If you’ve already created a Twitter account, a Facebook Fan Page and a Wordpress blog for your organization, you’re on the right track. Now that you have accounts at a handful of social media sites, how do you manage them all?
There are dozens of social media management platforms out there, including some great ones like TweetDeck and Seesmic. Both are great applications, but they need to be installed on your computer. One of the many great things about Hootsuite is it’s 100% web-based. You simply visit Hootsuite.com, log in and you can manage your social media initiatives from any computer with an internet connection.
Hootsuite Screenshot
Hootsuite originally launched in late 2008 as a dedicated Twitter client. As you can see from this screenshot, it’s evolved into a powerful social media management platform. In addition to Twitter, you can now manage Facebook (including Facebook Fan Pages), LinkedIn, Wordpress and the lesser-used Ping.FM.
Do you want to post the same message to your Facebook page and your Twitter account? Do you want to set up your blog to feed through to your Twitter and Facebook accounts? Do you want to set up multiple accounts so different people at your organization can help manage your social media strategy? Hootsuite lets you do all this and more.
Hootsuite Stats Screenshot
Hootsuite also automatically shortens links using their Ow.ly URL shortener and gives you detailed stats about each links posted through Hootsuite. You can look at link stats from the past 24 hours, past week, past month or any other timeframe.
We’ve been using Hootsuite as our primary social media management tool for the past several months and have been extremely impressed. There is a Hootsuite App available for iPhone and Hootsuite has told us they’re working on a Blackberry App that should be released soon.
Have you used Hootsuite?
One of the most important things you can do online today is tracking your web traffic with some type of robust web analytics package. At the Indiana Office of Tourism Development, we primarily use Google Analytics. It’s free, relatively easy to set up and enables us to track just about everything we need for our website and blogs. By analyzing the data culled from Google Analytics, we’re able to see whether some of our new marketing in initiatives are driving people to our website, whether a redesigned homepage had an effect on website visitors and whether our social media efforts are enticing users to visit our website.
The bottom line is if you have a website, you NEED to be tracking it.
Luckily, Google Analytics is in the process of launching two new features that will help make their service even more usable and robust.
A few weeks ago, Google unveiled their “Intelligence” feature and it’s a great addition to Google Analytics. As you can see in the video below, Intelligence looks at all of your web data and automatically flags data it considers important.
For example, during our recent Leaf Cam campaign we sent out our Big Idea Email (sign up to receive it here!) and experienced a 52% increase in website traffic from the day before. Google Intelligence noticed that along with 36 other alerts. Some of those alerts were a 75% increase in visitors from Kentucky, a 62% increase in entries to one of our Leaf Cam Contests and a 90% increase in visits to our Leaf Cam page (click on the image below for a larger version).
Google automatically creates alerts for many things, but if you specifically want an alert every time something specific happens, you can set up custom alerts as well. The custom alerts can even be emailed to you as they occur. These alerts are great for pinpointing changes in visitor’s actions on your website, but what if you want to know what factors contributed to those changes in your webstats? That’s where Google Analytics’ second great feature comes into play.
Google is still rolling this feature out to all GA accounts, but it will allow for you to make annotations on any data. For example. We launched our redesigned homepage on May 4th, 2009. There are 80 Intelligence Alerts for May 4, 2009 ranging from a 15% drop in new visitors to the site to a 30% increase in the average Time On Site per visitor. All I have to do is create a notation on May 4th so we can always know that we’re seeing those changes due to the redesign of our homepage. I can also set up notations for days that we send out our consumer or industry emails, note days when we’ve begun a new PR push or ad campaign or days when a news story came out that pushed traffic to our site.
Check out the video on Google Analytics Annotations below:
All in all, these two new features on Google Analytics give users a tremendous amount of flexibility with their web data.
DMMI 2009
Anicia Richardson and I will be attending this year’s Destination Management & Marketing Institute’s 2009 conference (DMMI09) this week in Indianapolis.
