WordPress buttons (courtesy mariannemasculino on Flickr CC)

The great thing about (powerful AND free) WordPress.org online publishing software is that you can customize it with plugins.

The problem with this abundance of bloggy toys is that there are so many different ways to customize, you may go wild with plugins that you don’t really need, all of which can pose a security threat if you don’t keep them updated.

Too many of them will slow down your site’s load time as well, which both annoys your audience and has a negative effect on your SEO.

Here are the plugins that I use here on my own self-hosted blog, and why:

**  MobilePress  –  Not perfect and the resulting display is not very pretty, but nowadays it is critical that any website or blog be mobile-friendly.  MobilePress plugin info.

**  All-In-One SEO Pack  –  Takes the guesswork out of SEO. Title, description and tags really matter; fill in the boxes that this plugin gives you in the draft version of a post. My favorite feature: you can create a separate, SEO-friendly blog post title through the plugin, but show a different (more writer-ly/artsy/clever?) title on the actual post that people see.  All-In-One SEO Pack plugin.

**  Akismet  –  Very basic, “everyone has it” plugin. Unless you really want to be driven insane by spam, install it.  Akismet plugin info.

**  nrelate Related Content  —  When readers finish with a post on your blog, it would be great if they’d stick around and read some others, right? This puts your related posts right in front of them (with a nice thumbnail if there’s a photo available.)  nrelate plugin info.

**  Sociable  –  Puts all of those Share buttons at the bottom of each post. Be careful; it is easy to clutter your blog with buttons. TIP: make sure you customize your Twitter Share button to include your own @TwitterHandle. Sociable plugin info.

**  CommentLuv  –  This is a nice touch for your readers; it puts a link to their latest blog post next to their signature when they leave a comment on your blog.  CommentLuv plugin info.

**  Broken Link Checker  –  This shows you which links are now broken from when you originally hit Publish; this happens more and more as your blog ages and sites that you’ve linked to in the past are rearranged or moved. When I have a moment, I try to go in and clean up/re-link, especially on evergreen/long tail search posts.  Broken Link Checker plugin info.

**  Backup  —  For heaven’s sake, back up your work! I use the basic installed Backup feature in the Tools section of the blog, but there are plugins for it as well.

What about you?

Which WordPress plugins rock YOUR world?

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Chinese plastic ear model for acupuncture training (photo by Sheila Scarborough)

Your online reputation built on many things, including the impression people get when they search for you and/or your business, organization or destination online. All of those reputation management services you read about don’t do anything mysterious; they basically churn out a ton of neutral or nice things about you to bury anything negative off of Google’s Page 1.

You could do the same thing by building an active online presence yourself; a few social media profiles (LinkedIn is the most obvious one – it will rank high in search results) plus your own website under your own domain name, even if it is only one page of basic information.

If you don’t have your own blog, get your name out there on someone else’s quality platform. For example, offer guest posts to the blogs for your favorite trade/professional organizations or alumni associations. Include a photo of yourself, which is also indexed by search engines, and you’ll have some searchable content out there created by you, not by others.

A big part of your online reputation is built on how you interact and respond to others on the social web. You can’t respond and show who you are, however, if you don’t even know that conversations are taking place.

You must listen online first, then you can respond.

How to do that was the subject of one of my presentations for a travel tech conference in India that just finished:  ICTT, the International Conference on Travel Technology – India, which was organized “by the trade, for the trade” by the ATTOI (Association  of Tourism Trade Organizations, India.)

(Speaking of reputation, I was happy to see solid media coverage after the conference in places like The Times of India and MSN India, which was well-deserved because it was an excellent event.)

Here are my slides about how to listen to the conversations that matter, with a few examples of how to respond. What do YOU think?

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Ceremonial oil lamp watches over the conference room at ICTT 2013, Kovalam, Kerala, India (photo by Sheila Scarborough)

By the time you read this, I’ll be in the Kerala region of India for a conference about travel, technology and tourism: ICTT 2013, the International Conference on Travel Technology India.

It’s an incredible chance to talk about my favorite topics, in a country I’ve never visited before.

The last time I was this close to the Indian Ocean, it was on a U.S. Navy ship.

Somehow, I think this will be a little different, don’t you?

