The Tourism Tech Corner will shine a light on technology and how it affects the world of tourism. The primary objective is to show how using interactive social media can help your website become more service-oriented and more valuable to your customers.
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The Indiana Office of Tourism Development just hosted the 2nd annual Indiana Tourism Summit. This year’s event was held at Serendipity at Metropolis in Plainfield, IN. The event was a great success with nearly 100 industry members attending.
If you weren’t able to attend the Summit, or if you’re just looking for a reminder of what each presenter spoke about, click on their name below to be linked off to a wrapup about their presentation.
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Joy Cropper’s presentation at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit was all about Permission Email Marketing. Joy went over – in detail – the campaign that Williams Randall put together for our office.
Below is Joy’s entire presentation:
Joy Cropper is the Director of Internet Strategy at Williams Randall Marketing. Joy brings 18 years of B-to-B and B-to-C marketing experience, with a special passion for website information architecture and usability. She is the agency lead for internet strategy, user research, permission email and landing page optimization. Joy is a former partner and Lead Web Strategist at J. Walter Thompson in Detroit, where she directed the strategic development of all Ford Division websites. At Williams Randall, her interactive clients include NCAA, Indiana Tourism, Purdue University, Indianapolis Museum of Art, IndyCar Series and USA Track & Field.
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Doug Karr’s presentation at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit focused almost entirely on social media. Two recommendations Doug made during his presentation are to pick up Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (I’ve written about this excellent book here and here) and Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan. He also spoke of the amazing growth of social media and its’ business uses in the past year.
Check out Doug’s entire presentation below:
Doug Karr is the President and CEO of DK NEW Media, an online marketing agency specializing in leveraging online technologies to maximize business results. Doug is a social media expert, having worked with clients around the globe and locally including the Indianapolis Colts and the 2012 Superbowl Committee. Doug is a strategic partner to Compendium Blogware, a corporate blogging platform he helped design, and continues to serve with strategic consulting. Doug is an avid blogger and is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog at MarketingTechBlog.com and is a co-founder of Smaller Indiana.
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Pat Coyle presented at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit about social media web trends and, specifically, Smaller Indiana. Pat created Smaller Indiana in January, 2008 and it has become a hub for Hoosiers who want to connect with one another in an effort to strengthen community, commerce and culture. Pat talked about some of the keys to Smaller Indiana’s success:
Plausible Promise – Make People Findable
Smaller Indiana makes people findable through the platform they have created.
Rules/Governance
Members must use their real names. This fosters community because you’re interacting with a real person, not just an internet screen name (think of the difference between Facebook and MySpace).
Hyper-local
Smaller Indiana focuses on Indiana, so there’s already a built-in demographic. Nearly half of the visits to the site come from outside of Indiana, but everything on the site is related to the Hoosier State.
Offline Activities
Smaller Indiana Bigger Ideas conference
Indy Fringe Festival
Live/Streamed Healthcare Debate
Smaller Indiana has great potential to help Hoosier tourism entities and they should absolutely become involved in the site. Check out Pat’s entire presentation below.
Pat Coyle is among a new breed of digital pioneers who are inventing business strategies inspired by emerging technologies. Pat is also the founder of Smaller Indiana (SmallerIndiana.com), and online platform which strengthens community, commerce and culture in Indiana. Before opening his own firm, Pat was the executive director of digital business at the Indianapolis Colts, where he lead an interactive staff responsible for the Colts’ digital businesses. Coyle remains involved with the Colts as general manager of MyColts.net, a sociable network for Colts fans. Based on his Colts experiences, Coyle also leads an online community for digital sports marketers at SportsMarketing20.com. He facilitates Sports Marketing 2.0 conferences throughout the U.S., and maintains a popular sports marketing blog at PatCoyle.net. Coyle earned a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Hamilton College in 1988. Pat, his wife Amy and their five children reside in Indianapolis.
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John Packer, from TNS Research, was the first presenter at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit. John brought his expertise in both web marketing and the tourism industry for his presentation and there are some absolutely fascinating statistics included. Here are some of the highlights of his presentation, followed by the PowerPoint itself.