Follow the tweetstream from the conference here (#DMMI09 hashtag on Twitter):
Purdue University in the ‘Hotseat’
You may or may not know that Facebook was created back in 2004 as a social network for Harvard students. In the 5 short years since Facebook started it has become the 2nd most visited website in the world for the past 3 months, with visits from more than 25% of all internet users all over the globe.
Facebook is one of the reasons that social media has become so pervasive in our society today. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook is actually users 35 and older. Even though it seems that everyone is on Facebook now, it’s nice to see an Indiana college bringing Facebook back to its roots and using it and other social media utilities (such as Twitter) in a new initiative called Hotseat.
Hotseat, a social networking-powered mobile Web application, creates a collaborative classroom, allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class and enabling professors to adjust the course content and improve the learning experience. Students can post messages to Hotseat using their Facebook or Twitter accounts, sending text messages, or logging in to the Hotseat Web site. – Purdue University’s Hotseat website
Students can log onto the Hotseat system from their laptops or mobile phones and can ask questions in real time as a lecture is being given. This is especially helpful in large classrooms where students might be intimidated asking questions. Since Hotseat is displayed on a screen at the front of the classroom, the professor and students alike can see the questions as they are asked. This enables the professor to address questions immediately and tailor his or her instruction to the class.
Watch the video below for a more in-depth explanation of what Hotseat is and can offer to students and professors.
Hotseat is in its pilot semester now and the University hopes to eventually use Hotseat in every class on campus. What kinds of uses could you see with an application like Hotseat in your job? Would you be interested in using an application like Hotseat at the next conference you attend?
The Tourism Tech Corner Has Moved!
The Tourism Tech Corner has a New Home
After more than a year and a half of Tourism Tech Corner posts on our Wordpress.com blog, we’ve moved the Tourism Tech Corner to a new home! If you already receive updates through RSS or Email, you’ll continue to receive your updates without interruption.
We’re still tweaking the layout for the blog, so if you have any recommendations, let us know! Here are a few new things we’ve done with the blog since moving to its new home at http://www.VisitIndiana.com/TechCorner/:
- We added Social Media Links at the top of the page for easier access to our social media sites:
- We added a Greeting Box that changes depending on how you got to the site (Through Google, Facebook, Email, RSS, etc). We also added links to enable you to easily share the posts through Facebook and Twitter:
- We added a variable advertising/promotion space on the right side of the blog. We’re currently promoting our Leaf Cam and the Follow Us page for our social media links:
- Perhaps most importantly, we’ve started to gather the Website, Blog, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other social media links for Tourism entities throughout Indiana and will keep the list updated. You can find the full list (and notify us if we need to add or correct anything) on the Follow Us page:
We’re excited about these new changes to the Tourism Tech Corner and hope that we’re able to make the blog more useful for you as you continue to tackle Social Media and other Tech-related initiatives.
Marshmallows and Social Media
I love social media because it’s free, it’s flexible and it works for organizations of all sizes.
Samantha Aulick and Alexa Lemley are the owners of 240 Sweet, a Columbus confectionery and an Indiana Artisan. They create artisan marshmallows in tasty flavors like Triple Berry, Chai Spice and Double Chocolate. They market their product online and sell the treats at a variety of Farmer’s Markets and shops. Recently, they ran a contest on the 240 Sweet Fan Page on Facebook, asking their fans to submit photos of themselves enjoying their special marshmallows.
The winner was the fan page favorite with the most votes, tracked by how many people clicked the “like” button. The entries were creative and fun with the winner pictured herself enjoying the treats in Las Vegas. The Runner-Up submitted a photo of herself in a canoe, enjoying the sticky-sweet treats.
The fan page added 50 new fans during the contest.
For the Halloween season, Sam and Alexa have launched a spooky limerick contest.
Social media offers a unique opportunity for customers to interact with your brand. Sam and Alexa provided a wonderful example of a simple, low-cost way to connect with our customers.
Learn more about 240 Sweet Artisan Marshmallows: http://www.240sweet.com
2009 Indiana Tourism Summit Wrapup
The Indiana Office of Tourism Development just hosted the 2nd annual Indiana Tourism Summit. This year’s event was held at Serendipity at Metropolis in Plainfield, IN. The event was a great success with nearly 100 industry members attending.
