Travel Industry

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.

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

We are now at a stage where the market is social media. It is simply not enough for companies to jump in occasionally, talk to  journalists and industry insiders, and hope to create some buzz with a press release.  Travel companies are increasingly targeting consumers directly on Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s a list of the top travel brands making positive use of social media to target consumers directly.

Jetblue

United

JetBlue (www.jetblue.com/) – Offers time-limited deals announced on twitter for last minute flights every Tuesday. More information here and follow on twitter @JetBlueCheeps.

United (www.united.com/) - United has a similar offer for twitter users called Twares – special fares available only via Twitter. More information here and follow on twitter @UnitedAirlines.

Hyatt

Hyatt (www.hyatt.com/) – Hyatt was the first major hotel group to offer a global 24/7 ’Twitter Concierge.’ Almost every major travel brand offers customer service via social media, but Hyatt was the first to specifically name it and create a separate account (@HyattConcierge). They’re now asking guests to use it to book spa appointments, dinner reservations, etc and make special requests.

Starwood

Starwood (www.starwoodhotels.com/) - Starwood has taken the unique step of creating a  clearing house for all the social media chatter about Starwood – on blogs, apps, facebook updates and on twitter. This allows them to make use of user-generated content on social media as a means of providing real-time information and updates to their SPG members.

JDV

Joie de Vivre (www.jdvhotels.com/) – JDV offers special deals via Twitter Tuesdays and Facebook Fridays. The offers go out at a different time every week and are only good for one hour, so unless you’re following JDV on both twitter and facebook, you’ll miss these deals.

Fairmont

Fairmont (www.fairmont.com/) – Their main account (@FairmontHotels), in addition to the usual interaction, deals and ’suite tweets,’ also regularly puts out twitter-only deals and runs innovative contests with free prizes – usually a free stay at a Fairmont.

Marriott

Marriott (www.marriott.com/) – Marriott’s social media efforts encompass all the usual avenues – deals, twitter-only deals, contests and special offers. Their most recent ’Tweet Yourself to Hawaii’ contest  is a pretty big success, and is earning them a ton of followers and fans on both twitter and facebook, and generating a lot of press.

Note:- As far as Fairmont, Starwood and Marriott are concerned, their brands, executives and even hotels have an active  presence on twitter and facebook.

For example, Starwood’s Aloft brand has one main account, and then each of their hotels has a separate account – and the entire effort looks like its been well planned to manage future growth.

Fairmont’s individual hotels also have their own twitter accounts, and are quite aggressive in marketing themselves. The Fairmont Chicago went so far as to hire a marketing company to manage and promote a twitter contest.

Marriot’s Ritz-Carlton brand similarly has an official a/c, the individual hotels have their own accounts and their key executives also maintain active profiles. Their co-ordination was plainly evident when their Jakarta hotels were attacked with bombs earlier this year in July, and all their accounts were tweeting information at various levels. 

Marriott (@MarriottIntl) provided the official responses, Ritz-Carlton CEO Simon Cooper (@SimonFCooper) provided the sympathy and a human face, while Alison Sitch, corp. director for PR (@RitzCarltonPR), provided active assistance.

The three travel brands listed below also need to be commended for their innovative use of social media to connect with consumers and improve brand visibility and image.

V Australia

V Australia (www.vaustralia.com.au/) – V Australia has taken twitter by storm with their 4320LA and 4320SYD twitter contests. It helped promote their twitter presence, their brand and the destinations – Los Angeles and Sydney.

Travelocity

Travelocity (www.travelocity.com/) – Travelocity’s Roaming Gnome doesn’t just travel on site and in real life. He also has a sizeable presence on Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. Putting the Roaming Gnome as their public face on social media platforms helps Travelocity connect with consumers.

Carnival

Carnival (www.carnival.com/) – The Carnival Cruise Line has a unique strategy - They get tons of free publicity on Twitter by  aggregating tweets and blog posts from people on-board their ships. Here’s a recent sample. To further this angle, Senior Cruise Director John Heald blogs about his life as a cruise director, offering behind-the-scenes insight. Carnival has also set up an in-house social network – CarnivalConnections - for building and maintaining an active community.

Speakers at the Hospitality Industry Technology Exposition and Conference (HITEC) and HSMAI’s Revenue Management & Internet Marketing Strategy Conference earlier this month admitted the unthinkable: As hotel VIPs, they still don’t know how to make social media work. They don’t know how to approach it (one person or every employee’s job?), and they don’t have a big-picture goal (boost sales, seal loyalty).