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Talking about Twitter chats at TBEX Toronto 2013 (courtesy Leslie McLellan)

My relationship with the TBEX travel blogging conference dates from the second one in New York (kind of a pickup ball game with a little over 100 people in an NYU theater in Greenwich Village, where I spoke on a panel about SEO) to this year’s 1300+ attendee extravaganza in Toronto.

I liked both of them.

There’s room for a variety of events in today’s travel media industry: small, intimate, casual, not super-organized in addition to huge, well-sponsored, all-business.

I’ve already given a brief summary of my TBEX presentation on Twitter chats for professional development, branding and marketing, but here are my thoughts on the current state of travel blogging, based on a comment that I left on my friend Pam Mandel’s conference review post, Less is So Much More.

Here is how I see it:  there is an arc of perception about travel blogging, and we’ve only moved across about one-third to one-half of it. TBEX is simply reflecting that. Very roughly, the perceptions look like this….

1)  Travel bloggers are a bunch of cheapo backpacking poor writers who don’t bring much value to travel storytelling. They’re rank amateurs, not businesslike and not properly respectful of real journalism. Any clown can write a blog. They sure hug a lot, and eat strange food.

2)  Maybe some travel bloggers are legit and maybe some are VERY legit, but they’re not nearly as important as print writers, and they’re still kinda weird. Also, why do they always demand WiFi? Such a sense of entitlement!

3)  Hey, wow, there’s an internet and there’s this social media thing. Travel bloggers seem to understand it. Maybe they aren’t so weird. They’ll bring us free coverage. Yay! Smooches! Did we say “free?!”

4)  Hey, WTF? We’ve developed this whole list of “influencers” based on their Klout scores, and we send them eblasts and swag and freebies and Holy Smokes, now they want to be PAID to create content? None of this works with our current organizational silos of PR and marketing and paid media and earned media and press trips. Gaaah.

I think we’re sort of muddling around between #3 and #4 right now (heads up – that means working for free is falling off of the acceptability cliff for a lot of bloggers.)

TBEX has been instrumental in making the marketing communications world understand and appreciate travel blogging as a particular skill set; that we are not just writers who use a computer. For that I am very grateful.

I am also grateful that we’re now at the point where there is room enough, and demand enough, for a whole spectrum of conferences devoted to travel blogging: big, small, flashier, more low-key, etc.

Look, SXSWi (the enormous annual South by Southwest Interactive tech conference in Austin) isn’t for everyone, although if you’re a digital communicator, I think you need to go just once to see what everyone else will be doing in 3 years.

TBEX isn’t for everyone, either, and that’s OK. I’m going to start planning for it like I plan for the madhouse of any big conference (from which I still get plenty of value, but I leave very little to chance.) Your mileage may vary.

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Tim Walker wrestles with how much learning is too much, in this tweet from 2008.

One of my favorite ways to learn new things and network is through Twitter chats;  a bunch of people get on Twitter at the same time, use a single hashtag to tie the discussion together and spend about an hour in a Q&A format with a specific topic, or sometimes a more free-form “open mic.”

For example, #tourismchat is one of the ways that we at Tourism Currents stay on top of destination marketing trends and meet new people in tourism and hospitality.

At the TBEX 2013 travel blogging conference in Toronto May 31 – June 2, I gave a presentation about how brands and organizations are using Twitter chats to grow communities and connect with customers.

It might surprise many to know that people are paid to run chats (sometimes called “Twitter parties”) – everything from US$100-250 to promote, organize and run a single chat, to about US$500 for a chat plus a sponsored blog post, to US$3000-4500 and up for a full-blown branded chat with promotion/marketing, the chat itself, sponsored post(s) and then a report and statistics package provided after the event.

Chats are a lot of work (I should know – I founded and run #awcchat for the Association for Women in Communications) so I’m all for compensation when it’s a commercial venture. However, I also spent a few minutes of the TBEX presentation talking about how I think we need to take our foot off of the marketing gas pedal sometimes.

I did not get on Twitter in September 2007 to listen to a bunch of sales pitches, and I feel strongly that we would all be well-served by exercising caution before turning every social channel into another doggone “sales funnel.”

