Tips & Tools to help you make the most of the mobile and social Web

Todd chats with Pam Mandel (@nerdseyeview), Seattle-based travel blogger at NerdsEyeView and Sheila Scarborough (@sheilas) blogger from Round Rock, Texas who pens the Family Travelogue about how they became travel bloggers and how travel, tourism, and blogging can be an essential components of marketing travel experiences.

Topics of Conversation:

• How writing and the evolution of the Web created travel blogging opportunities
• What’s the difference between travel writing and travel blogging
• How unique niche experiences provide great story ideas
• How quickly blog posts can impact travel and how blogged stories have a lasting impact
• Finding the right travel blogger to tell your story
• How pitches find their way to travel bloggers through PR agencies
• The relationship between bloggers and tourism businesses
• Why paid posts can compromise a bloggers objectivity
• Tourism businesses and bloggers need to have conversations about expectations and credibility
• Journalistic integrity and ethics is very important to top bloggers: While comping accommodations or travel may be appropriate for freelance journalists and bloggers, revealing such compensation in the story is important.
• Tourism regions or businesses can discover blogging by guest posting on existing travel blogs

Links:

• http://blogsearch.google.com - Google’s Blog Search Engine
• http://www.technorati.com
• Travel.AllTop.com - edited list of top travel bloggers
• Blogher - the Women’s Blogging Network
• Williamsburg, Virginia -Convention and Visitors Bureau
• Molokai, Hawaii - Visitors Bureau (@DavidHTA, @michaelni, @nathankam)

One of the most important tools in our office is our shared workspace.  We share calendars, action lists, documents, and more.  Staff also use the virtual office to keep track of their hours, updated shared information on current projects, access contact lists and more.

• An Intranet is vital to your business if you have multiple staff who occasionally work from different locations.
• An Intranet shared workspace can also be an invaluable tool for managing community events, not for profit groups and associations, and keeping community organizations, well . . . organized.

I want to introduce you to a new free hosted virtual office at Officezilla.com.

I had a super easy time setting up my own virtual office and upon signing up was given a real person’s name and phone number in case I run into trouble.  I can invite as many group members as I like and choose theme colours and even use my own images to decorate the virtual office space.

One of the things I really like about this intranet tool is it uses feeds very effectively.  Group members can set up a feed and monitor goings-on from a variety of feed-enabled devices like cell phones or even arrange for email updates when things are changed or added to the Group site.  (I suggest setting these feeds up in Feedburner if you really want it easy for members to get feeds by email).

Our shared office is a paid solution, and a very good one.  It’s the one thing my staff won’t let me trim from the budget!  At roughly $1000 annually, our hosted Intranet at WebExOne.com, is an investment that has significantly enhanced our ability to grow our capacity to manage multiple projects.

Would you like to more easily manage your tourism business?  Get all the members of the team on the same page?  Make it easy to track how your next festival or community event is coming along?

Try Officezilla …. the other members of your team will thank you for it!

Do you have a favourite virtual office solution?  Let me know about it by commenting below.

At tourism marketing workshops I have been telling everyone to start recording video for the Web in HD format for two years. Checking my feed from Lifehacker and noticed Gina Trapani reporting that YouTube has adjusted the the video clip player’s size from a 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9 (HD TV format). As a result, many clips that were recorded in standard definition 4:3 ratio will now have black bars on either side to fill in the new space.

If you listened to the advice I was giving you back then you would have seen black bars at the top and bottom of your videos.  Now however, you’ll notice your HD videos in 16:9 format now fit the Youtube player perfectly.

Instead, you’ll notice the black bars (pillar boxing - in video lingo) on any Youtube video that was filmed in standard definition.

How to Get rid of the black bars when you post to Youtube?

To get rid of the black bars in your videos, be sure to record and edit all future videos in HD or 16:9 ratio. That way, your video will play completely filling the viewer.  Voila, no more black bars!

Unfortunately, there is no way to get rid of the black bars on existing standard definition videos

On this version of the Tourism Keys podcast @Todd Lucier chats with @Chris Brogan about blogging tourism.