Social media fills seats

Maybe more importantly, they haven’t found how to turn these social media activities into a profit stream, points out Glenn Haussman, the editor-in-chief over at Hotel Interactive, Inc. And that very well may be a red herring in the equation.  “The one thing we do know is that the clout of the hotel marketer and sales pro can get severely diminished as consumers cut the hotel brands out of the communication,” he writes at his blog. “It used to be that brands could deliver clear, highly controlled messages through channels such as magazine or television advertising or through a direct mail promotion. While those tools are still around, their influence on savvy consumers is waning. They’d rather talk amongst themselves.”

Trying to influence that conversation has backfired for more than one hotelier who has tried stuffing the ballot box at sites like TripAdvisor. It doesn’t matter that some of the complaints are, indeed, disgruntled employees or the competition trying to smear anonymously. Fake, glowing reviews are still taboo — and TripAdvisor is now playing cop, publicly announcing when a hotel is being investigated for fraudulent reviews.

Perhaps the answer lies in the Social Customer Relationship Management software bursting onto the scene. Like other CRM versions, it tracks data — this time, tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, etc. to help companies deal with remarks the old-fashioned way: one at a time. Porter Gale, vice president of marketing for Virgin America, is one of the pioneers. The airline uses 1.5 people to engage in social media to listen to conversations and respond.

The word “marketing” doesn’t even enter the mix, according to Gale. Instead, it works like this: one of the 20,000 Twitter followers mentioned she had just graduated medical school and was flying Virgin America to get home. The VA social media team asked if anyone on the flight would buy her drink. Someone in Row 11 piped up. VA enhanced its fun image, and two human beings somewhere in the stratosphere made a live connection.

Photography: Virgin Atlantic

RepRelations, a Los Angeles based firm which helps clients improve and manage their online reputation, has put together a report outlining the ‘State of Online Reputation for Airlines.’ The report covers 10 of the largest airlines in the world, half of them US-based and the remaining outside the United States.

Reprelations ORM Survey for Airlines

Southwest Airlines aced the RepRelations ORM survey with an ’A-’ (90th percentile), while British Airways and American Airlines were tied for second place with a ‘B-’. Ryanair was  tagged as the virtual dunce with an ‘F’-’.

David Goldman, VP marketing and sales at RepRelations,  said that “Based on our study’s findings, most of the airlines appear to lack any sort of online reputation strategy, with the exception of one or two.”

RepRelations examined Google results for simple keyword searches on the name of the airline, with an emphasis on the following:
1. The number of negative results in the Google Top 10
2. The strength of the positive results vs. the negative ones
3. The number of websites in the Top 10 owned by the airline
4. The presence and placement of YouTube or other videos in the search results
5. Whether or not airline-owned web properties have optimal titles
6. Does the airline have a presence of social networking in the Top 10
7. Does the airline have an official corporate blog in the Top 10
8. Additional reputation-related indicators

The study also found a significant differential between the airlines – with some, such as Southwest Airlines (and JetBlue – not included in this survey due to its smaller size) embracing Twitter and capturing multiple places in the Top 10 with various company-owned websites.

For more details about RepRelations and the study of the Airline Industry’s online reputation, visit www.reprelations.com/.

For our packed travel blogging panel at the South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) tech conference in Austin, my co-presenter Pam Mandel and I put together a surprise for our attendees – a travel swag/gift bag.

We wanted to put some of our favorite goodies into the hands of our digitally-chatty attendees, so we included magazines that we’ve written for, information about books we like and products and services that we support (many of them based in Austin or Central Texas.)

So many companies were unfailingly gracious in response to our requests, and I’d like to show specifically why reaching out to online travel enthusiasts and travel bloggers is a good marketing and public relations move for a wide variety of businesses. Every link below is one more effort to land a roundhouse punch against “there’s not enough ROI (Return on Investment) in social media marketing.”

First, travel blogging panel attendees were enthused about getting an unexpected gift. From a SXSW overview blog post by content aggregators OneSpot:

“The travel blogging panel (#sxswtravel) had grab bags for each attendant ready on our chairs when we walked in. I felt like a Fashion Week attendee! The bag had better swag than the official Interactive [one] (did anyone else get the leather notepad [provided by Condé Nast Traveler.] How sweet was that!)”

Individuals at the panel reacted to the surprise bag on Twitter.

• Bill Hunt (a global marketing guy) liked it.
• Small business expert Becky McCray commented on it.
• Travel writer and Traveling Mama Shannon Hurst Lane talked about it.