Below is my presentation slide deck, including a variety of chats that I think bring value to their communities. I also plan to set up a page on Tourism Currents listing all of the travel- and tourism-related chats that I can find, with their scheduled days and times; will update here with the link when it’s done.

Kudos to all the chat founders and organizers, and thanks TBEX for the opportunity to speak.

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Caroline Bean from Visit Philly [Philadelphia] and Bill Karz from LA, Inc. [Los Angeles] show off their BlogWorld / New Media Expo session sign (photo by Sheila Scarborough)

How many of them are working staff members at a Tourist Board, CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau) or other destination marketing organization, and how many of the people who are presenting information are vendors TO the tourism industry?

I know; it’s kinda crazy to call attention to this since I am a vendor myself with Tourism Currents and do a lot of speaking in that role, but I have to tell you, I love to see presentations by people OTHER than vendors like me. It is a sign of a healthy, confident community.

Yes, OK, I know some useful information and I certainly love to teach it to others, but I will never have the same sort of credibility as a full-time CVB/DMO/hotel staff person who is down in the trenches doing the work every day.

Full-time tourism practitioners should be heard from at industry conferences a lot more often, but sometimes they are so busy “doing the work” that they don’t know about opportunities to speak.

Here is one event that they shouldn’t miss ….

The call for speakers is open right now for SoMeT (Symposium on Social Media in Tourism) in Huntsville, Alabama this November. The doors are open for imaginative proposals until May 24, 2013.

Sure, I’m going to pitch a presentation idea myself, but if I’m bumped for a speaker from a DMO, I won’t pout too much. Their voices need to be heard!

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Carnival ride at night (courtesy AcrylicArtist at Flickr CC)

Welcome to the Carnival of Cities blog carnival, where we tour the world in a single post, via submissions from a variety of different blogs, all about any aspect of one, single city or fair-sized town.

We normally publish every other week, although my business travel caused a lot of delays in the last month. The next edition will be hosted on the Perceptive Travel blog.

If you would like to host a future Carnival edition on your blog, please contact me as the Carnival organizer:  Sheila “at” sheilascarborough “dot” com. You do need to register on the carnival administration website (it’s easy and free) to submit to this or any blog carnival.

Here’s more info and background about the Carnival of Cities blog carnival, and now….

Off we go!

Cities in the Americas

Las Vegas, Nevada, USA   Linda Mundy presents Las Vegas is a Great City! posted at Linda’s Las Vegas, saying, “My first post on a blog intended to highlight the hidden facets of Las Vegas and surrounding areas.”

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada   Zhu presents Skyline of Ottawa – By the River posted at Correr Es Mi Destino, saying, “Just like that, overnight, some­one switched the heat on and we went from freez­ing to sweat­ing. Or more exactly, from single-digit tem­per­a­tures to a balmy 27°C. Wel­come to Ottawa, where spring is a two-day tran­si­tion between win­ter and summer!”

Los Angeles, California, USA   Leslee Haralson presents The Wild, Wild West posted at Ready for Adventures, saying, “The city of Los Angeles has many museums, but the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage brings Hollywood and history together.”

Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, USA   Byteful Travel presents First Impressions of Hawai’i posted at Byteful Travel, saying, “Kona, Hawaii — Today is only my 4th day on the island, but I feel like I’ve been here much longer. In short, it has been magnificent. This island really does have a strange kind of magic to it, and I can easily say that in all my travels I have never been to such an incredible place. As I’ve learned, Hawaii is the only US State where myth has been woven into the very fabric of the culture itself, often with fascinating results.”

Manassas, Virginia, USA   I was personally awed. What Jennie Dean built in Manassas, Virginia will live forever is posted at Perceptive Travel Blog; the inspiring memorial to a woman who was born a slave, and built an entire educational campus through determination and persuasion.

Cities in Europe

Copenhagen, Denmark   lozula presents What the Segway? A tour through Copenhagen, posted at Finding the universe, saying, “Taking a Segway tour through Copenhagen”

Istanbul, Turkey   Scholars & Rogues presents Traveling to Istanbul: The Glory of the Hagia Sophia posted at Scholars and Rogues, saying, “Thank you for considering our post for inclusion.”

Cities in the Middle East

Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt   Helen presents Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt posted at Wandering albatross, saying, “Surprising experiences in Sharm El Sheikh.”

