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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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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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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So, is social media just a fad?

There are plenty of people who still dismiss social media as useless. In fact, there are studies that show that 40% of all ‘tweets’ are pointless babble. Even though that may be true, that doesn’t diminish the power and usefulness of social media in marketing and PR today. There will always be people who don’t understand new technologies and how they can be useful, and social media is no exception. The video below has been circulating online in the past couple of weeks and it does a fantastic job of highlighting how much a part of our lives social media has become. No longer can you ignore social media, in fact, in a recent survey of Indiana Tourism entities, nearly 30% of respondents use Twitter on to promote their destination and more than 90% use Facebook.

My favorite quote in the entire presentation is:

Social Media isn’t a fad – it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

That’s such a true statement. Social Media isn’t just a way to waste time and talk with friends about useless bits of trivia, it’s truly a new way to communicate directly with consumers, with your customers.

Some other encouraging news for the use of social media is that more 80% of US adults use social media on a monthly basis. For more information about the different types of social media use check out these posts on Groundswell):

The video below is the precursor to the other video in this post. While this one doesn’t focus on social media exclusively, there is still some pretty amazing information in here.

Groundswell

I just finished reading Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and I can’t say enough good things about the book. Not only does it give you a great insight into the world of social media, but it gives case study upon case study about how organizations have successfully integrated different social media initiatives to varying degrees of success.

I mentioned in an earlier post about Groundswell that this book is a must-read for anyone thinking about getting involved in the groundswell, but after reading the book cover to cover, I think this should be required reading for just about every organization. We’re quickly headed in a direction that will essentially require you to be involved in the groundswell for your business. A great example given in the book mentioned that if you visited a website in 1995 and it had one header image and some text, that was pretty commonplace. If you visited that same website now, they’d be far behind the times. This is likely to be true in the not-too-distant future with groundswell technologies. If you visit a website in 5 years that doesn’t have social technologies integrated into it, they’ll seem woefully out of date.

There’s no need to fret, and you don’t have to be worried that your website is currently obsolete, you just need to read Groundswell and begin implementing some of their suggestions. If you have any questions about how your organization could begin to dip their toe into the groundswell, please feel free to ask me.

A great place to start for most tourism organizations is with Google Alerts (TTC Blog Post) and Flickr (TTC Blog Post). The Google Alerts allow you to listen to what people are saying about you and Flickr allows you to put your best foot forward and show everyone what your location is really all about.

On a personal note, I hope that everyone has a wonderful Holiday season and a Happy New Year. I’ll return in 2009 with more Tourism Tech Corner posts and more information that can help you more forward in your business. If you have any questions or recommendations for Tourism Tech Corner post topics, either leave me a note in the comments below or shoot me an email.

- Jeremy

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmykFKjNpdY]

You really should watch this Motrin ad before reading the post, but here’s a brief synopsis if you choose not to.

The ad targets moms, especially moms who use baby carriers to hold their young ones. It mentions that all different types of baby carriers seem to be in style now, and although they’re supposed to be good for the baby, they’re hard on mom’s back, neck and shoulders. In the end, the mom in the ad says that the pain is alright, because “it’s a good kind of pain – it’s for my kid.” Plus, she states “it totally makes me feel like an official mom.”

Motrin launched the ad above at the end of September, but a little over a week ago (on Nov. 15th) the ad was picked up by some bloggers and all hell broke loose. The very next day (Nov. 16th) Motrin yanked the ad and responded with an apology on their website. (see this timeline for the details of how the story broke)

The comments about the story ranged from support and understanding of Motrin’s goals to anger and frustration at the tone of the ad. Some felt Motrin connected with them about a deeply personal issue – their infants. Others were insensed that Motrin would insinuate that baby carriers were simply a style statement. Others commented that if you properly wear a baby carrier, it won’t hurt your back, neck or shoulders. Here are some examples of comments that surfaced on Twitter on the 16th. Pay attention to the last comment, it sums up how social media can be used to your benefit:

Just think about that last comment for a minute. There were thousands of people contributing comments about one ad campaign. Think about the possibilities if you could harness the knowledge and opinions of that vocal minority. Social media allows you to do just that. While this campaign turned out to be a bit of a PR mess for Motrin, they’ve been able to identify thousands of people who they could use as they begin working on a new campaign. They can leverage this groundswell of consumers to float slogans or ad concepts by and get feedback BEFORE causing another Motrin-gate ‘scandal’. (more…)