Then, panel attendees tweeted about specific bag items.

• Many liked the sample pralines from local Austin company Lammes Candies – traveler CouchSurfingOri talked about the Lammes habanero praline, and so did hedge fund talent recruiter Kim Haynes and Download Squad tech writer CJClark.
• Krista Parry (Park City, Utah resorts PR and marketing) cheered the stickers provided by the Alltop.com Travel topic channel.
• Canadian travel internet marketing guru Todd Lucier was ready to cash in his bag’s Blue Bell Ice Cream free pint certificate, and he told his friends about it.
• The SXSWi Guide talked about Texas Highways magazine.
• And I talked about several of the companies – here’s my tweet on Austin SegCity Segway tours.

So what? What’s the reach?

Well, if you add up the Twitter follower numbers for each person that I’ve linked to above, that’s a total of 23,279 followers of just a few people tweeting about a tech conference giveaway bag.

The products and companies involved with this bag can also be searched and found on the the Flickr photo-sharing Web site, because I described the bag and linked to every contributor in:

• this photo of the contents (also seen at the top of this post.)
• this photo of Pam and I with the bags, recently also added to the City of Round Rock Flickr photo pool because their CVB provided the bags.
• this photo of the bags set out in chairs before the panel started, also now in the City of Round Rock pool.

(I threw in a Flickr photo of bag contributor Driskill Hotel’s historic bar, with a link to them, of course.)

Finally, this travel panel was not confined to listeners inside the Austin Convention Center; it had, and still has, a reach outside the room.

It was livestreamed to the Web via Qik on a cell phone. Travel enthusiasts around the world watched it as it happened (including my boss at the BootsnAll Travel Network, Sean Keener, who watched from New Zealand) and it’s now archived for anyone to see at any time:

• Part One of the panel video (119 views as of this date.)
• Part Two of the panel video (143 views as of this date.)

If a business is looking for a way to get eyes on their high-quality product or service AND take advantage of the power of Web and word-of-mouth marketing, I heartily recommend investigating how to connect with social media-savvy travelers.

Here are the Web sites of every company that contributed to the bag – smart marketing folks, every one of them.

*** Condé Nast Traveler
*** National Geographic Traveler
*** Texas Highways
*** Lammes Candies
*** Tesoros Trading Company
*** Blue Bell Creameries
*** BootsnAll Travel Network
*** Austin, Texas CVB
*** Round Rock, Texas CVB
*** SegCity Austin Segway Tours
*** Yapta ticket price tracking
*** Moo.com printing
*** Alltop.com
*** Driskill Hotel
*** Austin Museum of Art
*** “Historic Hotels of Texas” guidebook, by Liz Carmack
*** Office of the Governor, Texas Economic Development including Texas tourism
*** “Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune” guidebook, by Tim Leffel

Will the wisdom of traveling crowds be a boon or a bane to travel booking sites?

The Chicago Tribune reports that the big travel booking sites — Orbitz, for one — are taking cues from social networking and incorporating more user-generated reviews. The idea is to engage users while they’re in the planning phase, not just when they’re ready to book a trip. And with the slow economy, the Trib says, the planning (and dreaming) phase is longer than it used to be.

When these companies tap user-generated content, they’re dipping into a deep well indeed. But the waters in that well — to stretch the metaphor – are anything but still.

There are more than 20 million travelers’ opinions on UpTake – collected from sites like TripAdvisor.com, organized and analyzed. The level of detail available thanks to travelers’ reviews is staggering, even for less well-known destinations.

For instance, my husband and I took a trip over the holidays to La Paz, Mexico, a city a few hours north of more heavily visited Los Cabos. Using online reviews, we were able to learn in detail about tiny resorts and hostels that would never have merited more than a sentence or two in published travel guides. The level of detail was such that many words were devoted to the personality of one specific property owner: an expatriate named Eberhard.

Many travelers adored Eberhard, finding him unusually hospitable, helpful and entertaining, with “great knowledge” of the area. Others, though, found him “difficult” and bemoaned a lack of privacy.

The more I read, the more fascinated I became with this Eberhard character. We eventually stayed elsewhere — Eberhard’s place was fully booked and although he magnanimously offered to rent us his personal RV, I was leery of feeling indebted to someone who some people described as “disrespectful” and “inappropriate.”

And that is the rub for companies in the business of selling vacations. Some user reviews will convince people NOT to visit a certain hotel or even an entire destination. Anonymous reviewers feel no compunction to hold back on opinions or verify facts, and fear no slander charges. So while some user reviews steer consumers away from legitimately bad establishments, others may unfairly cause perfectly nice places to lose business.