Cities in Asia

Bangkok, Thailand   Mihnea presents 10 annoying things about Bangkok traffic posted at Voicu Mihnea Simandan, saying, “Bangkok roads are the busiest in Thailand and this comes at great peril and cost for everyone participating in its daily traffic. Here are 10 annoying things about road traffic in Bangkok.”

Harihareshwar, India   Sulagna Dasgupta presents Travel Diaries 3: Halcyon Harihareshwar – Day 1 posted at Love in India, saying, “If you’re visiting Mumbai – one of Asia’s biggest business hubs – don’t miss a quick escapade to the gorgeous Sahyadri mountain ranges. Here’s a photographic acount of our weekend getaway to the exquisite beach destination of Harihareshwar – adorning the solemn allure of the ancient rocks and mountains.”

That concludes this edition, and thanks very much for visiting and supporting the Carnival.

Please submit your (ONE, non-spammy, recent) blog post – once you’ve registered – to the next edition of the Carnival of Cities using our carnival submission form.  Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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Kia Sportage front view. My ageing minivan was a little jealous about having this vehicle in our driveway. (photo by Sheila Scarborough)

The human brain is a stubborn, funny thing. It believes what it wants to believe, and trying to get someone to change that – to literally “change their mind” – is one of the most difficult challenges faced by communications professionals.

I was reminded of that recently while test-driving a pretty little cherry red Kia Sportage, and I think remembering this is very important when you are marketing a destination, attraction or hotel that may no longer be what people think they remember.

Now, I am a car salesperson’s worst nightmare. I’m not much impressed by glitz, I’m very price-conscious, I’m comfortable with mechanical things thanks to some time in Navy engineering departments (so you try to BS me at your peril) and I will drive a car till the wheels fall off before I’ll buy a new one.

The last time I really researched cars before buying was about 2003, and ten years ago, vehicles by Korean manufacturers like Hyundai and Kia did not have a good reputation for much of anything other than being inexpensive. The Edmunds.com Sportage review says that early on, the Sportage was a “cheap, poorly made penalty box….” (ouch!)

If you keep reading, though, Edmunds notes that “today’s Sportage is now a stylish and well-rounded compact crossover SUV….[it] has gone from a baboon to a Neanderthal and then George Clooney in the span of 15 years.”

Picking up some craft brew at Choc Beer HQ in Krebs, Oklahoma (photo by Sheila Scarborough)

That’s exactly what I found, to my considerable surprise, when I test-drove the vehicle from central Texas all the way north to speak at the Social Media Tulsa (Oklahoma) conference, and then back down south to do a social media workshop for the Tyler, Texas CVB (Convention and Visitors Bureau) before finally returning home.

If I’m ever in the market to buy a car, I will now absolutely consider looking at a Kia, which I NEVER would have done had I not physically gotten into one, checked it out and poked through its features like great pickup speed, decent gas mileage, push-button start, rear-camera display for backing up safely, a massive sunroof and gobs of tech-friendly touches like multiple USB/auxiliary inputs to plug in and charge my gadgets.

This particular Sportage model included a SiriusXM radio package with a fabulous sound system – imagine, if you will, me screaming up the Interstate with Guns N’ Roses blaring from my iPod, which hooked right into the dashboard.

I was not all that crazy about the navigation system, though. It seemed to want specific street addresses, whereas with (free) Google Maps on my Android phone, I can simply plug in a town and get going in the right direction, with turn-by-turn voice nav if I want it.

Interior of Kia Sportage (photo by Sheila Scarborough)

I’d never have given this brand a second glance if they had not gotten the product into my hands. Now, let’s take this lens of personal experience and think about your town.

What was it like 10 years ago, when some of your visitors last passed through?

Was it Sleepyville, like my mother’s hometown of Winnsboro, Texas that is now an arts enclave? Was it big oil and not too much else, like the resurgent Oklahoma City that now boasts unexpected attractions like an Olympic class rowing facility on a recently re-routed river?

When destination marketing is your job, and you know your subject well after years of talking about it with visitors, it can be very difficult to do that mental shift and remember that many people have very outdated views of your town. When I expressed surprise at the OKC Chamber of Commerce about the rowing facility, they were surprised by my surprise. I had to remind them that there was no river a few years ago, so of course the idea of OKC as a rowing destination seems absurd unless you’ve been there recently.