Five Emerging Travel Marketing Trends:
Travelers are still traveling and can be influenced
31% of visitors to VisitIndiana.com are extremely more likely to visit Indiana after seeing the site
54% of visitors are very likely to visit Indiana after seeing the site (score of 7-10 out of 10)
Affordability is the watchword
79% of respondents said that Affordability was very or extremely important when planning a trip
Search is still King
Many more people find out about VisitIndiana.com via search than any other medium
Travelers are shopaholics
63% of visitors to VisitIndiana.com are shopping around for their vacation destination – many people are looking at several states within driving distance
Websites are money well spent
48% of all visitors to VisitIndiana.com are potential travelers to Indiana 50% actually end up traveling to Indiana after visiting VisitIndiana.com
For every $1 spent on VisitIndiana.com and web advertising, the state of Indiana experiences $1,071 in visitor spending
Here is John Packer’s presentation:
John Packer is a vice president in the Travel & Leisure segment for TNS Research. He is a marketing research professional with over 15 years of client and supplier experience. His primary responsibilities at TNS are working with travel and tourism clients to fully understand their business issues an then working with team members to design and execute research programs that will help travel and tourism clients succeed. Previous marketing research postions with increasing responsibilities were MarketVision Research, D.K. Shifflet & Associates an SnowSports Industries America. he is the pas president of Travel and Tourism Research Association International, and he is affiliated with numerous professional societies. Educationally, he holds a BA (Physics) from the University of Connecticut and an MA (Tourism Administration) from George Washington University.
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Welcome to our 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit wrapup post about Online Marketing, preseneted by Santhana Naidu.
Our director, Amy, calls Santhana Naidu one of our secret weapons. Santhana is the Director of Online Marketing and Analytics at Williams Randall Marketing, our agency of record. His expertise in analytics and online marketing has been a tremendous help to us in the past year that we’ve worked with Williams Randall.
Santhana brought up several points about why it’s important to spend marketing dollars online
Online Marketing is relatively inexpensive when compared to most traditional mediums
Accountability for advertiers
Nearly all aspects of campaigns can be tracked, tested and optimized
The internet is used throughout the purchase funnel in the tourism industry and is the most powerful tool in prompting people to take a trip
Search is used by 6 in 10 travelers
Just under 30% of people are influenced to book based on online advertising - I’ll repeat that: Nearly 30% of people are influenced to book based on online advertising!
Santhana talked in detail about many of these items as well as these four important types of internet advertising:
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Display Advertising
Cost Per Lead programs
Mobile Marketing
While all four types of online marketing are important, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Display Advertising help give you the most qualified leads. Mobile marketing is certainly on the rise now, but we’re still in the beginning stages of mobile marketing.
Santhana’s presentation is below:
Santhana Naidu is the Director of Online Marketing & Analytics at Williams Randall Marketing. Since joining Williams Randall in 2003, he has been responsible for driving the strategy and development of marketing analytics programs and online marketing campaigns for several clients. Santhana has worked on related projects for BMW, Volvo, Harrison College (formerly Indiana Business College) and Indiana Tourism and currently manages a $3 million online advertising budget for a variety of clients.
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I was planning to live-blog the 2009 Indina Tourism Summit, but our internet access isn’t reliable, so I’ll be posting a Tourism Summit wrapup later this week.
Until then, here were the great presenters at the Summit:
John Packer – TNS Research
Santhana Naidu - Williams Randall Marketing
Pat Coyle – Sports Marketing 2.0 / SmallerIndiana.com
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There are plenty of people who still dismiss social media as useless. In fact, there are studies that show that 40% of all ‘tweets’ are pointless babble. Even though that may be true, that doesn’t diminish the power and usefulness of social media in marketing and PR today. There will always be people who don’t understand new technologies and how they can be useful, and social media is no exception. The video below has been circulating online in the past couple of weeks and it does a fantastic job of highlighting how much a part of our lives social media has become. No longer can you ignore social media, in fact, in a recent survey of Indiana Tourism entities, nearly 30% of respondents use Twitter on to promote their destination and more than 90% use Facebook.
My favorite quote in the entire presentation is:
Social Media isn’t a fad – it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
That’s such a true statement. Social Media isn’t just a way to waste time and talk with friends about useless bits of trivia, it’s truly a new way to communicate directly with consumers, with your customers.
Some other encouraging news for the use of social media is that more 80% of US adults use social media on a monthly basis. For more information about the different types of social media use check out theseposts on Groundswell):
The video below is the precursor to the other video in this post. While this one doesn’t focus on social media exclusively, there is still some pretty amazing information in here.
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We’re not usually the type to toot our own horns, but we got some fantastic news yesterday that we can’t keep to ourselves. Gammet Interactive, a marketing firm in Michigan that focuses on travel and tourism just released what appears to be the first study to look at the use of social media by each State’s tourism office. On founder Dave Serino’s blog, he explains the methodologies that were used to determine and rank how social each State DMO is.
There we are, Indiana is at #2 out of all 50 states! Huge congratulations go out to Pennsylvania, Florida, Oregon and Nevada for their top five finishes. Each of these states does a fantastic job with social media and we’re absolutely humbled to be included in such great company. If you’re interested in seeing the full report, click here for the PDF.
We’ve worked hard at the Indiana Office of Tourism Development to provide content that people want through our various social media channels and we’re very excited to be recognized for the job we’re doing. This is a great example of how, even in a time of decreasing budgets, you can still promote your destination in very effective ways for very little money.
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