Then again, getting reviewed by a whole group of consumers may result in destinations getting more of a fair shake than they would have if reviews were limited to only a handful of professionals. As in the case of Eberhard, one person’s overbearing innkeeper is another’s charming and colorful host. If one guidebook or magazine writer had visited and declared Eberhard a boor, his establishment might have closed forever. As it is, we can read about everyone’s experiences and decide for ourselves whether Eberhard is our kind of guy.

Photo by Carrie Kirby.

There is a lot to remember for effective blogging, so use a checklist (photo courtesy mictlan at Flickr Creative Commons)

One of the comments on my rant about social media foot-dragging by much of the tourism industry was left by Seattle-based writer/photographer Pam Mandel of Nerd’s Eye View. She’ll be my co-panelist at the Blog Highways travel blogging panel at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive tech conference in Austin.  We talk all the time about travel bloggers and tourism internet marketing.

The phrase she used in her comment is one that I hear a lot: “….we have a blog but no one is reading it.”

Well, why is that?

If your content is good, the problem is eminently fixable, but it takes work. Social media tools are (generally) free in monetary terms – good news in today’s economy – but they are NOT free in terms of the time needed to nurture and sustain them, which is true for any endeavor that involves human relationships and communication.

This is not something you toss over to the office intern for her/him to do in their spare time. Do not tell me you are “too old” to learn how to do this, either – I’m 47.  Nice try.

This is not your Web site, broadcasting pretty pictures and marketing-speak in one direction.

This is the “social” part of social media.  There’s a lot to it, but it isn’t rocket science; it’s building connections and relationships with prospective visitors to your destination.

OK, let’s break it down….why is “no one reading?”

• Define “no one.” Are you a brand-new blog (less than 3-6 months old?)  You will not have soaring readership numbers (my benchmark, among others, is unique visitors) unless you represent a very popular, world-class destination.  Every blogger starts out with 2-3 unique readers a day, and yes, one of them is probably your Mom (ask her to leave a comment next time; lots of comments are an important metric, too, so please don’t make it hard to comment by requiring registration and other silliness.)  Do you have about 50 uniques a day stopping by?  What if 50 people physically showed up at your office wanting to know more about your destination – see them all lined up in the hallway? Feels pretty good, right?  Take what you can get in the beginning. As super video blogger Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Everything is better than zero.”
• Is your content boring? Be honest – is it written by committee and vetted to within an inch of its life, then poked at by an “SEO expert?”  Gimme a break.  Readers connect with a lively human voice that has fresh news. Don’t waste their time with your recycled press releases – what else d’ya got?  I recommend the Philadelphia tourism blog UWishUNu or Experience Scottsdale (AZ) as examples of how to do it right.  If your content is boring because your destination is boring, then I’m sorry, I can’t help you.
• Do you link OUT in your blog posts? That’s how we wave to people on the Web….links say, “Hi, I appreciate your content and consider it link-worthy.” No, you do not have to ask to link to someone’s site; that’s part of the fun. Do you see the hyperlinked (light blue) items in this post? Every one of those people will see me talking about them over here on UpTake, because they see the link coming into the administrative back end of their site. Most will come over to visit and see what we’re talking about. That means traffic for this blog. Sure, I planned it that way. So can you.
• Do you surf over and check out the sites that link IN to your main Web site and/or your blog?  They thought you were link-worthy; isn’t that nice?  You always know when someone links to you, right? (meaning the data is visible to your entire marketing, public relations and communications teams, not just “the IT guy.”) Go look around on the site that linked to you, and maybe leave a comment on one of their posts in return; that’s how good link karma works, like any human kindness or courtesy. Some incoming links are from spammers/link farms – Boo! – so identify them as spam and delete.
• Is your number of blog content subscribers (by RSS or email) moving in an upward direction?  Do you make it easy to subscribe and is it obvious how to do so on your site?  Do you periodically encourage subscription in your posts?
• Is your blog registered with Technorati and lots of other blog directories?  Do you automatically or manually ping major search engines/directories after each post?
• Do you highlight your best blog posts in your Twitter stream and your destination’s Facebook page, along with photos of your destination on Flickr and some videos on YouTube? Yes, I’ll wait here while you go set those up. To get the word out about a blog, you don’t just do it on the blog itself – you need outposts on the Web.  Go see the Twitter stream from the tourism people in Nova Scotia, or the 3 folks who do Hawaii tourism: DavidHTA, Michael Ni and Nathan Kam.  Go see the Facebook page for Iowa tourism. Go see what these tourism guys in the Amazon have done with social media – good for them!  There’s a lot of travel action on Twitter.
• Ready to learn even more about successful blogging? Do what every other new blogger does – we all head over and read every word of Aussie Darren Rowse’s ProBlogger, a simply indispensable resource.

