Social Media For Tourism – Visit Indiana Meet the Media Recap
This past Tuesday I had the opportunity to participate in a social media bootcamp for Tourism industry professionals based in the State of Indiana that took place in Indianapolis at the Eiteljorg Musem. It was an interesting and illuminating event.
Jeremy Williams and the great folks over at Visit Indiana has been spearheading some great initiatives to get local tourism boards to take advantage of social media in their marketing efforts. Visit Indiana is leading the way in successfully using social media for Tourism and have recently been selected as one of the top Tourism boards in the country in their use of social media.
I was able to sit in on two excellent presentations and participate in a panel on blogging for Tourism. Visit Indiana was one of the first state tourism agencies to embrace blogging and now have one of the most successful state travel blogs, the Indiana Insider blog.
The first presentation I saw was all about using Twitter for marketing and tourism. James Burnes from Indianapolis based internet marketing firm Mediasauce presented and he was fantastic. Even though a lot of what he talked about was old hat to me – I still picked up a few new things. I think the audience, whom are mostly inexperienced in using social media, learned quite a bit from his presentation.
During lunch I sat on a panel about blogging and had a chance to talk about how local tourism authorities can quickly and easily use blogs to promote their communities. I shared the panel with bloggers Erik Deckers and Amy Magan, both experts in the field. The overall consensus was that blogging is something that costs very little to do and can have a huge ROI for tourism. By simply creating a blog, they immediately make it easier for people to find them and find out about what their communities have to offer.
After the delicious lunch, Duncan Alney from Firebelly Marketing talked about how you can implement a social media campaign on a budget. Duncan had some great case studies and the audience was very attentive. A stimulating Q&A session followed with the overarching opinion being that using social media costs very little and when properly done, it can have an excellent return. Sometimes, though, it just takes a little creative thinking.
The one thing that I took away from the day of sessions is that there is one clear rule when it comes to any type of marketing – Content is King.
If you don’t have content to disseminate across social media networks – then you will be left behind. It’s just not enough to participate on social networks and engage in the great conversation – you need to have great content to back it all up.
The travel industry is uniquely placed to attract people based on great content. All it takes is a little knowledge of what people are searching for, connecting with them and engaging with them. It all comes down to Imagination Publishing’s first question: How Do You Connect?
Special thanks goes out to Jeremy Williams and the fine folks at Visit Indiana for inviting me attend the awesome event!
Thanks so much for this great post and for coming down to the panel. It was great to see you again and I know our industry got a lot out of the event. The best point you made in this blog post is that Content is King. That’s so true!
Great post Jonathan.