With this post we close the year 2009 – slightly later than we had hoped … but finally it is here, the ranking of tourism organizations for December 2009.

Or list of DMOs that we track has grown to over 450. All major destinations have a presence – a year ago we were only able to find 109 official tourism Twitter accounts in the US and Canada. Only four accounts on that list had more than 300 followers, today more than 330 accounts have more followers than that.

2009 has been a wild ride in social media and tourism marketing, what will 2010 bring?

The year is almost over – you have 2 weeks left to work on your Twitter account and finish the year with a top ranking. To see who you are up against, have a look at the Twitter ranking of official destination Twitter accounts in the US and Canada for November 09. As usual we used Twitter Grader to put the ranking together.

Stay tuned for the final ranking of the year in 3 weeks!

Thanks to Twitter’s new list feature we have been able to find almost 100 new twitter accounts, most of them in the US and Canada. And we are for sure still missing many more. We list all Twitter accounts we can find at Twisitorcenter.com and as you can see the map is getting pretty crowded.

We have added all the new accounts we found to our monthly ranking of tourism organizations on Twitter – the list is now over 450 DMOs long.

As in the September ranking the top 60 accounts at the end of October (as ranked by using Twitter Grader) are only margins apart.

If you have any good lists for tourism organizations on Twitter we should follow, let us know!

As in every month we spend hours to grade all tourism organizations (US and Canada) we could find on Twitter using Twitter Grader. As you can see from the data below at the end of September the top 50 destinations on the list all had basically the same score.

Some of you had asked what our criteria are for listing a DMO Twitter account. There are basically two rules we have:

a) The account must be the account of an official tourism organization.

b) We only list one account per organization.
Several tourism organizations have multiple accounts (either by department function, e.g. consumer / PR / membership) or have several people tweeting on behalf of the organization. We have decided to list only one account per organization as the list would otherwise get even longer and it would make deciding which accounts should be on the list even more complicated.

If there is interest in having a lists of all Twitter accounts for destinations without a ranking we could put such a list together. Just let us know.

We have added several more accounts to the list since we put this one together at the end of September. If we are missing accounts, please let us know.

Our monthly ranking of US and Canadian tourism organizations on Twitter for the month of August brought quite a number of changes.

To put things into perspective here is some background information. For the ranking we use Twitter Grader, a third party tool that compares several million Twitter accounts and calculates a score for each of the accounts. The formula they use is not disclosed but if you look at this month’s ranking you can see that two factors have a lot of influence: the number of Twitter updates and the number of new followers. Both do not necessarily mean high levels of engagement with followers.

And we really think it is important to point this out as many of you use our monthly ranking for benchmarking purposes. We have said it here before and we will say it again: this ranking gives a good overview of what DMOs are doing on Twitter, it does not offer insights on the success they are having using Twitter.

So what is new?

The ranking for August shows a couple of interesting things:

Some DMOs now tweet A LOT. Take @SeattleMaven or @explorechicago who both had on average more than 35 post per day (including weekends). Very impressive but many of you will probably ask if they are getting a good ROI considering that it takes a lot of time to post 40 – 50 Twitter updates every day. One thing that is clear is that more updates will lead to a better grade on Twitter Grader.

To grow your number of followers you need to tell the world you are on Twitter. @nycgo is the perfect example. They managed to grow their following by over 1,200 with less than 5 tweets a day (each tweet = time = money). How did they do it? Telling the world they are on Twitter, e.g. through prominent banner ads on the main landing page for the official nycgo.com website. If you want to get more followers you need to advertise your accounts – if not through banner ads then at least through prominent links on your website, email newsletters, links in the signatures of staff emails etc.

Note: We have cleaned up our list of tourism organizations some more by deleting several account that are no longer active and also added a couple of new accounts. More new accounts will be added for the September ranking.

Our thoughts – what are yours?
The question of measurement and ROI for social media is becoming more and more important. Everybody should have a clear set of metrics and report one those. These metrics need to be in line with your overall strategic objectives. Examples: if growing awareness about your destination as a wine region is a strategic goal, click-throughs on “wine-tweets” can be a good metric. If reaching DMO members (hotels, restaurants) is important, the number of conversations and re-tweets by members is a good measurement. If you targeting out of town visitors the location of your followers is really key. Getting more followers locally does not help that goal and you should be using Twitter tools that analyze the geographic distribution of your followers to see if you are on the right track.

What are your thoughts? What is the optimal number of tweets per day? Is promoting Twitter accounts (or other social media presences) important? What is working for you? How are you aligning your social media measurements with your strategic objectives?

And here it is – the July ranking for US and Canada tourism organizations using Twitter. The overall number has not changed much – we added several new ones but at the same time deleted several accounts that were no longer active or used for tourism (thanks for all your feedback!).

Every month we get question about the algorithm used to compile this list and every month we have to point to Twitter Grader – the 3rd party tool we use to compile this list. As Twitter Grader does not disclose their exact formula we also have only limited insight which factors influence the grade for a Twitter account. If you want to learn more check out this blog post.

And while we talk a lot about Twitter on this blog we think nobody should overlook the possibilities that Facebook offers. We have a ranking for destinations on Facebook as well (unpublished yet), the main downside being that there are no tools for Facebook that measure engagement in a more sophisticated way than just looking at number of fans. If there is interest in that list or if you know of a way to include other parameters let us know.

And while we talk about Facebook we also want to make sure than anybody who uses social media for marketing or PR has seen the huge changes Facebook launched today: the ability to search all public wall posts from all users. The search is not very sophisticated yet but count on Facebook to develop tools around that or give 3rd party developers to build tools. These tools will sit of course within the Facebook platform (unlike on Twitter where the API allows for data portability). Very clever – and very scary if you are a Facebook user and are not sure what your current privacy settings are.

As an example see this screenshot of a search for the term “vacation” within posts by everyone. I think some interesting information for the travel space could be found in these posts …

Of course the Facebook mechanism are different than the one from Twitter and connecting with somebody is very different than just following somebody on Twitter. But the changes in search show that Facebook is paying close attention to Twitter and adopting to be more competitive.

Here is the Twitter ranking for July 09 – as usual we rely on your feedback to add new accounts or delete inactive ones.

And as in the past we want to disclose that we work with several DMOs on their social media strategy (e.g. Travel Portland, San Francisco CVB) as well as tourism clients who are just in the process of launching their social media presence and will show up on the list over the next months.

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!

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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?

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.