This month’s ranking of US and Canadian destinations on Twitter brings a major improvement - the list is now embedded as a Google doc, making a lot nicer to look at (you just have to scroll now to see all destination on the list).

We found over 100 new destinations on Twitter bringing the total to over 300. Thanks to @nathankam and his list of DMOs on Twitter - lots of destinations we had not been tracking.

Putting the list together is becoming a bigger and bigger project every month, with now over 300 accounts that have to be run through Twitter Grader it takes more than a day just to get the data (thanks to @allisonkpark for helping with this).

The month of April saw @BaltimoreMD returning to the top of the ranking again (no tattoo needed this time), @VisitChicago held it’s second spot. Both destinations have a high number of updates, besides followers an important factor in the Twitter grader algorithm.

(Disclosure as usual: we manage @TravelPortland and @OnlyinSF Twitter accounts and work with many other organizations on the list on social media projects).

Other major developments: @ExpCols launched a Twisitor Center using the hashtag #expcols. As you might know we are huge fans of using Twitter hashtags for visitor information and we hope more destinations will start using them. @iknowdenver just started on Twitter and is using not only one but four different hashtags to identify different information. You have to look at the Denver Twitter page on a web-browser to understand the concept as the information about it is embedded into the background of the page.

If you are still not convinced that using Twitter for visitor information is a good thing, consider this: the Twisitor Center we developed and operate for Travel Portland has generated media impressions worth over one million dollars. And that is just print, not counting social media like Twitter itself. @guykawasaki twittered about it and that tweet itself was re-tweeted multiple times reaching through this process almost half a million Twitter users.

So who else is in, who will be the next destination to use Twitter to identify and answer questions from visitors?

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.

As we do every month we list all destinations that are using Twitter and rank them using Twitter Grader.

February brought many changes to our ranking including a new Nr. 1: @BaltimoreMD put - literally - a lot of skin in the game, became the first destination with more than 3,000 followers and moved up to the top spot.

Congratulations to Tom and everybody else in Baltimore!

If you have not followed the “fail whale” tattoo story, you can read up on it here and also see a video of the “fail whale” finding it’s home on a nicely shaved leg. A must read for anybody who wants to see another great example of how to create a buzz with social media.

@VisitChicago and @TravelPortland (disclosure: we manage that account) also broke through 3,000 followers. @TravelPortland gained a lot more followers through the PR and attention created for the Portland Twisitor Center and @VisitChicago is just lucky to have somebody managing the account who really gets social media.

We will have a separate blog post later this week to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of trying to get as many followers as possible (a topic that has cause good debate in the past).

Overall we are now tracking more than 208 destinations in the US and Canada.

Here is the ranking for destinations as of February 28th. For some destinations grader did not return results so we estimated the grade (those grades are in italics).

As usual please let us know who we are missing, @anneh632 already found 5 new destinations on Twitter. Please keep them coming.

Also, if you destination is not yet listed on TwisitorCenter.com please follow the account so we can follow back and your destinations will show up on the map with destinations that twitter.

Apparently, “that which does not kill us only makes us stronger”, so in a time when budgets are tightening and consumer confidence is declining an unprecedented emphasis is placed on creativity and differentiation.

And a few brands are raising to the occasion and using their, shall we say assets, to gain attention in new, authentic and honest ways.  Whether or not you would deem these strategies effective or complete flops they are at the very least unexpected.

25 years and still red hot

The story and brand attributes of Virgin Atlantic are widely known, and that is precisely why this ad, celebrating what at times seemed like an impossible milestone, is so effective.  See for yourself:

Anniversary commercial

However, you do not have to take my word for it, Richard Branson, explains his airline’s success:

Who’d have thought 25 years ago that Virgin Atlantic would be the leading airline player it is today?

Now, we use 38 aircraft to fly six million people a year to 30 destinations around the world.

Our 9,000 staff have built an airline that, after 25 years, is still red hot; an airline that focuses on being the best, not the biggest, and injects customer service and innovation into its daily philosophy.

By emphasizing the same brand attributes that have engaged and intrigued audiences for 25 years, Virgin Atlantic created a spot that is both authentic and entertaining to consumers.

Philadelphia: a good sport with a sense of humor

All things considered it could have / should have been a really tough week for the great people of Philadelphia.

