negative if you want to keep fans on your Facebook page, but I view it as a good thing.

Networked Blogs

Networked Blogs is one of the more popular blog feed apps on Facebook today and it has some great networking features built in. You can install a Networked Blogs widget on your blog and readers can easily click to follow your posts. When you install Networked Blogs, you can also follow other blogs within their network. It’s a nice way to stay up-to-date on your favorite blogs.

Just like with RSS Graffiti, visit facebook.com/networkedblogs and click Add to my Page to get started. Here’s where it gets a bit more confusing. While Networked Blogs offers many features, I found it extremely difficult to navigate and do even simple things like edit my feed, determine whether the feed would get pulled to my personal profile or fan page. Once you figure out the process, it’s not too bad, but there’s a fairly steep learning curve with Networked Blogs.

Positives:

• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog, or a screenshot of the blog if there are no images in the post.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post.
• Gives you a Networked Blogs page on Facebook where you can keep up with your other favorite blogs.
• Application manages multiple blogs and allows for posting to your personal profile as well as any pages you manage.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.
• Appends Tweet This and Follow Blog links to the update so you can easily share the post outside of Facebook.

Negatives:

• Significantly more difficult to set up.
• Does not allow you to set how frequently the app checks to see if you have new posts. Networked Blogs manages this based on the number of followers you have. It can vary from once in 24 hours to every half-hour.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post – this could be a negative if you want to keep fans on your Facebook page, but I view it as a good thing.

HootSuite

I use HootSuite to manage multiple social media initiatives and enjoy its ease of use and robust features. In fact, I do use Hootsuite to push my blog posts through to Twitter, but other apps do a better job in pushing blog posts to Facebook.

When you’ve set up your Facebook account and fan page in Hootsuite, simply click on the Settings, then RSS/Atom tabs and add a new feed. You can add multiple feeds and you can specify which accounts you want them pushed through to. It’s very simple to set up and once you’ve done it, you shouldn’t have to go in and modify it. You can definitely set it and forget it.

Positives:

• Very easy and quick to set up.
• Pushes the user directly to your blog to read each post.
• If you use HootSuite’s ht.ly links, you can see robust analytics for each post.
• If you already use HootSuite, this is a great way to manage just about everything with one program.

Negatives:

• No thumbnails pulled in, just any prepended text you specified, the blog title, the beginning of the post and a link.
• This is the simplest-looking post of the ones mentioned.
• Post is not sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook – it just appears as a link within update copy.

Recap

There are many ways to feed your blog into Facebook, but whichever method you use, be sure you do pull your blog feed into Facebook. It’s a great way to give your fans and friends relevant content. Do you use any of these methods to feed your blogs into Facebook or do you use something else?

If you’ve already created a Twitter account, a Facebook Fan Page and a WordPress blog for your organization, you’re on the right track. Now that you have accounts at a handful of social media sites, how do you manage them all?

There are dozens of social media management platforms out there, including some great ones like TweetDeck and Seesmic. Both are great applications, but they need to be installed on your computer. One of the many great things about Hootsuite is it’s 100% web-based. You simply visit Hootsuite.com, log in and you can manage your social media initiatives from any computer with an internet connection.

Hootsuite Screenshot

Hootsuite originally launched in late 2008 as a dedicated Twitter client. As you can see from this screenshot, it’s evolved into a powerful social media management platform. In addition to Twitter, you can now manage Facebook (including Facebook Fan Pages), LinkedIn, WordPress and the lesser-used Ping.FM.

Do you want to post the same message to your Facebook page and your Twitter account? Do you want to set up your blog to feed through to your Twitter and Facebook accounts? Do you want to set up multiple accounts so different people at your organization can help manage your social media strategy? Hootsuite lets you do all this and more.

Hootsuite Stats Screenshot

Hootsuite also automatically shortens links using their Ow.ly URL shortener and gives you detailed stats about each links posted through Hootsuite. You can look at link stats from the past 24 hours, past week, past month or any other timeframe.

I’ve been using Hootsuite as my primary social media management tool for the past several months and I’ve been extremely impressed. There is a Hootsuite App available for iPhone and I’m waiting for the Blackberry app that will hopefully follow.

Have you used Hootsuite?

The people at CommonCraft have created a wonderful video series called “…in plain english” (check out their channel on YouTube) where they give you a quick and easy to understand description of lots of different types of technology, from Twitter to blogs, from social media to wikis, even from web search strategies to electing a US President. Below, I’ve included their “RSS in plain English” video. It gives a great, simple description of what RSS is and how to use it.

So now you understand what RSS is, and how it can help you to stay up-to-date on websites and blogs that you want to follow, but who should you follow first? The Tourism Tech Corner, of course! Use this RSS link to subscribe to the Tourism Tech Corner in your new RSS reader (I recommend Google Reader). While you’re at it, you should probably subscribe to the new Visit Indiana Blog too (RSS link here).

