Blog – Page 18 – Pine Street Digital

So you’re going to a conference

With the use of social media, more and more people can now experience conferences virtually. Whether you’re attending in person or just following along via a hashtag, here are five tips to help you get ready to use social media at a conference.

What’s the hashtag? Hashtags are a great way to follow the conference on twitter. If you’re leading the conference, create the hashtag early and publicize it! Put it on all of your registration information, printed and online. Be sure to include your social media icons here as well. When creating a hashtag, make it short but not so short that it becomes confusing. Use “10” instead of “2010” or consider using no year at all.…
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Using Twitter’s Advanced Search

Social media is not traditional marketing. If you’re only pushing out information to your twitter followers, you’re missing out on connecting with potential visitors.

People are talking about you and your area. They might not know that you’re on twitter but they do know that twitter can help them find answers. Are you listening?

There are many tools that can help you find these people and Twitter’s Advanced Search (search.twitter.com/advanced) is one of them. …

Tracking: it’s not just for reports

Tracking is an important part of social media, even more so than in traditional marketing methods. You might already be tracking basic stats to include in reports but that’s only touching the surface. Tracking is not complete without analysis.

How can you tell that you’re not wasting time?

On Twitter:

Are people clicking on your links? I recommend using budurl.com or bit.ly to track the click-through rates of your links. But don’t just stop there. Categorize your links into themes. Are your culinary tweets getting more clicks than your art/culture tweets? Find out what topics your followers seem to be interested it.
Are twitter followers replying to you? If no one’s talking to you then you must be the one to start the conversation. Ask questions like “What’s on your Chicago must-see list?” and retweet some of the answers. Keep track of the amount of replies/mentions you receive each month. …
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A picture is worth a thousand words…especially on twitter

Convention and Visitors Bureaus know that photos are an important part in selling a destination. Compelling photos can also say much more than 140 characters can on twitter. Part of twitter’s appeal is time-sensitive content and photos should enhance this. I can tweet about the beautiful weather in Chicago but sending a twitpic photo would say even more.

There are several photo posting options on twitter but my preference is twitpic. It seems to load photos faster (for the viewer) than TweetPhoto and it’s easier to navigate through a user’s photostream than yfrog.

You can easily upload photos from twitpic.com but I think the best use of twitpic is the ability to upload photos on the go from your phone. Each user has a special “twitpic email address” that they can email their photos to for instant uploading.…

Past Travels

I remember coming home from school and watching The Donna Reed Show on Nick at Nite in the 80s. I so wanted to grow up and be just like her. Well the life of a 1950’s housewife is no longer in my future but I am still fascinated with all things retro and antique.

Luckily my parents have great saving habits so I’ve acquired a few antique items that used to belong to my grandma but I have only recently discovered the delightful experience of antiquing. Thanks to Dave Woodson‘s recommendation, I went antiquing in La Porte, IN this past weekend and came back with three great items.

My first find was a pair of gently used ice skates with a red & black houndstooth lining. It’s going to be a perfect Christmas decoration and it only cost $5. How could I pass that up?

My other two items are vintage postcards. I just loved thumbing through stacks of postcards, reading all of their messages and reliving their trips from decades ago. There’s something special about getting in the car and driving across the country. It’s the only way to experience a real road trip. …

Google Maps: it’s that easy

Creating a custom Google Map is a great way to enhance itineraries, attraction and hotel listings, special events and so much more. Plus Google made it very easy to create and embed these maps.

Go to the “My Maps” tab and create a title and description for your new map. All you have to do now is find, drop or drag placemarks and draw lines. You can customize the icon for the placemark as well as adding live links and images via html.

Flickr is always a great resource for images. Search within the Creative Commons to find images that can be used commercially. You can find the html under the “Share This” tab for each photo.…

DMOpro: a new way to connect

It just got easier for DMO professionals to stay connected. Bill Geist and Terry White have created an incredible portal for destination marketing professionals: DMOpro Some of the highlights of the DMOpro site are a real-time tourism news feed, a comprehensive listing of tourism job opportunities and an impressive library featuring white papers, funding models…

Checkin Etiquette

If you’re not using Foursquare or Gowalla, now is the time to start, especially if you’re in the tourism industry. Both of these sites allow users to “check in” at places via their phone and earn badges or pins for different checkin criteria.

When you sign up for either of these, you have the option to connect your checkins to your Facebook and Twitter accounts. While I feel this is a great feature, I see it overused and abused quite frequently.

Oversharing

Don’t tweet all of your checkins, especially without comments. As a twitter follower, I don’t really need to know when you’re at Walmart.

Do be selective and tweet (or post to Facebook) checkins that are special locations (vacations, festivals, something really cool) or those that have a funny comment. If your comment is something like “I want to be a Walmart greeter when I grow up” then, by all means, tweet it.…

Flickr’s New Design

Flickr rolled out a new design a few weeks ago to 800,000 some users and just made it mainstream today. It’s a lot cleaner and seems to display all the important information “above the fold” on the screen.

Here are my favorite aspects of this new design:…