First of all their beloved Eagles lost to the Arizona Cardinals, which is rough enough, but to make matters worse their twitter account (@visitphilly) was forced to use a Cardinals logo as their avatar for the week.

This costume change was part of a friendly wager they engaged in with our friends at the Arizona Office of Tourism (@ArizonaTourism) prior to the game.  While this could have been a convenient time to take a Twitter time-out the account has been active all week, dressed as the Arizona mascot.

Then while minding their own business the City of Brotherly Love was the butt of some of political humorist, Jon Stewart’s jokes.

The original blog post is witty and well written; so there is no need for me to rewrite it for you, find all the details here.

Once again the city responded in stride, willing to let it go, but not before they got a couple of their own good-hearted digs out against Stewart. “Well, Jon, we’re used to this kind of thing and we know how to respond: Philadelphia, the city that bleeps you back.”

Proving that having a sense of humor and sharing your personality especially in the world of social media can only serve to boost your brand and inspire your enthusiasts to rally behind you.

No visitors, no problem

Ontario Tourism has created a contest that Algoma hopes will put it on the map.

The Great Ontario Outdoors Adventure of a Lifetime contest will hand out a week-long adventure for four through Algoma’s wilderness and along Lake Superior’s northeast shore.

And the big winner will be the area’s tourism industry, says the executive director of Ontario’s Algoma Country.

It is the lack of visitors, serene surroundings and available excursions that make Algoma the perfect location for this adventure seeker’s dream vacation. While it is yet to been seen if this promotion will be enough to put Algoma on the map, as they hope, the honesty regarding their tourism is refreshing.

Additionally, Ontario has turned what most deem as a negative, a lack of visitors, into the centerpiece of their promotion.  In the current economic climate there is no better time than the present to position negatives as positives.

Rather than try to recreate the wheel with your marketing efforts try using attributes, situations or even perceived weaknesses that your brand currently possesses and repackage them in new ways in order to gain attention and build authenticity.

What do you think, are there other great examples that we missed?  Please let us know.

Thank you to MPR529, Rubenstein and mike_miley for photos.

Using our monthly statistic about destinations on Twitter we thought it would be interesting to analyze the number of followers and number of posts in more detail.
One school of thought on Twitter is that if you write tweets are people find interesting and helpful, your number of followers will grow. So lots of time should be spend on creating good content.
But reality is different. Try to build a following this way and unless something else happens (e.g. media talking about your Twitter efforts) it will take a long, long time to get to a larger number of followers.

Quite a few destinations therefore conduct follow-unfollow campaigns to grow the number of their friends.

But this is also time-consuming and has to be done right as Twitter will shut down accounts that have a big imbalance between followers and being-followed.

We use the followers/updates rating as a metric that we track each month for the accounts we manage. It tells us how successful we are in creating good content and in growing our following. We only looked at destinations that were on our list on Dec. 31st and had posted more than 10 updates.

Comparing these ratios between different accounts is not as meaningful when you look at them only as a snapshot and not as development over time.

Here is how to read this: WilliamsportPA twittered 10 times and got 219 followers. GoRockford on the other hand twittered 264 times and had on 12/31 only 71 followers. The ExpCol account that is fed by an RSS sent 1863 updates and had 705 followers. Paadventure has more followers and got there with only 221 updates.
(Full disclosure: we are working with TravelPortland - Nr. 34 on the list - on developing and implementing their social media strategy which includes Twitter activities)

So the learning form this? You need to spend time on tweets and on growing your number of followers. And you need to develop metrics to measure the efficiency of your twitter efforts over time.

What are your thoughts on this?

If you have any interest how other destinations are having success with Twitter make sure to read a very insightful comment from @paadventure on yesterday’s blog post. Thanks for sharing!

Based on your feedback we have added more destinations to our growing list of tourism organizations on Twitter. 
@travelynnmo pointed out a very good point: many destinations have several Twitter accounts “powered” by different staff members. While this is a very valid strategy we are tracking (at the moment) just the main Twitter accounts as otherwise this exercise would get out of hands. But please share with us all accounts your organization is using, then we can start a separate list.

So, are more and more tourism organization starting to chirp?

See for yourself:

The two phases for growth were certainly influenced by a hands-on social media workshop we did for DMOs in Michigan at the end of September and a workshop ChicagoPlus did for it’s member DMOs in December.