Ideas Chris Brogan and I discussed:

• Why blogging is good for getting your content more views.
• Bloggers and other content producers have link equity and audiences that can generate views for your social media.
• Blogging with two perspectives in mind: producing content from inside your community on a shared tourism blog in an ongoing focused way, and earning blog content from visiting bloggers who share an outside perspective on your travel region.
• How can the tourism industry engage podcasters, bloggers, video producers and photographers to work with tourism industry?
• How OMGPittsburgh got started as a way to let the city speak for itself.
• What about the economic relationship between bloggers and tourism businesses? How to provide incentive for visiting bloggers to write about your region may be less expensive than you think.
• Other types of economic relationships: be pay per post, gaining exposure for content, ie: creating a multimedia audio or video tour and getting thousands of views.
• Why social media agencies provide valuable resource of Web 2.0 content production. Where to find them?  Local agencies and larger agencies can provide different types of value.
• What metrics matter?
• Chris talks about fishing where the fish are.  Have a gander at this post on crosswalks and designing Web pages to understand how niche content can put your content in front of people that matter.
• Why niche, narrowcasting content can produce higher revenue for your tourism business or region.

Learn more about Chris Brogan at http://www.chrisbrogan.com.

• Podcamp Toronto: February 23-24, 2009 http://podcamptoronto.pbwiki.com/
• Podcamp Halifax: January 25, 2009 http://podcamphalifax.ca/
• Try out Twitter  at http://www.twitter.com to find people engaged in social media including @Todd Lucier and @Chris Brogan.

Which one of these line painting companies would you hire to paint a crosswalk across your pavement?
A:  These lines lead clearly from the parking area to the door of the store:

B: These lines lead from a lamp post, shrubs and a curb to some more posts:

Before you put lines on your pavement, watch where people walk. Then you’ll know where to paint your lines to get people safely into your store:

Painting a crosswalk is a lot like building a website

Before your design your next site, use a keyword search tool and find out where people are letting their fingers do the walking!

You’ll have a lot better chance of having people come across your content if you design your site around keywords that people are already typing into search engines!

These are my 2 favourite keyword suggestion tools:

• http://addme.com/keywordsuggest.htm
• http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com

If you are hiring someone to do the work for you on your next website, make sure they understand your products, your ideal customers and the keywords that bring them together before they map out your site.

Are you a Bridge Person?
The digital divide describes two types of people or communities.
Those who use high speed Internet and regularly post content online and those who lack one of the three pillars of an intelligent community:

• High Speed Internet access
• software and applications that take advantage of the bandwidth
• knowledge / training of how to make use of the applications

On this version of the Tourism Keys Internet Marketing Podcast Todd talks about two key trends noticed at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco in early November 2008 – explosive growth in online user generated video and the rise of social web.

It’s time to bring in bridge people to help tourism businesses and regions get the coverage they need with storytelling expertise of bloggers, podcasters, photographers, and videographers.

Are you a blogger? Podcaster? Photographer, Videographer?  Call your nearest destination marketing organization and let them know about the skills and services you can provide.

Are you in the tourism biz?  Build a bridge, or go searching for these people.

There is a new podcast on the Web today - TourismCafe.ca

We’re dedicating this version of the Tourism Keys podcast to this new project which aims to strengthen tourism industry understanding of the benefits of experiential tourism.

Todd Lucier, Nancy Arsenault and Celes Davar invite you into the café for a chat about tourism. They represent tourism development from a Canadian perspective and introduce you to their background as operators, share interesting tourism development projects they’re involved in and introduce the Canadian Tourism Commission’s Explorer Quotient. It’s 15 minutes to introduce you to Tourism Café. We’re sure you’ll want to bookmark the site so you can to catch future episodes of the Tourism Cafe, as well as insights on tourism by reading their experiential tourism blog posts.

Check it out!

At the Social Media Jungle gathering in New York, November 13th, hosted by Jeff Pulver, the question of survival in the Social Media Jungle is being raised.

