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!

A new report by Forrester is causing some controversy by claiming that RSS usage has peaked at 11% of mainstream consumer adoption. If that were the case if would be a sad story for everybody in the content business.

I have to agree with those who say that the questionnaire was flawed. The vast majority of consumers on the web uses RSS feeds but have no clue that they are doing so. They just see and enjoy the results in form of personalized pages, widgets feeds and more.

At this point it is also no longer about RSS anymore. The point is that today as a web user I will decided which content I want, from whom I want it, when I want it and where I want it. RSS is of course the main vehicle for that allowing me for example to “blend” my own newspaper by getting local news from one source, business news from another, weather from a third etc. and looking at it on e.g. Netvibes or Pageflakes.

But the same principle applies to other feeds like Twitter (here we go again) where a user can decide who to follow, Friendfeed etc.

Smart content no longer lives on a website, it is mobile and gets pulled into the place where people want to consume it. If your content is not mobile and flexible it will die a lonely death.

Despite the many (emphasis on many) praises we at GoSeeTell sing for social media, search and ecommerce there is still no replacement getting out and into the real world.  Exploring, networking, conversing and socializing- while possible on the web do not produce the same levels of engagement and fulfillment that can be found offline.

Given the current popularity of sites that facilitate planning and organizing offline events online- I cannot possibly be the only person that enjoys getting out from behind the screen.

Upcoming is a localized community that allows users to search events by topic, date or popularity and even add their own to the mix.  This is Yahoo’s massive calendar of events, and if you have not yet checked it out I encourage you to browse around- as you will likely be surprised with how much fun is happening in your area.

Beyond the obvious social benefits of this site, it is also a great resource to share your destination or organization’s calendar of events.  By syndicating events across multiple sites (in addition to your own) a potentially new and previously untouched market is exposed to your content.

Other bells and whistles the site offers include the ability to choose to attend (RSVP) or watch events.  Placing an event on a watch list is in essence putting it on a short list of possibilities to be committed to at a later date. These features matter if you are the host because you will know about your guests before they arrive and how many you should expect. Also, you can keep track of members that watched your event but then did not actually attend- great for measurement.  As a guest, this is a great feature because it allows you to view fellow attendees prior to the event and remind yourself of events and activities of interest.

Upcoming, while the largest is not the only online event community, eventful is another leader and in addition to similar features as upcoming it also allows users to demand events in their area. Users demand bands that may have neglected a specific city on a current tour, speakers, specific shows or conventions and when enough members start demanding the same events they show up on the site’s homepage, which if nothing else allows users to connect with each other based upon similar interests and requests.

Likely you have already started to think about your weekend, so why not use one of these sites to plan your own fun while sharing your destination’s events with a new audience.

Let us know what you try and if you find anything fabulous – we love hearing great stories.

If you have not guessed it- we at GoSeeTell are pretty high on Twitter, but even if you have not been drinking our Kool-Aid there are some tools and resources worth checking out, if only for productivity and sanity’s sake.

Let’s face it, Twitter is a slippery slope to losing an entire afternoon if you allow yourself to wander into the depths of the twitterverse. The next time you want to know what the masses are linking to, a great way to remain on the forefront of internet trends and conversations, head to Twitturly.com.

Twitturly tracks the 100 most popular sites over a 24-hour sliding time scale, so content remains fresh and quality high. The site’s spiders count the votes in this popularity contest by following each link posted on Twitter, even those using tinyurl or Snipurl (snurl), to the final URL, so every link is counted.

While this site will help you find popular sites faster, I cannot promise that you won’t still lose track of time as you surf Twitter’s top 100– do not say we did not warn you.

Disclaimer: Given the impending election many of the most popular sites are politically influenced, so if this is not your cup of tea skip those links. Regardless you will learn about the sites that have received tweeple seal of approval.

We will start blogging more about Twitter tools and Twitter sites we like.
If you have been using Twitter for a while you will probably know many of these tools already.

Are you having a hard time finding the right people to follow?
Want to see who you should follow but are not following yet?

Try Twannabe.

Twannabe allows you to quickly compare your list of users who you are following to another user’s list.
So pick somebody you think know the area you are interested in very well and see who they are following. Simple as that. More difficult is managing the increased number of tweets resulting form this exercise.