And for sure we are still missing many other tourism organizations that are using Twitter. To make it easier for you to tell us which ones we are not tracking we have prepared an overview per state (US & CA).

We have added new destinations over the last days to the list, however we do not have data for them for number of followers and updates, even if they joined before Dec. 31 of 2008. 

While the number of followers in itself can be a misleading indicator (quality vs. quantity) I find it nevertheless impressive that of the DMOs we are tracking @VisitChicago or @BaltimoreMD have more followers than all DMOs from Florida and California combined.
 

But these can’t be all! Who else are we missing?

We want to know, even if this growing list is becoming more and more work …

Over the last 12 months we have talked to a LOT of companies and and organizations about social media. Most feel overwhelmed, some are scared and fewer and fewer are doubting that social media is here to stay and will change how organizations interact with customers, suppliers, partners and employees.

Here is our top 5 list of answers we heard most often when asking organizations about social media in 2008:

1. “We did not have time to look into that”
Under which rock are you living? It is almost the year 2009! Twitter is old news, Facebook even older. If your company or organization does by now not understand that you need to have a presence on sites like Facebook or Twitter than you can probably only hope for some sort of bailout down the road. At a minimum register accounts to ensure nobody is “brand-jacking” your social media identity.

2. “We are monitoring the space”
Or even better: “we are actively monitoring the social media space”.
Clearly you are not “monitoring” closely enough, otherwise you would see that to really understand the power of social media, one has to do it. So get your hands dirty, sign up for a Twitter account and see what happens.

3. “We let our interns handle social media”
Good thinking: let the “young” people handle this. Throw them a bone - after all they are not even getting paid. The only two problems: do you let your interns also handle your brand-campaign and press releases? No? So why do you trust them with your social media efforts? And problem number 2: even if you have an intern who understands your brand, your products, your customers, your competitive situation and your procedures (yes, these are some of the things to keep in mind when starting with social media), that intern will be gone after 6 months. And with him/her he/she takes the relationships and insights gained and so your organization will start all over again.

4. “We are just experimenting with social media”
This is definitely a step in the right direction. But the danger of “experimenting” is that the efforts are not taken seriously. Which makes convincing results less likely.
You need to integrate your social media activities into your overall strategy. That does not mean paralysis by analysis but the willingness to allocate resources (mostly time), to learn and adapt without loosing the overall goal out of sight.

5. “We do not have clear goals yet for our social media efforts”
How will you know whether you are successful or not if you do not set yourself some goals? So after the “experimenting” phase is over, think about what you want to accomplish and write down some numbers. How many followers on Twitter, how many fans on Facebook, how many comments on your blog etc.? And while numbers are definitely not everything (quality beats quantity) it is good help to understand how your social media efforts will help your organization achieve it’s overall goals.

So how should companies and organizations tackle social media?

It just takes four simple steps:
1.    Do it.
2.    Learn from it.
3.    Measure and benchmark it
4.    Repeat first 3 steps.

Did we miss a step? Are you hearing the same answers we are hearing?

GoSeeTell provides technology solutions, thought leadership and support for the social media space. Connect with us on Twitter @coldinpdx or @ariannap .

Thanks to andwat for the photo.

Two destination blogs (re)launched last week that both integrate social media elements in a very nice way:

Travel Oregon Blog

Travel Oregon (full disclosure: we work with them and provide content to them) relaunched their blog last week.

The blog was already considered by many one of the nicest and most successful destinations blog around before the redesign. The new blog is - in my opinion - even more interesting.

Travel Oregon now integrates not only videos (from YouTube, Vimeo etc.) but also Flickr photos into the blog. The “Oregon Snapshots” come from the Travel Oregon Flickr group. The blog footer invites readers to follow Travel Oregon on Twitter, the sidebar now includes a polling module. All great social elements for a blog and best of all - they do not cost a lot. 

If you want to see best practices in action do not miss the RSS feeds offered for the blog - not only are different feeds for the different categories available, the feed page also explains how feeds work and offers good resources. We need more examples like this to drive RSS adoption to where it should be!

Experience Columbus

Experience Columbus launched their blog last week and while they are a little bit later to the party they for sure come in a nice dress. The blog includes several interesting social media elements.

