Social Mediarology

Social Media Landscape - fredcavazza

You might look at this image and feel completely overwhelmed at the idea of social media and how you’re going to implement it for your business. Don’t be! Social media can appear overwhelming, but there are easy ways to break into it without breaking the bank. To be honest, this image only shows a tiny sliver of the social media networks online today, but it gives you a good idea of how important social media is now and will be in the very near future. Don’t be intimidated by thinking you need to be involved everywhere right away, know that you can slowly build your social media presence, one network at a time.

One of the best things about social media networks, especially in this slowing economy, is that the vast majority of social networks are free or offer at least some of their services for free. That being said, don’t be lulled into the false assumption that creating a good social media presence will be easy. It CAN be easy, but you have to devote some time to it.

Hopefully, you’ve created a Flickr account (if you haven’t, head over to Flickr.com, create an account, upload some photos and join the Visit Indiana Photo Group). If you haven’t and you want some more information about Flickr, check out this post (a Flickr primer), this post (getting the most out of Flickr) and this one (about launching into social media) from the Tourism Tech Corner. Flickr is a great place for any DMO to begin their Social Media Footprint (here is a great post from Travel 2.0 that explains how to protect your social media footprint). Create a page, post some photos and spread the word.

The best way to get your foot in the social media door is to see what others have done. Please take a look at what we’ve done on some of the following social networks:

• Flickr: Visit Indiana Photostream, Visit Indiana Group
• Twitter: Visit Indiana Tweets
• Facebook: Visit Indiana Group, Visit Indiana Fan Page
• YouTube: Visit Indiana Videos
• FriendFeed: Visit Indiana Office Stream
• Blogs: Indiana Insider Blog, Tourism Tech Corner Blog

Even if you’re not quite ready to jump head-first into social media, it’s a good idea to go ahead and create accounts at these sites and some others. The last thing you want is someone who is not associated with your DMO to create an account and create an online presence in your name. If you create your accounts but aren’t ready to start creating content, go ahead and set your profile status to invisible or private. No one will be able to see your accounts until you set them live again, but at least you won’t have a blank page sitting out there and no one else will be able to create that account in your name.

Over the next several months, I’ll be creating posts that will give you a primer on each of the social media sites mentioned above and any others that I come across. The best thing for you to do now is get in there and start experiencing these networks. Create a personal account, play around and have some fun. Get a feel for what these sites are and what they can do, then create an account for your business.

I’ve got one more suggestion for a social network that you, personally should join. It’s called SmallerIndiana and it’s an Indiana-based social network. Created as a place for Indiana’s best and brightest to collaborate, SmallerIndiana has members from throughout the state in countless industries. It’s a great place to become involved. With helpful members, most questions you ask will be answered quickly. So, join SmallerIndiana (and the Visit Indiana group) today! And if you’re interested, there are many active discussions in the SmallerIndiana Forums.

As always, I’d love to see your comments and thoughts about social media. Any benefits you’ve seen, any challenges or fears. Also, please feel free to send me a note or say hi on any of the social networks we’re involved with above.

Last week, we hosted the first Indiana Tourism Summit at the Indiana State Museum. It was great to see so many industry members in attendance and we hope you got as much out of the summit as we did.

Our four speakers included Bill Geist, Josh Hallett, Dan Schilling and Rob Hunden. Here’s a brief synopsis of what each one spoke about:

Bill Geist – Zeitgeist:

Bill has been a friend to the tourism industry for many years. From his time at the Madison (WI) CVB to his current role as a CVB/tourism consultant, he is at the forefront of the tourism industry. Bill’s presentation focused on everyone’s favorite topic: Strategic Planning.

While Strategic Planning can be viewed as a dry and tedious, it is still a necessity. Bill spent time talking about best practices for creating a strategic plan and among those was the idea that there’s no such thing as a bad idea. The beginning of a strategic plan is a brainstorming session. Some of the best ideas come from these early sessions.

Josh Hallett – Voce Communications:

Josh has spoken for our industry before, at our Tourism Council meeting in December of 2007, but every time he speaks, he brings something new to the table.

Josh’s speech touched on social media and how to use it effectively in your organization. The goals of the Tourism Tech Corner are similar and Josh is extremely knowledgeable about interactive new media.

Josh actually attended the tour of Lucas Oil Stadium and took some great pictures. Check them out here.

Tourism's Triple Bottom Line

Dan Schilling – Civic Tourism:

Dan brought some great information with him. Heritage (Cultural) tourism is one of the fastest growing segments of tourism, and tourism is the 1st, 2nd or 3rd largest industry in each of the 50 states. It’s Indiana’s 3rd largest industry.

One of the most interesting ideas Dan brought was that of the “Triple Bottom Line”. More than any other industry, Tourism benefits from being located in an economically, socially and environmentally healthy area. Similarly, no other single industry can contribute as much to help an area become more

Rob Hunden – Hunden Strategic Partners:

Rob is a native Hoosier and an IU graduate and has done quite a bit of work in Indiana, even though his office are located in Chicago now. Rob spent time talking about economic development through real estate development. His speech resonates, not only with the Indianapolis’s of the state, but also with small towns and cities.

After the presentations, we all headed over to the Lucas Oil Stadium for a guided tour that brought us through many public areas of the stadium, as well as some private areas. We got to go down on to the turf, through the visitors locker room, up into the press box and through the Quarterback suites.

Dinner followed soon after at The Rathskeller. Good food, good beer and great conversation followed. I hope that everyone had as much fun attending the event as we had!

Very soon, we’ll have each presenter’s presentation posted on our industry site, Tourism.IN.gov, and I’ll come back and link to those.

What were your thoughts of the Tourism Summit? Did you like it? Anything you would change?

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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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.