If you weren’t able to attend the Summit, or if you’re just looking for a reminder of what each presenter spoke about, click on their name below to be linked off to a wrapup about their presentation.
- John Packer – TNS Research: Webtrends
- Santhana Naidu – Online Marketing
- Pat Coyle – Smaller Indiana
- Doug Karr – Social Tourism
- Joy Cropper – Permission Email Marketing
The Tourism Tech Corner will be hosted at IN.gov soon, so be on the lookout for a new location and a new look for the blog. If you subscribe via RSS or email, you don’t need to worry, you’ll keep receiving the Tourism Tech Corner on a regular basis.
Joy Cropper’s presentation at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit was all about Permission Email Marketing. Joy went over – in detail – the campaign that Williams Randall put together for our office.
Below is Joy’s entire presentation:
Joy Cropper is the Director of Internet Strategy at Williams Randall Marketing. Joy brings 18 years of B-to-B and B-to-C marketing experience, with a special passion for website information architecture and usability. She is the agency lead for internet strategy, user research, permission email and landing page optimization. Joy is a former partner and Lead Web Strategist at J. Walter Thompson in Detroit, where she directed the strategic development of all Ford Division websites. At Williams Randall, her interactive clients include NCAA, Indiana Tourism, Purdue University, Indianapolis Museum of Art, IndyCar Series and USA Track & Field.
Doug Karr’s presentation at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit focused almost entirely on social media. Two recommendations Doug made during his presentation are to pick up Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff (I’ve written about this excellent book here and here) and Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan. He also spoke of the amazing growth of social media and its’ business uses in the past year.
Check out Doug’s entire presentation below:
Doug Karr is the President and CEO of DK NEW Media, an online marketing agency specializing in leveraging online technologies to maximize business results. Doug is a social media expert, having worked with clients around the globe and locally including the Indianapolis Colts and the 2012 Superbowl Committee. Doug is a strategic partner to Compendium Blogware, a corporate blogging platform he helped design, and continues to serve with strategic consulting. Doug is an avid blogger and is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog at MarketingTechBlog.com and is a co-founder of Smaller Indiana.
Pat Coyle presented at the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit about social media web trends and, specifically, Smaller Indiana. Pat created Smaller Indiana in January, 2008 and it has become a hub for Hoosiers who want to connect with one another in an effort to strengthen community, commerce and culture. Pat talked about some of the keys to Smaller Indiana’s success:
- Plausible Promise – Make People Findable
- Smaller Indiana makes people findable through the platform they have created.
- Rules/Governance
- Members must use their real names. This fosters community because you’re interacting with a real person, not just an internet screen name (think of the difference between Facebook and MySpace).
- Hyper-local
- Smaller Indiana focuses on Indiana, so there’s already a built-in demographic. Nearly half of the visits to the site come from outside of Indiana, but everything on the site is related to the Hoosier State.
- Offline Activities
- Smaller Indiana Bigger Ideas conference
- Indy Fringe Festival
- Live/Streamed Healthcare Debate
Smaller Indiana has great potential to help Hoosier tourism entities and they should absolutely become involved in the site. Check out Pat’s entire presentation below.
Pat Coyle is among a new breed of digital pioneers who are inventing business strategies inspired by emerging technologies. Pat is also the founder of Smaller Indiana (SmallerIndiana.com), and online platform which strengthens community, commerce and culture in Indiana. Before opening his own firm, Pat was the executive director of digital business at the Indianapolis Colts, where he lead an interactive staff responsible for the Colts’ digital businesses. Coyle remains involved with the Colts as general manager of MyColts.net, a sociable network for Colts fans. Based on his Colts experiences, Coyle also leads an online community for digital sports marketers at SportsMarketing20.com. He facilitates Sports Marketing 2.0 conferences throughout the U.S., and maintains a popular sports marketing blog at PatCoyle.net. Coyle earned a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Hamilton College in 1988. Pat, his wife Amy and their five children reside in Indianapolis.
