For the first time in five years, I’m taking a real vacation, i.e. longer than a 3- or 4-day weekend. Destination: Alaska, on the Royal Caribbean cruise line! I’ll be back around September 25. Internet access on board is pricey, so I probably won’t be sending virtual postcards. I know, you’re heartbroken. But you’ll get over it. *grin*

Flickr Creative Commons photo taken in Juneau, Alaska by Traveling Otter.

My friends Sheila Scarborough and Becky McCray are about to launch a membership site where travel and tourism professionals can learn all about social media. If you’re in destination marketing, you couldn’t be in better hands. These two ladies are true experts–and they are both great teachers.

Don’t wait until the September 9 launch. Surf over to Tourism Currents and sign up for email updates before the site goes live.

Sheila and Becky will feature tourism-specific training materials, a moderated forum, exclusive interviews with social media and tourism experts and round table Q&A sessions. The site will be a unique resource for Convention and Visitors Bureaus (CVBs,) Chambers of Commerce, PR professionals who work in tourism, heritage/preservation organizations, agritourism, festival planners, or anyone involved in destination marketing.

Read more about it:
Sheila’s Guide to the Good Stuff
School’s in Session: Social Media Learning Resources for Tourism

BEST WISHES FOR A SUPER SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH!

I’m honored to be hosting this week’s #socialmedia chat on Tuesday at noon Central time. Our topic is Determining the Tipping Point in Social Media.

Be forewarned that I don’t have a definitive answer, but I’m acutely aware of the questions and always in pursuit of ways to enable companies to effectively manage their social media presence. Social media marketing consultants often urge companies to “join the conversation,” to interact with customers and constituents through social networks. But what happens when it succeeds to the point that it doesn’t scale?

Specifically, we’ll focus on these three questions:

Q1: Can a company have too many friends in SocMed?

Q2: When does quality trump quantity?

Q3: What are the most effective ways of scaling social for Business?

You can participate by going to the LIVE page for #socialmedia. Please join us and help make this a lively, and productive, discussion.

Yesterday, I did something that runs counter to my standard recommendation for clients: I locked my Twitter updates. My move to privacy was one of desperation, not desire.

Twitter has experienced phenomenal growth in recent months. Unfortunately, a large part of that growth is due to an influx of self-proclaimed social media gurus, affiliate marketers and assorted get-rich-quick schemers. Oh, and there’s the porn.

@conniereece Twitter update 6-23-09

My Twitter account has over 6,000 followers–certainly not celebrity status, but far more than the average user. Because I have been on Twitter since the early days (January 2007 for me), and because I’m very active on a number of social networks, my Twitter following has steadily grown. On an average day I get about 20 new followers and lose at least 15, most of whom are probably using automated services to follow people based on keyword then unfollow those who don’t immediately follow back. (See this post by Kami Huyse (@kamichat) and this podcast from Jim Turner (@genuine) if you’re curious about how people are gaming Twitter to amass followers.)

Each day I go through my list of new followers to see which ones I might be interested in following back. Sad to say, it’s maybe 1 in 20. The rest are trying to sell me something. Or the account has no photo or bio. (I recently quipped that the Twitter equivalent of “no shirt, no shoes, no service” is “no bio, no photo, no follow.”)

Or perhaps the new follower doesn’t appear to share any common interests. Like the one yesterday whose Twitter bio mentioned necrophilia. Isn’t that charming.

The last straw was learning that my friend CJ Romberger’s Twitter account had been hacked by a porn spammer. If you try to access her Twitter page, you see an error message: “that page does not exist.” Her account was taken over, the user name was changed, and tweets with links to porn started appearing in her timeline. The same thing happened to Guy Kawasaki and others.

Guy was evidently able to post to his Twitter account again late yesterday, but CJ is still locked out. I don’t expect her problem to be resolved any time soon, given Twitter’s track record of customer service. Bestselling author Sherrilyn Kenyon had her Twitter account hijacked about six weeks ago, the day before her latest book was released. Instead of porn, the hacker started posting insults and threats.

Kenyon filled out a Twitter form to report the problem, filed a police report, and her lawyers tried to contact Twitter; their email was returned as undeliverable. Finally, 12 days later, Kenyon got a form response from Twitter saying they hadn’t been able to get to her email. They did, however, suspend the hacked account.

Here it is June 21 and I still have no real resolution from Twitter. While I finally do have a live person to email– who hasn’t emailed me back for weeks now, I still don’t control the accounts. So I’ve made the decision not to spend my valuable time developing a page that could be taken away from me at any moment and one that can be used to hurt or threaten my fans while the people who own Twitter twiddles their thumbs. (full post here)

I still love Twitter. Still recommend it to clients. But it definitely comes with strong words of caution now on how to guard your privacy. I hope that protecting my updates for a while will reduce the amount of spam accounts that try to follow me and bots that want to retweet me. My intent is not to be exclusive, just to reclaim some control over my Twitter experience.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’ve recorded a short screencast (just under 3 minutes) to show how to create and use Friend Lists on Facebook. Each friend list you create has its own news feed, which allows you to keep up with people whose updates tend to get lost on your home page news feed.

