It’s time to go beyond our tribe to establish a presence within other tribes. We need each other. I started thinking about this after reading a post about building a small powerful network by Chris Brogan. It reminded my repeated efforts to build bridges between content creators and the tourism / travel industry. Not only does the tourism industry need content, but the content providers in social media need opportunities to create content.
The Platform: A shared community Blog
The single most significant opportunity for regional tourism development lies with community blogging. The most important step your community can take to boosting your online presence is to create a place to share the travel experiences of your region.
There are many reasons why I believe that your community must create a shared blog:
- Blogging is inexpensive.
- With blogging it is easy to create good content when you share the work load.
- It’s the stories that matter. Your Web site is just your business card, blogged stories reveal the true essence of your brand.
- Enhances your regional share of voice in the travel market.
- Web 2.0 content makes it easy to distribute your content far beyond your Web site.
Challenges to getting a shared blog up and running in your community:
- a leader - someone with the skills and capacity to set up, design and administer the site.
- one or more editors who can help develop the voice of your community and inspire story catchers to participate
- a shared community vision of the kind of content you would like to share with your ideal guests.
- Recruting local story catchers, people who love to write, take photos, record and edit audio and / or video.
Where to find these people:
- They are bloggers, podcasters, photographers. Find them online by searching across the Web and engaging in social media conversations on Twittter, Facebook, Flickr and Youtube with people who understand Web 2.0 in your community.
- They are Twits, young people who live in your community and live in the social Web.
We need each other:
- bloggers and podcasters, photographers, writers are looking for opportunities to earn money by sharing their talents. They are passionate, intelligent and caring people who know how to tell stories.
- most community tourism web sites are poorly done and don’t reflect a sense of life and vitality that come with rich media stories that could be shared on a community blog. Community tourism sites need these stories!
- Communities and tourism businesses that are significantly overpaying for Web site design, hosting and web site updates. Design matters, but content matters more!
- Instead of paying for design and distribution ( a traditional way of marketing), your community needs to start paying for content development – Stories.
Next steps:
- If you are reading this, you are on one side of the divide. Start engaging in conversations with those on the other side. Talk about how you can build bridges to help one another achieve your goals, share what you are passionate about with the rest of the world.
Communities that Win in travel and tourism, will be those that go beyond the industry to recruit the people who can make a real difference in your Web presence by helping your community tell inspiring travel stories.
Footnote: Working together works – I applaud Darren Cronian at Travel Rants for his invitation to bloggers to work together to establish a travel blog carnival. It’s a great start working within a community of content creators to share the best travel stories. We need to build bridges within our tribes as well.
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I think it’s important for any travel company who is running a blog to make sure that they network themselves within the travel community. If I had not got out there and left comments on blogs and forums, joined social networking sites then the Travel Rants brand would not have been as successful as it’s been.
Still tons of work to do, but, social media and blogging is not a quick-win solution to your marketing needs.
Indeed Darren, you set a very fine example of best practices for working with social media. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your wisdom. Comments on other blogs is a great way to demonstrate your unique offerings.
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