If this all sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is HARD to build a blog that draws a crowd, and don’t let some newly jumped-up “social media marketing expert” tell you otherwise.  I’ve been at it for three years as a blogger, and I’m still learning. The learning curve will only get steeper, so get hot.

In the long term, you cannot outsource social media and be particularly effective.  My consulting company Every Dot Connects, for example, just finished what we think was a pretty good marketing campaign contest with HomeAway vacation rentals. I wrote some blog posts for their new microsite as a part of that project, but the idea is that such content eventually moves in-house because you want your organization’s voice in social media, not mine. I’ll teach you how to fish, and all that….

While you’re at it, keep an ear to the ground about mobile content – my long-time tech mentor Dwight Silverman at the Houston Chronicle tells me that mobile devices (mostly because of the game-changing iPhone) are the next huge leap for the Web, social media and how humans connect.

Is your tourism organization thinking about mobile? Do you check your blog’s presentation on mobile devices?  Start now, because people are driving near/through/around your destination even as we speak, looking for guidance on their Web-browsing mobile device.  Make sure that your blog is easily findable and full of useful information for your visitors, just like that danged brochure that you still print for an ever-shrinking audience at the highway rest stops.

Sure, keep doing occasional print runs, but your focus should be shifting now, to the future and to the Web.

We are out here in social media; where ARE you guys?! (courtesy foundphotoslj at Flickr Creative Commons)

After only a few meet-and-greet sessions into the Fall 2008 Travel Media Showcase conference in Kansas City, I realized that I was a wee bit out of step with most of the rest of the room.

I was a blogger, and they (generally) were not.

It made me crazy.

Frankly, I wondered when the mainstream travel and tourism industry would back off on printing brochures and rejiggering their Web sites (again) and really engage with the Web 2.0/social media world.

Many CVB and tourism bureau representatives said they were “considering” at least adding a blog to their main Web site, and when I invited their guest blog post participation on my Family Travel site (as the Iowa Tourism Office had already done) exhibitors were uniformly enthusiastic and interested in learning more.

My concern is that we are rapidly moving past the “I’m considering that” stage into the “this is a major way to engage with our travel customers right now” stage, but too many are dragging their feet.  Why?

There is an army of wildly enthusiastic travelers online.  When I began blogging on the BootsnAll Travel Network about family travel in early 2006, I was thrilled when a little community of readers magically appeared, leaving comments on my posts about places as disparate as Tokyo and Colonial Williamsburg. Some of those readers also blogged, and we read each other’s work, recommended resources and shared our passion for travel with many others in the ever-growing online world.

We gabbed together in person at fun blogging/geek conferences like BlogHer (which had a 2008 travel blogger’s meetup,) Austin’s South by Southwest Interactive, SOBCon (”Biz School for Bloggers”) and BlogWorld and New Media Expo, even Le Web in Paris and The Next Web in Amsterdam.  We exchanged ideas on Travelwriters.com. We started travel blogger forums.

We put our photos on Flickr and shot video for YouTube. We were thrilled when our favorite print magazines started blogs like Intelligent Travel (National Geographic Traveler,) the Perrin Post (Wendy Perrin of Condé Nast Traveler,) This Just In (by Budget Travel magazine) and for me personally as a Texas-based writer, the Texas Highways magazine blog.

We piled onto Facebook and put up links to our posts on our Facebook pages (and sometimes even on stodgy LinkedIn, where we joined Groups like Travel Media Pros and THAT’s Professional.) We bookmarked good posts on StumbleUpon and Delicious.  We were elated when we found lots of other travel enthusiasts on Twitter.

We’re looking forward to the 2009 travel blogging panels at South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and at BlogHer….and we’re wondering why we still don’t have more company from traditional tourism organizations.

Next time someone like me says, “Do you have a blog?” you should be able to answer, “Sure, and here’s our Facebook page and here we are on Twitter and check out our Flickr photos and YouTube videos.”

Hey, your destination looks like a place that I’d like to visit!

(Ready to jump in? Don’t miss the post How to get social media traction for your tourism blog)