Kia Sportage rear view (photo by Sheila Scarborough)

Think like a visitor as much as you can train your brain to do so, and that includes thinking like the people who have not visited in a long time.

Things change, in towns and in cars.

(Thanks to Social Media Tulsa, Drive STI and Kia Motors America for arranging my test drive.)

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License to IL t-shirt from the T-Shirt Deli in Bucktown, Chicago, IL (photo by Sheila Scarborough – please give design credit to T-shirt Deli)

While wandering around the resurgent Wicker Park/Bucktown neighborhood in Chicago before the SOBCon business conference, I stumbled across the T-Shirt Deli. It was cleverly laid out like a real delicatessen, but with t-shirts as the offering instead of provolone and salami.

I need another t-shirt in my closet like I need a hole in my head, but I could not resist this one. Even if you aren’t a fan of the 1986 Beastie Boys debut album “Licensed to Ill,” it’s hard not to smile at the play on words.

Warning:  although I bought the biggest women’s t-shirt size they carry, it still runs über-small. I’m looking at it as a get-in-shape motivator.

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One person’s story matters when it is multiplied (courtesy Richard Parmiter at Flickr CC)

Here is a social media ROI (Return on Investment) case study with a sample group of one: me.

This is what the dashboards, analytics and all that jazz have such a hard time showing you, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

A few years ago, I heard about a guy named John O’Nolan while following a Twitter hashtag from a travel blogging conference in Europe where he was one of the speakers (I think it was Travel Bloggers Unite.)  John sounded smart and interesting. I met him in person – no more than a hello and a quick handshake – at the TBEX: Travel Blog Exchange travel blogging conference in 2012. He was also part of the now-defunct Travelllll.com site, which I read and liked.

On April 29, I got an email from him (he sent a one-time announcement to the leftover email list from Travelllll.com) about his latest project, a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new blogging platform called Ghost.

I thought, “That’s nice, but I’m fine with WordPress. I wish him well.”

The next day, I happened to see a tweet by Darren Rowse of ProBlogger that the Ghost Kickstarter campaign had raised all their funding within 12 hours. Wow!

Since I never “sensed a disturbance in the Force” demanding new ways to blog, I decided that maybe I’d missed something, so I took a few minutes to watch the video about Ghost that was embedded in Darren’s post, and from that video learned that a Senior Developer from one of my very favorite businesses (Hannah Wolfe from MOO.COM) is heavily involved in creating Ghost.

Now, not only is John worth supporting, but also ….

1)  I absolutely adore everything about MOO – how their website works, the way they make my Tourism Currents business cards, the funny Buzzword Bingo cards that they ship with some of their print products – everything! Anyone associated with that fabulousness is my kind of person, and,

2)  The world needs more geeky women, so I’m happy to see Hannah in the thick of developing Ghost.

That was it for me. I headed over to the Ghost Kickstarter page, pulled out my credit card and pledged to the cause (it’s the first time I’ve ever given money on Kickstarter.)

Let’s review the math….

I connect with John on Twitter, I read the travel industry blog he’s associated with, I open and read an email from him because his name was on it so I trusted it, I see additional compelling info about his project via a tweet from a blogger that I also trust, I read the blogger’s post and watch a video within that post and I learn of a connection with a company I already admire thanks to their great products and customer service.

All of that (“touch points” in marketing-speak) was what it took for me to go slap down some money for building a blogging platform, not because I dislike my current platform, but because I like and trust the people involved and want to help them succeed.

Yes, that is only one example of a positive ROI from social communications. Yes, if I hadn’t drawn the thread for you, it would be hard to prove that some hashtagged tweets from a conference a few years ago led to a conversion and real money …. but it did.

Multiply that times thousands/millions, and allow time for things to develop – I mean allow months and years, because this is a long game – and there’s your positive return on the investment of human relationships and trust started and nurtured through social media.

Sometimes it’s quick and “easy,” but most of the time it’s tangled and slow, because we’re talking about people and trust and time.

Start asking customers how they found you and why they bought from you; it’s such a basic thing to do, but sometimes it’s the only way to capture the proof that what you’re doing with social media does matter, and it does bring results.

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