For example, I have 700+ friends on Facebook. The news items on my home page span a time frame of less than one hour. So I won’t see news from anyone who has not posted in the last hour without scrolling back to see older posts. But with the custom news feeds I’ve created for certain friends, it’s easy for me to retrieve news from people I really want to keep in touch with.

If you have questions after watching the screencast, drop me a comment. Feel free to leave a comment even if you don’t have a question. You know I love hearing from you!

NOTE: Click here to see full-screen version on screencast.com

Note from admin:

We are currently in the process of transferring our EveryDotConnects.com domain to a new registrar.  Due to the way this works, the site could be closed for a few hours one day this week.  We apologize in advanced for the inconvenience.

The “fam tour” or “familiarization tour” is standard practice by which tourism boards and Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs) introduce their destinations to media people.

In the past, such tours have been filled with only print and broadcast media representatives. Not any more.

One example in progress right now is the “So Much More Hawaii” fam tour just for bloggers; it’s sponsored by the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA.)

I’m on the tour covering mostly family travel, and other blogging specialists include:

• Rick Calvert, founder, Blog World and New Media Expo – a huge annual blogging conference.  He’ll cover the islands as a business and convention destination.
• Leah Lamb, covering eco-tourism and green travel for Current TV. I know she must be intrigued by Hawaii’s recent efforts to invest in clean and renewable energy resources.
• Jim Turner, OneByOne Media and host of the Social Mediasphere show on Blog Talk Radio.
• Shira Lazar, blogging on solo travel for Jaunted.com, the pop culture travel guide.
• Aric S. Queen, producer, writer, podcaster and value travel blogger for the UpTake travel site.
• Mark Tafoya, our tour foodie blogger. He’s a professional chef and co-founder of the Culinary Media Network.
• L.P. “Neenz” Faleafine, a native Hawaiian, Chief Evangelist for Alltop.com and founder of Hawaii-basedPono Media.

As we all know, the economy is down around the world. The Hawaii tourism industry is in crisis right now andthe outlook is grim.

By some standards, this social media outreach could be considered a risky move by the HTA, but I think it’s simply smart.

I applaud this major tourism organization for seeking new, more effective ways to use social media to showcase the islands for potential visitors.

Welcome to the May 21, 2009 edition of the Social Media Blog Carnival. Thanks very much to the carnival “owner,” New Media Labs, for asking us to host.

Next week’s host is Social Media Wiz, so send ‘em in.

For this carnival, the host reviews all the submissions and then picks the post that he/she thinks is the best combination of original, useful social media-related information AND presentation.

This week’s winner is….Tim’s post The SEO and Social Media Mix at Search Engine Optimisation.

Runner-up is Steven Leung’s post Defining Integrated Marketing at Integrated Marketing Experts, saying, “At the intersection between Web 2.0, social media and traditional marketing is integrated marketing. Business owners need to know how this impacts the way they publicize their business online.”

Some carnivals don’t show you the other submissions (we all have a different style) but I thought you’d like to see what else came in, so it’s listed below.

Angel presents Fallen Sword Web Based RPG Guide posted at Burn a Brain.

Patricia Turner presents 100 Online Brainstorming Tools to Help You Think Outside the Box posted at Forensic Science Technician.

Anthony McCune presents Tweets From Capitol Hill - Members of the United States Congress On Twitter posted at The Lives and Times… of Anthony McCune.

ivan presents How To Increase Your Feeds Subscribers posted at PC Hacks, saying, “If you ask any blogger what metric they would like to increase on their blog, it’s likely that their first answer will be feed subscribers.”

Jeremy Smith presents Best in Social Media - May 11, 2009 posted at Social Marketing by Michelle MacPhearson.

That concludes this edition, and thanks for participating.

Please submit your (one, non-spammy) blog post to the next edition of the social media blog carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

(This is an Open Letter guest post from travel expert Tim Leffel, who wants to help public relations (PR) and marketing folks who are stumbling around in the dark regarding Web-based tourism development.  Anyone who still deals with a recalcitrant boss about these issues, even if you aren’t in travel and tourism, will find something helpful in his suggestions.)

Dear person who handles the marketing budget for your travel destination:

In case you have not been reading the news, the media landscape rug has been pulled out from under you. What have you done to adjust?

I’m a travel writer who writes a lot and travels a lot. In the past year, I’ve had two dozen PR and marketing people working in travel tell me that their boss or executive board is at least a decade behind the times in their marketing focus. While my contact person telling me this may be clued in to what matters, the people controlling the marketing purse strings are still fully stuck in the old world they understand, namely print and TV press and advertising.

A couple of times a month, I’ll get a call or e-mail from some PR person about an article I wrote for Perceptive Travel, the Practical Travel Gear blog, or Luxury Latin America—all sites I run myself. The caller needs to put together some kind of ad value report to show their boss or board because, well, that’s the way it’s always been done and that’s the report that has to be written. If the article can’t be measured in monetary terms, it doesn’t matter in their eyes, regardless of how many visitors it brought to their door.

The problem is, while that may have sorta worked in the print world, it doesn’t on the Web.