It seems to me that if we looked at our ancestors survival strategies and compared them to the uncharted landscape we’re living in with social media, we might benefit from a few handy survival instincts that likely served our ancestors well:

1. Learn the Customs of New Tribes

We wouldn’t go looking to hang out with other tribes just because we shared the same jungle.  In many cases, getting involved with tribe members you don’t know can be scary or even life-threatening.  You might end up in a stew if you wade in without knowing the customs of the tribe.  It’s widely known that first nations people in the America’s figured Europeans thought snot was sacred.  After all, when their own noses got congested, they simply covered one side of their nose and blew the plugged snot onto the ground.  Europeans on the other hand, would blow their sacred liquids into a frilly handkerchief and place it in their pocket next to their heart!

Lurk and Learn before jumping fully into the next social media tribe.  You’ll appear more normal if your behavior blends in with social norms of each social tribe you share ideas with.

2. Search is your Friend

Finding food in the social media jungle requires persistence and dedication and knowing what you are looking for.  As the jungle gets more and more crowded, seek out the people who speak your language or have social customs that you are comfortable with.  Use the search tools available in social media to find people that are a lot like you.  How do you know they are like you?  In the jungle, friendly tribe members will likely walk, talk and share ideas that are similar to yours.  The topics of conversation will be topics you are interested in.   It may be a common place, like the Rascal House, like Jeff Sass talked about or any of the W questions - Who? Where? Why? When? What? How?  Lurk and watch for places, topics, and ideas that seem familiar.  Follow links and read blog posts, watch video posts and learn who is talking about things you are interested in.

Join in the conversation and leave tracks.

3. The community will find value in your content - or not!

Wherever you go in the jungle, you are leaving tracks.  People will come across your tracks and identify you as an authentic tribe member, or ignore you.  Don’t worry about hiding your tracks.  The comments you leave and content you post will only be interested in people who share your interest.  These are your ideal social contacts.  You want these people to come across your blog posts, videos, podcasts, photos!  They will value your social interactions based on the contributions you make to the tribe.

Remember, it’s better to have 6 raving fans following you, than 6000 who passively are interested in your contributions.

4. Find someone to watch your back - earn their trust

Earn the trust of people in the social media jungle by nurturing relationships and following leaders.  There are many people in the social landscape who are tribal leaders like Chris Brogan.  It is best to be a follower, before attempting to grab a seat on the throne for yourself.  Relationships take time to develop.  Earn the trust and participation of valued social media community members by nurturing relationships.  You can do that by commenting on the posts, videos, photos, tweets of others.  Comment without expectation of the favour being returned.  Comment without the expectation of making an instant sale.  Comment without the expectation of link-juice increasing your popularity with search engines.  Comment when you have something valid to add to the conversation, even if you disagree with ideas being shared.

The quality of your contribution to the dialogue will earn you the respect and admiration of other tribe members and boost your status in the jungle.

5.  The time will be right for your tribe to awaken to your wisdom and follow you!

It has taken the better part of two years for tools like Twitter to gain a wider acceptance as other media refer to it in the reporting of the news.  When an earthquake happened last year in Iceland, CNN turned to Twitter to get a contact they could interview for a first hand news report.  It took television news reporters looking for disaster photos to happen upon Flickr and make it a popular place for sharing photos.  It will take a live news report via cell phone - an on the scene report from a bystander to make Qik hit the big time - again it will gain free wide media coverage when it it hits television.  Qik doesn’t have to work hard for media to discover their incredible application, it will just happen when the time is right.  Time and again, simple blog posts have resulted in mainstream media calling on my expertise in the area of marketing tourism - mostly because of my social presence in this area.

Mainstream media looks to new media for value-added coverage when the value provided by these new media benefits their audience.  Currently, the new media landscape is awash with techie types, but the time is right for all types of people to position their role as a thought leader in whatever topic you are passionate about! Start sharing photos, videos, audio podcasts, text (whatever you feel is your best medium!).  Tell stories that matter, discuss issues that matter, focus on concerns that matter - to you.  Your audience and mainstream media will find you.

Will you be ready for your closeup?

In the spirit of being there, it’s time for some pizza!