While the buzz about Twitter is not seeming to slow down I think all of us that have been using Twitter for a while (personally or for an organization) have seen huge changes in how Twitter users are responding to more and more brands trying to use the tool. In a nutshell: things are not getting easier and many Twitter users are starting to get annoyed by all the marketing messages that are starting to take over and pushing conversations of “real people” in the background.

Our list of US/CA tourism organizations that have a presence on Twitter has grown to over 300. More than 70 destination accounts have over 1,000 followers. Here are the details (and as usual we used Twitter Grader on the last day of the month -in this case May 31st - for the ranking):

Since the end of May we found several new destinations using Twitter but as usual we rely on your feedback to complete our list.

We would also love to hear if anybody else is seeing Twitter and reactions from Twitter users change. If so, how?

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!

++++

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?

Southwest Airlines today very quietly launched their own community and took their social media activities to a new level. The community is accessed through a new tab in the top-level navigation named “Travel Guide”.

In the Travel Guide section users can share travel tips, rate and review destinations, hotels, attractions etc., upload photos and discuss travel experiences in forums.

Features and design are typically Southwest – nothing edgy, no bells and whistles, nothing that we have not seen before, but a very, very solid execution. And Southwest is not afraid what customers have to say: the forum even includes a section where travel on Southwest can discussed – who needs Flyertalk.com.

So far the community is very thin on content and members – Southwest did obviously feel it was not necessary to create a lot of content in stealth mode before opening it to the public. And they are probably right because now that the site is live the content should grow pretty quickly.

Southwest joins a whole group of other airlines that have rolled out community / social networking sites but this takes the game to a new level and raises a lot of new questions.

A community of 100,000,000
Southwest Airlines had more than 100 million enplaned passengers in 2008.

That is a nice pool to tap into when you want to start a community. Obviously enplaned passengers are not unique passengers but even if Southwest has only 50 million unique passengers and manages to entice 1% of those to join the community will have 500,000 members. 5% would mean 2.5 million in the Southwest social network. This is a game changer when it comes to social travel websites.

Content screening
I could not resist to create some content and to my surprise it went live right away. No pre-screening or other delay. Of course content can be flagged by user but overall this is a bold move for a brand like Southwest. It will be interesting to see how the airline will handle self-promotions by hotels and restaurants through “reviews”. And as adding content requires only a registered profile but not entering a CAPTCHA code it is currently pretty easy to write a robot program and create spam messages. Not difficult to remove but still a pain.

Ancillary revenue
Southwest is not getting into the community business because they love social media so much. With their own community they can now do something they can not do on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr or any other social media sites they are currently using: they can make money. Not totally unimportant if you are an airline in these days.
How will they make the money? Look at this from a SEO perspective alone. Lots and lots of content will be created and the Google spider will come and visit over and over again. Search for a Las Vegas hotel review and you might see a Southwest Airlines Travel Guide instead of Tripadvisor. But wait, there is more! Take the traffic and monetize it with ads. But not just any ads – use the additional data you have collected about member interests during the sign-up process for some targeting. Your favorite destination is San Diego? Have a look at this – coincidentally a special deal from your hometown to Southern California. Oh the possibilities …

Pressure on airlines
The Southwest community is overall pretty unsophisticated as far as the features go: no good search engine, just simple Google maps, very few “social” tools to connect with other members etc. But the fact that Southwest as the social media leader in the airline space (Blog, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr) has decided to roll out a community – as simple as it is - adds significant pressure on other carriers to follow suit. Virgin Atlantic will roll out their Vtravelled community in June. They will not be the last.

Pressure on destinations and DMOs
Other airlines are not the only ones that will feel the pressure. As a Southwest customer I will soon be able to get travel insights and user-generated-content on Southwest.com. One less reason to go to a DMO (destination marketing organization) website. One more website the DMO has to screen to stay on top of what visitors are saying about the destination.
Overall social networking micro-sites are growing rapidly (this is just another example). Each of these travel-themed micro-sites makes online life for the DMO more complicated.

Consumers want to share and connect and if DMOs do not offer the right tools and the right content consumers will find it elsewhere. Southwest Airlines is a powerhouse when it comes to tourism marketing in the US. The content created on Southwest.com has the potential to shape travel decisions similar to what Tripadvisor has done for hotels. Few DMOs can afford to stand on the sideline while this is happening. They must – and will – offer consumers their own alternative for the content they are seeking – ratings, reviews, photos, videos etc.

