Over the last weeks we have been asked many questions about the Portland “Twisitor Center” so I thought I would share some background info and learnings from it.

The whole idea started with a post on this blog about the need to engage with travelers while they are visiting a destination.

At the same time we were developing the social media strategy for  Travel Portland and were preparing to launch the @travelportland Twitter account. We were already having a very successful partnership with Travel Portland through the GoSeePortland portal which allows locals and visitors to share their personal Portland recommendations and tips. During a brainstorming session we were thinking about how Twitter could be used as an additional to GoSeePortland tool to answer questions from visitors about their trip to Portland. Using Twitter seemed to offer several advantages: Twitter was growing fast, it was easy to use on a mobile platform, it had a great and fast search function. But we did not want to be online 24/7 to answer questions of potential visitors. We needed a way to get more people involve – just as we do on GoSeePortland.com – and “crowd-source” the visitor information. And so the idea of the hashtag was born – tag Portland questions with a unique and somebody in the community would try to help.

Over the next weeks two things happened: Travel Portland educated its constituents and key stakeholders about the upcoming Twitter activities and we used the @travelportland account to test the hashtag concept. The first hashtag we tested (#obamapdx) was a failure and we did not get any traction. The second hashtag we tested (#pdx6) worked much better and we got great participation when we asked the @travelportland followers to describe Portland in six words on Twitter. After that we knew the “crowd-sourcing by hashtag” idea could work.

The next step was choosing the right hashtag for the “Twisitor Center”. The tag had to be short but distinct, should be about Portland and not Travel Portland, it had to explain what the whole concept was about and it should be relevant for visitors and locals alike. It might not look like it but a lot of thoughts went into choosing a “#inpdx” as the hashtag …

=> Learning: If we had to do it again we would probably choose an even more distinct hashtag, preferably one that will not be placed in tweets by people who do not know about the concept and use hashtags liberally, e.g. “Today the sun was shining #inpdx”.

After deciding on the hashtag we reached out to top users on GoSeePortland and Twitter users in Portland to run the idea by them and ask them for their support. Everybody who was on board. It helped tremendously that with GoSeePortland we already had a platform where Portland enthusiasts were already sharing their best kept secrets about the city.

=> Learning: If you plan a service that requires community participation you need to identify and reach out your “evangelists” early on. When asking other to participate you are also no longer in control – there is no way to limit recommendations e.g. only to members of a conventions & visitors bureau.

We were also pretty certain that we could get some good PR for Travel Portland if we played this right. To support the planned press release with social media components we shot a short video and uploaded it on YouTube, photos were added to a dedicated Flickr account. Travel Portland build a landing page on their website explaining the concept, incl. information about Twitter in general.

=> Learning: It was amazing to see how many blogs used the YouTube video or the Flickr photos when they wrote about the Twisitor Center. Makes sense – visuals make a blog post a lot more appealing.

The press release went out on February 9th, as of today more than 500 stories have been written about the Portland Twisitor Center – from India to Australia. It even made the local news. And non-travel publications like Venturebeat wrote about it, which made us at GoSeeTell very happy.

=> Learning: Twitter is hot, hot, hot – at least at the moment. Any good idea that involved Twitter will get you excellent press coverage. But that window of opportunity is closing, in a couple of month Twitter will probably be old news. So if you have a good idea, act now.

Last week Associated Press published an article about the Twisitor Center. AP content is used by  publications all over the world and more articles were published. Most interesting was that the SF Chronicle picked up the AP story and also published it on its website SFGate. The article was read by many top Twitter users in the Bay Area who then tweeted about it – for example @guykawasaki. Guy has over 100,000 followers and Guy’s tweet was re-tweeted many, many times. Our estimate is that his tweet and subsequent re-tweets (and re-re-tweets – you get the picture) reached over 500,000 Twitter users. I think nothing explains the power of Twitter better than this.

What next?

At the moment we get between 10 and 25 questions for the Twisitor Center per day. We try to answer as many as we can from the @travelportland account (which we manage for Travel Portland). But the real beauty is that for most questions people from the Portland community offer answers – and different perspectives – as well. The @travelportland Twitter account has grown to over 5,000 followers (to a large extend thanks to the many hours that @ariannap put into it) but also because of great local press coverage. That local coverage lead to more people actively monitoring the hashtag and as a result even better answers.

The roll-out of the Portland Twisitor Center was planned in four phases. Phase 1 was the preparation, phase 2 was the launch and we are now working on the phases 3 and 4 which will focus on integrating the Twisitor Center, content and participants into other web properties. Stay tuned for more updates!

And thank you to Travel Portland for being an unbelievable partner who is willing to push the envelop in order to make sure visitors to the city have the best possible time!

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We have developed TwisitorCenter.com to track all DMOs on Twitter. Just follow @twitisorcenter with your official destination account, we will follow back and your destination is automaticall added

http://www.twisitorcenter.com that lists all destinations that have an official Twitter presence.

If you have questions about how to build your own “Twisitor Center” let us know.

And if you have a hashtag or similar system for your destination, we want to hear about it. How did you go about it? What works, what does not?

Putting our monthly ranking of destinations on Twitter was slightly challenging this month as our trusted tool Twitter Grader was uncooperative and had significant down time. Usually we pull the data all on one day (the last day of the month) but because of the problems it took 3 days to get all data.

So, how many destinations in the US and Canada had a Twitter presence at the end of March 2009? We 24 new ones bringing the total we are tracking to 236 (new DMOs are marked in yellow).
We are probably missing some – let us know which ones.

24 tourism organizations now have more than 1,000 followers. Travel Portland added over 1,600 new followers as the buzz for the “Twisitor Center” continued.

And as usual we want to disclose that we work with several of the listed DMOs on various social media and social travel initiatives. Those DMOs are marked with a “*” behind their name.