Tourism Tech Corner

The Tourism Tech Corner Has Moved!

Jeremy Williams — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:11:27 +0000

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

The Tourism Tech Corner Blog has now moved. Don’t worry, we’re still going to bring you great tips about Social Media, Web Marketing and Technology in the Tourism Industry, we’ll just be doing it at a new location (http://www.in.gov/visitindiana/techcorner/).

Be sure to Bookmark the new Visit Indiana Blog. If you’ve already subscribed to the blog through our RSS feed or via Email, you don’t need to worry, you’ll keep receiving updates like you always have. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can get updates sent to you via RSS or Email.

2009 Indiana Tourism Summit Wrapup

Jeremy Williams — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:44:43 +0000

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.

The Tourism Tech Corner will be hosted at IN.gov soon, so be on the lookout for a new location and a new look for the blog. If you subscribe via RSS or email, you don’t need to worry, you’ll keep receiving the Tourism Tech Corner on a regular basis.

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

2009 Indiana Tourism Summit Wrapup – Permission Email – Joy Cropper

Jeremy Williams — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:22:14 +0000

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.

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

2009 Indiana Tourism Summit Wrapup – Social Tourism – Doug Karr

Jeremy Williams — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:14:56 +0000

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.

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

2009 Indiana Tourism Summit Wrapup – Smaller Indiana – Pat Coyle

Jeremy Williams — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:07:06 +0000

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.

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

2009 Indiana Tourism Summit Wrapup – TNS Research: Webtrends – John Packer

Jeremy Williams — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 15:03:31 +0000

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.

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

2009 Indiana Tourism Summit Wrapup – Online Marketing – Santhana Naidu

Jeremy Williams — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 19:35:06 +0000

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.

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

2009 Indiana Tourism Summit

Jeremy Williams — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:21:05 +0000

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
Doug Karr – DK New Media / SmallerIndiana.com
Joy Cropper – Williams Randall Marketing

More to come…

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

Is Social Media a Fad?

Jeremy Williams — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:13:03 +0000

So, is social media just a fad?

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 these posts 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.

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!

More Local Social Media Resources

Jeremy Williams — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:31:37 +0000

If you’ve attended any of the conferences or sessions that Indiana Office of Tourism Development has recently hosted, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been talking a lot about online and social media marketing.

2008 Indiana Tourism Summit: We brought in Josh Hallett, who talked about Flickr and other social media platforms.
2009 Hoosier Hospitaliy Conference: IOTD hosted a blogging seminar (featuring Doug Karr, Paula Werne, Jeff Robinson and myself) where the panelists talked about the importance of blogging.
2009 June Tourism Council: We hosted a panel (featuring Jen Perry, Bruce Hetrick, Erik Johnson and John Palmer) about Marketing in a Recession that talked about different social media initiatives to get you through in this tough economic climate.
2009 Meet The Media: This event occurred just a few weeks ago. We had sessions about Social Media from Erik Deckers and Duncan Alney as well as a Twitter session from James Burnes and an Indiana Insider Bloggers Panel that featured each of our Indiana Insider bloggers.
2009 Indiana Tourism Summit: This upcoming summit will be completely web-focused and will feature such topics as web research, online optimization, social media and permission email. (Click here to register for the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit – PDF form)

We’re choosing to focus on web-based and social media marketing so much because it is such an important part of an effective marketing mix, especially in today’s economy. All of these sessions and conferences provide a great opportunity to hear directly from some of the smartest minds in online and social media marketing, but what do you do between sessions? Who should you pay attention to? Who should you go to with questions about online marketing?

In addition to the Tourism Tech Corner, we’ve compiled a short list of other great resources for social media and technology questions. Several of them are even located here in Indiana. Here are some of my favorite blogs to follow as well an excerpt from each:

Check out Firebelly's blog for great thoughts from Duncan Alney and his team

8 Social Ettiquette Suggestions You Can’t Live Without:

Be on time

Say please and thank you

Be nice

Don’t be a monologue

Caring matters now more than ever

Don’t be a hater

Don’t share every detail

Think before you retweet

Kyle Lacy has great thoughts on his personal blog, KyleLacy.com and his company's site, GetBrandswag.com

3 Steps to Being Productive in Social Media:

Step 3: Be Authentic

I get numerous e-newsletter in my inbox everyday, most of them vary from mundane to outright boring. When posting on your social media applications, try to add some authenticity and personality to the information you are sharing. When I am reading blogs and posts on social applications the last thing I want to read is an impersonal e-newsletter. I want to know that the keystrokes behind the information is an actual person. Be personal. Be Authentic.

