Two Las Vegas hotels and an airline teamed up with social media consultant Peter Shankman to host a holiday party in New York City for the “movers and shakers” of the social media world, marking another big step by the travel industry into the world of social media marketing.

Jet Blue, The Venetian and The Palazzo were some of the sponsors for the invitation-only party hashtagged #shankman2010 on December 15th.  Guests were chosen by their Klout scores and, in many cases, flown to New York City for the event at the Hudson Terrace.  According to Shankman, invites were sent to people who have high ranking Klout scores within specific industries.

Presumably, Jet Blue and the two Vegas properties were targeting big names in the travel and tourism industry, yet none of the names in travel I’m familiar with were tweeting about #shankman2010 last night.  Of course, it’s possible they were invited and couldn’t attend – after all, travel bloggers tend to be on the road a lot.

While social media enthusiasts and PR bloggers are still debating the wisdom of inviting guests to a party based on Klout score, it’s clear that travel companies are continuing to reach out to people who appear to have influence on Twitter and Facebook.  What’s not clear is how, exactly, travel companies are targeting “people within their industries”.

A Klout profile is supposed to measure not just how influential a user is, but within which arenas that influence is in.  It’s this ability to measure within a niche that ideally makes Klout so useful to companies like Jet Blue.  However, a quick look at the profiles of users I’m familiar with (including my own) shows that there is still ample room for improvement.  According to Klout, I’m an expert on iPhones and Google (I’m not) and talk a lot about a one-day social media conference I attended over two years ago (I don’t).

As a travel blogger, I’m excited to see more travel companies embrace social media and online marketing in general.  But as they look for ways to target potential partners, I’m concerned about the effectiveness of the tools that many seem to be relying on so heavily.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that Jet Blue, The Venetian and The Palazzo weren’t looking to celebrate the holidays with people in the travel and tourism industry at all.  Which begs the question… who are travel companies partnering with in social media?

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In November of 2010, 110 people gathered in Loudoun County, Virginia to discuss the use of social media in the tourism industry at the first ever Social Media Tourism Symposium.  The event was considered a success and plans were made to hold another symposium in 2011.  Attendees were asked to complete a survey that provided organizers with input for selecting dates and locations of future events.

According to the Facebook fan page, The 2011 Symposium on the Use of Social Media in the Tourism Industry will be held on Wednesday, November 9 through Friday, November 11.  The event location is expected to be announced in January of 2011.

Should you mark your calendars for SoMe ’11?

According to the Facebook page, the symposium is designed to be a discussion among destination marketing organizations, hotels, resorts, attractions and any other people with an interest in the success of the tourism industry.  As the name suggests, the specific focus of this event is the use of social media – including Twitter and Facebook – in tourism marketing.

Presentations from last year’s symposium, which included case studies and discussions about measuring the ROI of social media campaigns, are available online.  Tickets for the event appeared to have sold for $450 a piece last year.

For more information about the 2010 event and to receive updates as they are released about the 2011 event, join the Facebook fan page.

Elliott Ng will represent  UpTake during the PhocusWright 2009 Conference, Blogger Summit Town Hall on Wednesday, November 18th at 9:00 a.m. Ten topics were suggested by the panelists for discussion during a planning meeting a few weeks ago. We decided to collect the best posts and examples about each subject and showcase them. We hope this series lends itself to more insightful discussion during the Town Hall presentation.–Patricia Jenkins, Editor

How does social media marketing fit into your overall marketing plan? How to get corporate execs to buy into social media as part of your strategy? Some of the examples provided below demonstrate how corporate execs are warming up to social media marketing and factoring it into an overall strategy.

Lonelyplanet

Lonely Planet (www.lonelyplanet.com/) – The dominant publisher of travel guide books is rapidly shifting from books written by LP writers to digital content partly aggregated from the community.  As a result, Lonely Planet has been ramping up their Thorn Tree Community Forum, factoring it into the future development of their main business, and encouraging their website visitors, guide book readers and purchasers to become contributors.

Lonely Planet CEO Matt Goldberg says the shift in focus towards the community and digital content is part of a plan to provide solutions to consumers’ needs, instead of being only a content provider.

Carnival

Carnival (www.carnival.com) – The Carnival Cruise Line, as mentioned here, is aggregating UGC on Twitter and Flickr published by cruise passengers while on-board Carnival’s ships, and keeping up the engagement via John Heald’s blog, and CarnivalConnect.com - an in-house social media platform for their community, and FunShipIsland.com – an interactive virtual tour. All three sites now routinely bring in over 1 million visitors each, and are being used by Carnival for strategic brand positioning.