Now that you’ve set up your RSS reader and you have started following some blogs, it’s time to begin subscribing to your favorite websites or blogs. If you’re using Firefox as your web browser (which I recommend), they make subscribing to RSS feeds REALLY easy. Look at the image on the right. I’ve boxed the RSS feed icons in yellow. Firefox actually scans the websites to see if there is a feed to subscribe to and if there is, Firefox will place the feed icon in the address bar. Simply click on the RSS icon and you’ll be able to subscribe to the site.

In a later post, I’ll talk about how to set up your website so others can subscribe to your RSS feed, but the basics of RSS are here and it can save a tremendous amount of time as you let the information  come to you, rather than spending the time to go find the information you want.

Regardless of how you define the word ‘recession’, we’re definitely in a down economy. Local, State and Federal governments are taking in less tax money than expected, many businesses are losing money, budgets are being slashed across the board (especially in marketing and advertising) and many consumers are pinching every penny they can. While this all sounds very ‘doom and gloom’, it doesn’t have to be. There are effective ways to market to your customers, even in a slow economy like the one we’re in now.

I’ve been reading articles just about every day that talk about the opportunities that have arisen because of the slowdown in the economy and here are seven trends I’ve noticed (in no particular order):

• Email Marketing
  • Permission-based email blasts are still a great way to keep your consumers up-t0-date on things going on with your company. Unlike direct mail pieces, your consumers have requested to receive information from you via email. That gives you the opportunity to give your consumers what they want.
• Web Analytics Integration
  • There are several web analytics suites available, but whichever suite you decide to use, you should use one. Google Analytics is a good free option. I’ve found that one of the most useful features of Google Analytics it the ability to find out which search terms people used to find your site. That knowledge can help you better optimize your website’s content or assist in the creation of a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign to push more traffic to your site.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • While there are many companies that specialize in SEO you can do some basic optimization on your own. Focus on keywords that relate to your business. If the copy on your website hasn’t been rewritten in a few years or even a few months, it’s probably time to put up some new copy. This will help the search engines find your site when users search for those keywords.
• Blogging
  • In addition to enabling you to get information out quickly and informally, blogging can also be good for SEO (see above). If you use your organization’s blog strategically, by using key words and focusing on specific topics, you can come to be seen as an authority in your field. Search engines love blogs because content is created frequently and is stored forever. Unlike a website where you change out the content on a page a few times a year, every time you create a new blog post, all the old posts are still there, continuing to be indexed by the search engines.
• Social Media engagement
  • In the same way that blogging is good for SEO, social media can be as well. By getting involved on different social media sites, your name gets out there more and, in addition to delivering information to your consumers in a new way, people will be able to find you in more places using search engines. (Click on the image on the right, you’ll notice that when I searched for “visit indiana” in google, our webpage came up, but so did our twitter page and our Visit Indiana blog. Those are two more opportunities for people to find us.)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  • Search engine marketing is a relatively inexpensive way to drive more traffic to your site. If you are working to optimize the content on your website for search engines and engaged in blogging and social media, you’re in a great place. But if you want to supplement that work with paid search listings, SEM is for you. I know that the Columbus Area CVB uses paid search and it’s also a part of our ongoing marketing plan as well. This summer, our office launched Live Indiana for our summer promotion. During the promotion, we targeted consumers we don’t typically target – specifically, motorcycle enthusiasts. Since we did not have a wealth of motorcycle content on our website, we purchased motorcycle related keywords in Google and Yahoo and were able to drive traffic to our Live Indiana motorcycle promotion through SEM.
• Social Media Advertising
  • Social media advertising, especially on sites like Facebook is another way to stretch just a few dollars a very long way. Facebook allows you to advertiser either a group or fan page on Facebook or an outside website. I created a mock-up ad we might have used for the motorcycles portion of Live Indiana this summer. I was able to target about 30,000 adults 18+ in Indiana and the surrounding states who have an interest in motorcycles and motorcycle riding. You can also dig down much deeper to target more specifically. You can also run your campaign based on ad views or on click-throughs. (click on the image for a larger version)
  • Columbus Area CVB launched a campaign in October called Chicks Click Here. The campaign features a website, blog and a Facebook group – Unforgettable Women. Cindy from the CVB will put up a post with more details about the campaign, but for just about $25 a month, they’ve run a pay-per-click campaign on Facebook and have been able to attract women from as far away as San Diego, Boston, Florida and everywhere in between, to join them in the Unforgettable Women group.

Many of us will experience budget cuts in the year to come, but by thinking strategically and investing some time and effort, you can stretch those limited marketing dollars in ways you haven’t stretched them before.

Have you already implemented some of these marketing tactics? If so, what results have you seen? If not, do you think you will look to internet advertising more over the next year?

Some sources:

• MediaPost – Social Media Wins In Marketers’ ’09 Plans
• BusinessWeek – Why Online Ads Are Weathering the Recession
• New York Times – Some Online Ads Thrive in a Miserable Economy