MediaSauce keeps you up-to-date on the latest in interactive marketing

Why Should You be Using LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter for your Business?

Listen, these technologies are just tools. Just like your fax machine (if you still have one of those) or your email.

It’s a tool for communication with other people. When email came out (does anyone remember life without email?), some people embraced it. But others, you know, struggled, they fought it, but then they finally had to give in. And, of course, there were those that got confused and accidentally spammed the entire company. That still happens. But it doesn’t happen so much anymore. And what companies do actual training on how to use email? It’s just a part of life in the office environment and you should know how to use email.

LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter can all be the same thing – even if it isn’t called by these specific brand names in a few years. Think companies won’t have an internal Facebook for communicating? Think a LinkedIn type tool won’t hold all your business and personal information? What we are seeing is just the first shots at these tools. Email has come a long way in a short time. Don’t think that these tools won’t evolve as well.

Mashable is the definitive guide to social media - while not based in Indiana, Mashable has a wealth of information

HOW TO: Get Retweeted on Twitter:

Retweeting, as we explained in our article How To Retweet on Twitter, has evolved as the main way to reshare content you like on the social media service. There’s also a great deal of data we can glean from retweeting behavior, as we outlined in the article The Science of Retweets.

But apart from the obvious, what makes a retweet different from a tweet? What makes some types of tweets get shared more than others? And what can you learn from that data if you’d like to get retweeted more?

This week viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella dug into the data on retweets and published some interesting stats about retweet behavior. These help us understand why people retweet things, and might help you too.

Noobie is an Indy-based company that helps people with tech-related questions. If you're just dipping your foot into the internet, this is a great place to start.

Find and Share the Best of the Internet With Digg:

Digg.com is a free web site that lets its Internet community rank pages on the Internet. As account holders find web pages with articles, blog posts, videos or pictures that they like, they can “digg” the page. The more diggs a page gets, the higher its popularity rank. After enough diggs, a page can earn its place on the “popular” page.

So, Digg.com primarily appeals to two different kinds of people: Those who find interesting Internet content while browsing, doing research or reading daily online news and can’t wait to share it, or their opinion about it; and those who want to keep their finger on the pulse of public opinions. Chances are good that if you try Digg.com you will really, well, dig it!

The MTB is very focused on the hard numbers of web marketing and is a great resource.

Putting a Value on Social Media With Tourism:

Tourism is a difficult entity to monetize and specify a value for. Tourism departments spend money, but don’t have any revenue directly associated with those expenditures. Revenue is seen by the destinations of the hospitality industry… resorts, shopping, hotels, restaurants, etc. All of those sources will rarely report revenue (or can pinpoint revenue) attributed to tourism expenditures. We know there’s a return on investment – but tracking that expenditure was difficult to tackle… until now!

One method that I provided the team with was to put a value, instead, on the visitors who arrived at their websites. Luckily, there’s an entire industry out there that pinpoints the value of a web page visitor – and that’s Pay Per Click!

Smashing Magazine goes amazingly in depth on a range of issues, from web design to programming. This is a resource for the more tech-savvy, but can still help those getting started.

Social Network Design: Examples and Best Practices:

According to Nielsen Online, social networks and blogs are now the 4th most popular kinds of online activities. 67% of the world online population are now visiting them and the time they’re spending on them is growing by three times the overall growth rate of the internet. Social networks are now visited more often than personal email is read. Some social networks have grown to such enormous proportions that they rival entire countries in terms of population—if Facebook, for example, was a country, it would be the fifth-most-populated in the world (right between Indonesia and Brazil).

There’s a lot of variety out there in the realm of social network design. Some sites keep a very professional approach (like LinkedIn) while others have a more organic, free-form look (like MySpace). Most sites fall somewhere in between, mixing professionalism with personalization (like Facebook). But what’s the best way to design a social network? What are the elements that make a social network more user-friendly and more attractive to users? Read on to find out.

Those are just a few of my favorite resources for all things web and social media. Remember that you’re always welcome to email me any questions you might have regarding online marketing or social media (after all, we did just get ranked #2 out of all 50 states for our social media strategy). The reason I write on this blog is because I want to be able to help CVBs with their technology- and web strategy-related questions.

The Tourism Tech Corner has a new home!