Yesterday we published our monthly ranking of US tourism organizations on Twitter. Over the next days we will analyze the data some more and see if Twitter is really having an impact on tourism or if it just a fad. 

In this post we rank the 50 destinations that picked up the most followers in December of 08.

Pennylvania picked up almost 500 new followers, followed by Cleveland and Chicagoland.

Soon several DMOs will have more than 1,000 followers and if you look at the average number of daily updates this means that it will be possible to make several thousand contacts with consumes every day.

And here is a quick look at the growth rates for the three most followed and three fastest growing destinations over the last 3 months.

Most followed:

Fastest growing:

Of course now we all want to know what @paadventure did on December 2nd when they picked up 200 new users in just one day. 

And don’t forget: if you work for a tourism organization and have not participated in the “Social Media in Tourism” survey then please click here and give us your thoughts. The survey will close at the end of this week.

Here is our updated list for the number of conversations US destinations are having on Twitter. 

A conversation on Twitter is not a tweet but a series of replies back and forth between two Twitter users. For destinations on Twitter conversations - together with retweets - can be seen as the best engagement with other users.

The ranking at the end of November by number of total conversations:

And here is the number of conversations taking place in November - Philadelphia, Asheville and VisitChicago were far ahead of everybody else in that category:

When looking at the conversations of destinations keep in mind that a significant number of conversations on Twitter is still taking place between different destinations and not with consumers or travelers.

We plan to track the growth of conversations over the next months to see if the number grows as the travel industry figures out better and better ways to use Twitter as a tool to talk to travelers.

Anybody interested in this?

At the end of each month we look at the destinations in the US that are using Twitter to engage consumers and publish a ranking of these destinations using Twitter Grader.

And important element Grader does not take into account when calculating it’s score is the number of conversations that is taking place on Twitter. A “conversation” on Twitter can be defined as an exchange of (public) messages between users using the “@” syntax.

So here is the ranking of the top 20 destinations by conversations (this ranking does not include direct messages):

Clearly Philadelphia and Baltimore and far, far ahead of everybody else.

The number of conversations is cumulative, so obviously those destinations that started earlier have an advantage.

I think it will be interesting to see how the number of conversations changes over time as Twitter enters the mainstream more and more. Are you interested in that as well?

The most asked question about social media is: “Why should we be doing this?”. Do a good enough job of answering that question and you will immediately be asked “What is the ROI for this?”. You might be tempted to ask in return about the ROI for the last print ad your organization did or the ROI for taking a customer out on a golf course - but there are better options. Because the impact of social media activities can be measured, can be reported and can be put in relation to the cost involved: the ROI for social media activities can be measured.

At this week’s E-Marketing Insight conference we will present our thoughts on social media measurements, but to start a discussion about this subject we thought we would blog about this and hopefully start a wider debate.

In this post we want to share some of the ways we measure the ROI of social media activities using Twitter as an example.

Twitter is free to use so the only “investment” is the time needed to tweet.

The “return” part or the ROI should be defined as how successful you are in engaging customers through Twitter. Several factors are important and can be measured:

How many times did you Twitter?
Every time you tweet you potentially engage each of your followers. The challenge is that unlike email where you can measure an open rate there are no reliable tools to find out who reads your tweet or not. (Note: there are some tools to measure Twitter “open rates” and we will discuss those in one of our next posts).

How many people follow you?
Obviously the more people follow you, the more people you touch with your Tweets.

How many people follow the people who follow you?
But it is also important who follows you – quality beats quantity. You want people as followers who actively use Twitter and are followed themselves by many other users. Several tools allow you to measure the strength of your network.
(Note: we are measuring the strength of our network but at this point we are not considering this when calculating ROIs or cost per engagement).

How many of your posts are re-tweeted?
Re-tweeted posts engage on a high level. Somebody found your information important enough to share it with their followers. Not only those this take some effort on their part (= higher engagement) but it also gets your message out to people who you do not touch. Re-tweets are one of the highest levels of engagements you can have on Twitter.

How many conversations are you having with followers?
Another high level of engagement are the conversations you are having on Twitter. If you have followers that reply to your posts or ask you questions directly it can result in a high level if engagement.

