Tourism Keys In

An overview of Tourism Keys Internet Marketing Workshop.

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.

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.

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.

[podcast]http://www.tourismkeys.ca/aussie%202.mp3[/podcast]

Todd and Fabie continue their discussion about the digital divide, or how to bridge the gap which exists between the current state of online marketing and the capacity of tourism operators to take advantage of it.

Fabie has been heavily involved in the Australian tourism e-kit - a series of 37 tutorials about Internet Marketing for tourism operators available for free : http://www.atdw.com.au/tourism_e_kit.asp and is seeking advice from Todd on how to get the support from the Aussie government to move to the next logical step: face to face training.

The Canuck and the Aussie tourism geeks also address and propose solutions to the following challenges:

Guiding small tourism operators to create new Internet content for their region

"Get together with a whole bunch of other operators and skilled people such as your local photographers, writers, multimedia students and get your hands on the case to create a whole bunch more content to be available on the Internet"...

Why you shouldn't give Martha from your local tourism association $253 for an advertisement in their new brochure

"If zero phone calls were generated from the ad, why would you invest those dollars again? - invest them in your own time to become better at understanding how visitors search for you and what they want to read. Your future visitors look for you online and want to read, view images, videos about you and not simply another ad in the paper quoting your rates, showing a 10 year old photo and your opening hours".

So next time Martha rings, ask her to help you to get better at providing the content a potential customer wants to see online. Tell Martha about how many bookings you got from your TripAdvisor listing!

Tracking the origin of your enquiries and bookings

"Get your pen ready, Todd will tell you exactly which questions to ask a visitor on the phone to track where they heard from you - was it on your Website, or somewhere else?"

What are your thoughts? Have you been getting many phonecalls from Martha? Or do you want a few tips on how to get your message across to the Marthas of the world? Leave your comments so we have some "meat" to lobby for more training programs both in Canada and Australia

Stay tuned for part III of our Travelling Podcast...

Todd chats with Fabienne Rabbiosi of Untangle My Web, from Queensland, Australia about:

bridging the digital divide
providing broadband Internet access and access to training
making training less scary with images
thinking like your Ideal Guest
using questions to brainstorm and design Web pages
feeling sad for Aussie's - they don't celebrate a Thanksgiving Holiday!