But it didn’t start like that. John Heald started blogging to create buzz for the launch of a new ship. CarnivalConnect was launched to encourage guests to send invitations to their friends and family. Carnival saw the potential across these platforms, and merged it all into an overall strategy of showing new visitors what’s happening on board, and allowing new and prospective visitors to engage with loyal customers via social media.

Banff

Banff Lake Louise Tourism (www.banfflakelouise.com/) – BLLT was chugging along like most other tourism organizations in Canada, when the Banff Crasher Squirrel popped into a photo and triggered a viral tsunami wave on social media platforms – over 300 blog-posts, 5,000+ tweets, and 650+ facebook posts.

BLLT understood the potential early, and set up a YouTube video, a twitter account for the squirrel, and a Facebook page, along with a search-engine marketing campaign with keyword “squirrel.” End result – $3 million in ad value, reaching out to 80 million people in North America and Europe via online channels, print and TV. The squirrel is now on billboards marketing Banff, and has established a permanent presence on social media platforms.

Affinia

Affinia Hotels (www.affinia.com/) – For hotels wanting to wade into social media marketing, Affinia offers a valuable lesson – It’s all about listening, and responding on time. They’re all over Twitter, talking to their guests, offering assistance and answering queries.  Their My Affinia program allows guests to customize and pre-select in-room amenities – from pillows to iPods. Items are added on to this list or modified based on the feedback that the Affinia reps get from the social media chatter. 

Another good example of a hotel implementing social media marketing as part of an overall strategy is the Roger Smith hotel – details here. The fact that Chris Brogan gives them high marks for listening to their customers and being social-media savvy is a testament to their success at playing the game.

Southwest

Southwest (www.southwest.com/) – Southwest Airlines looks at social media as an extension of their customer engagement offline. Their ‘Nuts About Southwest’ blog is a lot more popular than any blog owned or run by any other airline. The Blog-o-spondent video contest run on the blog went massively viral last year. The blog is updated constantly by a team of Southwest employees.

Newly uploaded videos can be seen every week on Southwest’s  youtube channel. Thousands of networked Southwest employees form a web that stretches into every corner of Linkedin. Jeremy Jameson, Corporate Strategist,  Strategic Planning for Southwest Airlines, says that the social media success is simply an online extension of their corporate culture of engaging in authentic relations and conversations with customers.

Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic (www.virgin-atlantic.com/) – Richard Branson’s mothership offers a valuable lesson in course correction. After taking flak last year over the firing of 13 employees who posted derogatory remarks about customers on Virgin’s corporate Facebook page, Virgin seems to have retooled their approach.

The airline now has a cross-functional Social Spaces Forum group comprised of personnel from eCommerce, PR, customer relations, product and service, marketing etc. The team works closely to understand the social marketplace, shape the direction for activity in social spaces and develop a framework for the business in this area, according to Allison Wightman, Head of Marketing Systems, Virgin Atlantic Airways.    

United

United (www.united.com/) – Again, a lesson in how to turn around a bad situation on the social media networks. Only, United hasn’t done it yet. I’m sure you’ve heard the viral Dave Carroll video on Youtube, which the Canadian singer created after United broke his guitar and refused to pay for it.

In a similar situation, Electronic Arts was hit with a user-uploaded video of a glitch in their game which showed Tiger Woods walking on water. EA promptly responded to this with a professional ad video featuring  Tiger walking on water, which in turn again went viral and nullified all the negative impact of the first video.

As Julie Sturgeon notes, the right approach for United would have been to co-opt Dave Carroll and turn it into an ad, or put out a video of their own in response. 

AA

American Airlines (www.aa.com) – American isn’t usually counted amongst the savvy kids on the social media block, but they have taken a right step with the creation of BlackAtlas.com – a community site offering travel insights from an African-American perspective. No other airline has a brand community like this, and it should go a long way towards helping AA score some much needed social media creds.

According to Roger Frizell, American’s vice president of corporate communications, they’re planning a site in 2010 which would collect in one place all the social media videos and chatter about AA. American, he says, intends to be a part of the conversation, instead of just letting it happen without them. 

Wyndham

Wyndham (www.wyndham.com/) – Again, Wyndham is probably the only hotel group to offer a community site – Womenontheirway.com – which aims simply to foster a sense of community among female travelers.

This community goes a long way towards humanizing Wyndham and adds a touch of gentleness  to the corporate image.