For our ROI calculation we (roughly) track the time we spend on Twitter and multiply it by an hourly rate. This is our investment.
Example: Time spent twittering per month: 20 hours at an hourly rate of USD 150 = total cost of USD 3,000

To calculate the return we assign values to the different forms of engagement, we call these “engagement units”.

Example for one month:
- Tweets per month: 200
- Average followers in that month: 100
- Tweets x followers = 200 x 100 = 20,000 EU (engagement units)

- Re-tweets: 5
- Value of a re-tweet in engagement units: 1,000
- Re-tweet engagement value for that month: 5 x 1,000 = 5,000

- Conversations: 20
- Value of a conversation: 500
- Total engagement value of conversations: 20 x 500 = 10,000

Total engagement units this month: 35,000 EUs

ROI = 35,000 EU / 3,000 USD = 11.67

Or looking at it another way the CPE (cost per engagement) is 3,000 USD / 35,000 EU = 8.6 cents.

The number itself does not say a lot but repeating this exercise every month allows you to track engagement over time. Furthermore we can now put this number in relation to other vehicles we use for engagement like a website or email newsletter. We suggest using corresponding engagement values for those tools.

Example:
- Email newsletter opened = 1 EU,
- Newsletter forwarded to a friend = 300 EUs,
- Link clicked in the email newsletter = 50 EUs

Cost to produce email newsletter (labor + tools) = 2,500 USD
Engagement created by newsletter = 3,800 reads, 3 forwards, 600 clicks = 34,700 EUs

CPE for the email newsletter: = 2,500 USD / 34,700 EUs = 7.2 cents

And obviously you can do the same thing for a website or a blog using analytics data and assigning corresponding engagement values.

We compare all our forms of engagement on a monthly dashboard. The values we are currently using for the different forms of engagement are not set in stone. We will probably adjust them once we have more data (at the moment we only have 3 months).

Anybody else measuring engagement this way? Thoughts on the values assigned to the different forms of engagement? Analytics overkill or helpful insights?

(Thanks to monkeyc for the photo)

Expedia had their earnings conference call for the 3rd quarter of 2008 call on Monday and provided some very interesting insights.

Most questions on the call revolved around the weakening economy and what Expedia is doing as a reaction. Expedia is a truly global travel company and because they are in the online space they can see trends much faster. So I think there is a lot to learn from Expedia for everybody in travel and tourism.

Expedia sees softness in almost all global markets and across all product lines (air, car, hotel) as well as the media side (e.g. Tripadvisor). Expedia also expects 2009 to be a very difficult year in travel on a global level

What is Expedia doing?

1. Be more efficient in marketing
Apparently Expedia felt that paid search was getting more and more expensive for some keywords so they moved more in to the long tail of SEM. Meaning that they do more keywords that individually have a lot less traffic and are therefore cheaper. Of course this makes managing paid search a lot more complex and requires a lot more sophisticated tools to run campaigns.

Expedia will do more targeted emails (as they lead to up to 30% better conversion rates) as well as more data mining to deliver more relevant offers and content.

What does it mean for you?
Are you seeing the same trend of keywords getting more expensive? Do you have the tools to do more long tail search? Do you have your email database set up to handle targeted emails? How do you segment customers so you can have a relevant call to action for each segment? What is your call to action for the different segments? Are you offering differentiated, relevant content or is your content “one size fits all”?

2. Improve conversion ratios
Expedia apparently has been successful with lowering or dropping fees and they will continue to use these tools in a softer economy to drive transaction volume. They will also push their loyalty programs more and reward their most loyal customers.

What does it mean for you?
Very interesting to see a business that sells a commodity (online transaction) focus more on repeat customers and customer loyalty. Do you know who your repeat customers are (e.g. who visits your destination every year)? How are you talking to and rewarding these customers? Once you have identified who these consumers are, marketing to them is a lot cheaper than chasing new customers.

3. Get better supply
Expedia feels that as occupancy has dropped already significantly, average daily rates (ADRs) for hotels will now start to drop. This should lead to great offers for consumers, which should help Expedia do more transactions.

What does it mean for you?
This was a very interesting point. The hotel industry over the last weeks (e.g. at TIA Marketing Outlook Forum in Portland) has said over and over again that it does not want to repeat the mistake it made after 9/11 when hotels dropped rates significantly and then could not raise them again. Expedia says rates will drop and I think they are right. Hotels will not have the willpower to watch occupancy drop further and not play with rates.
So let’s assume hotel rates will drop. This will create problems for those organizations that sell hotels online as a “side business” (like some DMOs) as well as organizations (like DMOs) that have income that is based on room tax. Lower hotel rates = less commission and lower tax revenues.