It was never a very accurate gauge anyway, as this article will attest:   Why most magazine industry metrics are bogus (and that’s from a publishing industry trade!) Anyone on the inside can tell you the circulation numbers are bogus, the published advertising rates are bogus and the demographic breakdowns are bogus.

But at least the suits are used to those particular stretches of credulity. On a website, however, this is an exercise in futility; an invitation to just make up a bunch of numbers to please the boss.

There’s no such thing as a “full page ad” to value to start with. Just banners. There’s no real circulation—just unique monthly visitors and page views. And how do you place an ad value on an article that people will keep reading for years, month after month? How do you value a link to your site? For someone who knows about search engine optimization, that link is very valuable. To a visitors’ bureau board member who still doesn’t know what a blog is, it’s worth far less than a one-paragraph newspaper mention.

Everybody’s heard of the Detroit Free Press, right? So it must be more valuable than being on something called BoingBoing, right? (Um, hate to break it to you, but no. It’s not even close. Besides, the Free Press is the one that had to cut back home delivery to three days a week because it’s a financial wreck.)

I promise you that your potential visitors, including the ones who increasingly can’t remember the last time they read a newspaper, are getting their information from all over the Web and from social media. They are relying less and less on what the traditional gatekeeper people you always pitched (newspapers and magazines) have to say. Unfortunately, this means you have to work much harder now.

Your universe of 20 magazines and 50 newspapers is now a few less of those, but 100 or even 500 blogs. And some of those writers contribute to multiple outlets. You’re no longer pitching an outlet, you are pitching a person: an influencer. The good news is, you get to the right influencers, you’ve got champions who will send you visitors by the planeload, year after year.

This requires a radically different approach and a vastly more fragmented way of spending your resources. Buying one of those silly “special advertising sections” in a general travel magazine is going to pale in effectiveness compared to spending that same amount on Google Adsense and 20 specialized travel websites. Inviting a dozen freelance print writers on a press trip will get you spotty results over time, but inviting a dozen prolific writers who blog on subjects specific to your destination’s appeal will pay off for years and send measurable traffic to your official site.

Here are six things you can do right now to drastically improve your destination’s marketing effectiveness and pull in more visitors:

1) Figure out who is already writing about your destination and engage them the way they want to be engaged. This may be e-mail, Twitter, phone, Facebook or LinkedIn. It is almost surely not by spraying them with press releases.

2) Figure out which blogs and sites are already sending visitors to your website. (You do monitor your stats weekly, right? You do have Google alerts set up, right?) Those are obvious ad targets for the marketing people and those are editors/bloggers your publicists need to be talking with. First go thank them, then build a relationship.

3) Spend some time researching which websites and blogs are a great match for your visitor demographics. As a cheap destinations expert, I hear regularly from and/or have been on press trips with Honduras, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, parts of Mexico and Panama. I haven’t heard a peep from most of the other destinations profiled in The World’s Cheapest Destinations book or on my blog, even though I am quoted in the major media every month and my blog is one of the top 100,000 sites on the web. I’m the best-known travel writer in Nashville, Tennessee, but in a decade of living here I’ve never heard from the city’s visitors’ bureau. That’s just silly. If you run a family travel destination or attraction and don’t have Sheila Scarborough or the Traveling Mamas on your radar, you’re missing a huge opportunity. It’s even easier to target sites focused on specific geography. For some destinations there are fewer than 10 people who generate 80 percent of the search engine hits. For a place like Nicaragua it’s two or three. Do you even know who they are? Those people should be on your cell phone’s speed dial.

4) Add every relevant site to your RSS feed and visit them often. (You do have an RSS reader set up don’t you?) You can’t pitch to blogs if you don’t know their style, tone and subject matter (or at least follow them on Twitter if that’s your thing.) Blind pitching doesn’t work anymore. Mass market advertising doesn’t work anymore. You need to focus and converse, not broadcast.

5) Stop worrying about bragging rights. Sure, it’s great to say “As featured in Travel + Leisure” when they write a few sentences about your destination on page 148, right behind the fold-out ad for Lexus, but in terms of influencing travelers to visit, did it matter? Was that one-page magazine ad that ran for one month really more effective than advertising on 20 very well-matched websites or blogs for an entire YEAR? Focus on the actual objective, not on what sounds impressive on a report.

6) Listen to your people at the bottom. The most junior people in your organization probably already know what needs to be done. They don’t have your built-in preconceptions and prejudices and will always be two steps ahead of you. Give them a budget, stop worrying about whether they are “wasting time on Facebook,” and turn them loose.

If you still have questions after reading this, let’s get together at Travel Media Showcase or Visit Europe Media Exchange (VEMEX) or have a drink in your destination’s best pub. (”Will work for beer.”)

But if you really want to jump on the social media train with both feet and don’t know where to start, keep reading this blog…or just hire Sheila and Connie!

Tim Leffel is the author of three travel books, editor of the award-winning webzine Perceptive Travel, and editor of several blogs.

He still likes to write for magazines too.

You can see his portfolio and contact information at TimLeffel.com.