In the sidebar all staff members (18!) who are on Twitter are shown with their Twitter icons.

Also listed are links to the Experience Columbus Facebook page, myspace page and Flickr group. Unique is the integrated delicious feed for websites bookmarked by staff on the social bookmarking site. This can turn into an interesting resource e.g. for journalists who are looking for background info on the city. The only thing I would like to see improved is an easier navigation back to the main ExperienceColumbus page, maybe in the top level navigation. 

While playing around with the main Experience Columbus site I found some great elements other destinations should have a look at. 

The individual listings for hotels, attractions etc. include nicely integrated Google maps. But other destinations offer that as well. What I have not seen anywhere else are events listings that are tied to the individual member listing and therefore tied to the map location. So if I look at the Motorcycle Hall of Fame I can see all events taking place at the Hall of Fame in an extra tab. 

The infrastructure should allow Experience Columbus to very easily do even more as the events data is tied now to geo-data. Example: A Google map that shows all events taking place during a certain time within a certain radius around a specific place: “Let’s see what events are taking place within a mile radius from our hotel for the weekend we will be in Columbus”. Events are also available via a different RSS feeds.

Oh, the possibilities …

Almost every session at the TIA Marketing Outlook Forum in Portland talked about social media. Luxury, millennial travelers, hotels, attractions, DMOs – it was mentioned in almost all presentations or panel discussions (and there were close to 30). This was not surprising given the fact that the conference deals with marketing trends and few would argue that social media is THE thing happening at the moment.

But another thing was very surprising: there seems to be a quickly widening gap between those that are involved in social media and those who are now trying to get on the train before it pulls out of the station.

When asked what they had the biggest success with in the last 12 months and what they would focus more on in the next 12 months those being already involved in social media said they would do even more. Those who are just getting started or have not even started to dabble in this space said they would focus on various other things.

The session about online marketing / social media for attractions was very interesting in that regard as well. While the presenters showed great examples for pretty sophisticated social media campaigns, the Q&A session revealed that many in the audience where feeling overwhelmed and close to panic. And who would not feel for them?

Imagine being a destination, attraction, hotel or organization that has no experience whatsoever in social media. No Facebook account, no photos on Flickr, no blog, no Twitter account. And at the same time you competitors have already thousands of followers, fans or subscribers. But even worse: they have already made their mistakes and (hopefully) learned from them. You still have this ahead of you while your “social” competitors are setting new benchmarks.

At Marketing Outlook Forum I saw a “social gap”. On the one side those who are already using social media to their advantage, on the other side those who look in awe and try to figure out a way into the game. The problem is that in social media there are no shortcuts. It takes time to build meaningful engagement. The longer you wait, the bigger this social gap will get.

Are you seeing this social gap too? Are there any good examples of organizations that started late and yet were quickly very successful? What should those do that are just getting started?

(Thanks to mwichary for the photo).

A new, very neat tool allows users to analyze twitter patterns: day, time and frequency of posts for a particular user. Bubbles show the number of tweets for a particular time for each day of the week as well as replies by that user for that time.

I ran reports for some of the top twitter users in tourism with interesting results:

Experience Columbus uses an RSS feed to push content. Most Tweets are pushed shortly after midnight EST / 9pm PST. What this means is that many times when I check Twitter in the morning, I have a long list of Columbus tweets sitting on top of each other. And first thing in the morning I have to check email - no time to check tweets. And therefore not the best strategy to engage me.

Baltimore also pushes feeds via RSS but also engages consumers with replies and non-feed posts. The feeds are pushed in the morning (8am / 9am EST) which seems to be a better time to get clicks of tweets.

Philadelphia has truly some amazing engagement with Twitter users, activity on Twitter is spread out over the day. I recommend following some of the discussions that are taking place here as a best practice.

Arizona has great engagement as well but all Twitter activity takes place from Monday to Friday between 8am and 5pm.

So what are the learnings? If you push a RSS feed via Twitter, time it so the tweets go out during the day, not at night. Even better, find a way to spread the tweets out so users have time to digest them. But don’t limit your account to pushing feeds only, that is not what Twitter’s strength is. Reply, discuss, ask, reach out. And if you really want to engage and connect with consumers, you have to be there 7 days a week. Hey, nobody said this would not be a lot of work!