4. Grow non-transaction revenue
Expedia plans to grow ad revenues on its sites to offset drops in transaction revenue. The challenge is to find the right mix, so that ads do not drive potential transaction revenue off the site. Expedia also plans to sell more high margin products like insurance and co-branded credit cards.

What does it mean for you?
Obviously a company like Expedia is set up perfectly to offset a drop in transactional revenue with other sources like advertising. But how are you monetizing the eyeballs you are getting? Are you selling ads? Do you have value-ad components you can monetize? How will you offset possible budget cuts with new revenue streams?

5. Lower costs
And finally the company plans to lower cost in the fulfillment area any by making shifts within the marketing budget. Expedia explained in the call the higher return on investment for spending money on SEO and getting more natural search than spending money on paid search, especially as the price for popular keywords has gone up.

So what does it mean for you?
Expedia did say that they currently do not plan to lay off staff or cut marketing expenses. They however plan to spend their money more wisely, utilize the investments they made in the past like setting up more sophisticated keywords or segmenting their email databases. The most important insight (although not a new one): in general money is better spend on SEO than SEM.

Summary:
- The slowdown in the economy will continue to affect travel worldwide
- Do not cut your marketing budgets but spend them smarter
- Consumers react to relevant messages so you need to be highly targeted
- Think about new sources of revenue, especially if you depend on room taxes
- You should do a lot of experiments on a smaller scale to quickly learn what works and then apply the learnings to your overall business

Another month has come to an end - time to publish our updated list of destinations that are using Twitter (or at least have registered an account). The list of DMOs / CVBs on Twitter we could find has grown to 76 (in the US). (Click here for the last list)

BaltimoreMD is still the number 1 destination on Twitter, they are on track to be the first destination with over 1,000 followers by the end of November.

A surprise Nr. 2 is newcomer VisitChicago (full disclosure: we work with them on GoSeeChicago.com). They started using Twitter less than a month ago and have now already over 500 followers. Very, very impressive.

Destinations are ranked using TwitterGrader which ranks Twitter accounts from 100% to 0%. A score of 95% means that the account ranks higher than 95% of all Twitter accounts that have been graded by the tool.

Here is the whole list, please let us know who we are missing:

VermontTourism is not twittering publicly, therefore Twittergrader could not calculate a score for them.

We will start publishing some more detailed analysis for the Top 20 destination-twitterers like growth rates, tweet rates etc. as well as more best practices over the next days. Stay tuned!

For our next report we will add Twitter accounts for DMO microsites (like Philadelphia’s uwishunu). Who else are we missing?

Twitter usage by DMOs and tourism organizations is clearly growing with the number of DMOs using Twitter in the US we could find doubling from 30 to over 60 within the last 4 weeks. The number of followers for most of the DMOs is however still very small (we will have a more in depth analysis on growth rates for the top “Twitters” in US tourism later this week) with the most successful organizations attracting only a couple of hundred followers so far.

The numbers become even smaller when you take into consideration that a lot of DMOs are following each other. Even the poster-child of Twitter usage in the travel industry – Southwest Airlines – has only 4,000 followers. Not much for an airline that transports over 90 million passengers a year.

So what is the point of spending time on Twitter and reaching only a couple of hundred people when one can send an email to 100,000-150,000 people? Especially as Twitter does not give you the analytics email (if done right) can give or does not allow you to use rich media and limits you to only to 140 characters (TwitWall might change that a bit).

The point is that tools like Twitter cannot be compared to other marketing vehicles like email, radio, TV etc. It is not about blasting out a message to as many people as possible. It is about one-to-one or one-to-few interactions in a highly relevant context. This can not be done if you talk to thousands of people.

I am going to say it one more time: Twitter offers huge opportunities for the travel industry. Not because millions and millions of travelers are using Twitter already but because it is the perfect tool to learn how to deal with “micro-interactions” that will soon replace a good chuck of what we call today “marketing”.

If you cannot figure out how to interact with 200 people that are following you today, how are you going to handle 20,000? It will take time to learn this, to set up the structure needed to manage it and to develop the tools needed to measure it. Better start today. And better follow your peers to quickly learn what works and what does not.