Learn how, on Tuesday, Jan 10, 2012, Google made the biggest change to their search algorithm ever. And, learn how we have been preparing for this!

Social media now dictates who appears on top of the search result page.

If someone who is connected to someone you know talks about what you’re looking for, it may bring that back to you as a personalized search result.

Thanks to Mike Brooks for the tip! Mike helps local businesses to get more customers online by making them findable when people search for their product or service, build their online brand using social media and creates celebrity and authority through video marketing campaigns. Mike also helps others build their career as social media consultants.

Big new going around the Net today about the new Social results in your Google Searches.

Social search results first reported on December 3, 2011 – are starting to get wide-spread attention after Matt Cutts officially released an announcement about 30 important changes to the Google Ranking Algorithms.

I just had an amazing experience on Google, and I had to stop what I was doing to make this social media case study video.

While updating a website for a client, I did a search on Google for a specific Geographic location. I wanted to find someone to link to, when I did a search, the Google Search Results are turning up google + profiles.

It occurred to me that I’m logged in, and that is changing my search results for a town location. WOW that is powerful for google +

Then I scrolled down more and I found that my twitter connections were also showing up in my search results.

I’m following Kashabowie Outposts on Google + and, because they shared this link, it is turning up in my search results when I search for topics that match the information they have shared.

From these top results, five of the top in the first page of the search results were because of social sharing and not because of search engine optimization – I found it completely startling to see how the rankings were changing in google based on your social media connections.

It’s amazing now, what this means for tourism marketing – it influences what choices people have available to them, right at the beginning of their search.

Profound Significance For Tourism Marketing

I consider this to be an incredibly positive step forward for user experience on the web. The significance of this real world example is profound. Tourism marketing and travel planning well forever be changed by the social connections you establish with your guests.

Are you a tourism business wanting strategies for developing your social media?

Consider the long term impact of a single ‘Like’ or ‘Tweet’ - so long as that individual grows their social media network over the years, their entire network of connections will continue to be influenced by that recommendation – starting with the choices they are presented with when they begin a search.

Three Critical Take-Aways

These are busy days of awesome web! Tourism Tim’s Marketing Success Course is changing the way I have to build websites - right from the bottom up!

In fact, I looked at my own business web design website and thought

‘WOW! I’m missing all of these core components on my *own* website!’

I now see opportunity to increase the effectiveness of all the top search rankings I have achieved, by including these components on all of the websites that I have created!

When The Student Is Ready, The Teacher Appears.

I feel really lucky that have taken this course right now because I have three or four different projects that I’m working on where I can get the practical experience of directly implement all of his recommendations!

These projects are all in different stages of development – some of them are long-standing websites I’ve been doing for years, and some of them are brand-new redesigns where I’m switching an old website over into the WordPress Publishing Platform.

I’m really keen to review how Tim recommendations can benefit my tourism clients – however, after completing his course, I believe the very same things that work on a tourism website will work on any different website.

Worksheets For Everyone

After completing Tim’s Course, I’ve spent the past week contacting clients, doing a ‘Tourism Tim Worksheet’ on each page of their website, discussing the changes – and starting on the updates to their websites – knowing that Tim will be personally reviewing one or two of these projects!!

I’m very excited with the new learning – and a bit overwhelmed!

Presently I am implementing the step by step plans on adding Tim’s Components to the design and layout of my current projects.  I’m meeting with clients over skype, bringing up the Tourism Tim Worksheet and filling out the form with each client.  Then, after we complete the worksheet, we review their individual websites and start planning the changes to be made that will incorporate Tim’s recommendations – changes in design, graphics, layout and text… even color changes are considered as we reflect on these critical updates.

Next is the phase of doing.

Core concepts have been learned, meetings with clients organized and completed, now the updates are underway on the first sites that will be placed on the Hot Seat for review!

The Tourism Tim Success Hotseat

I just watched the webinar replay that Tim Warren Hosted for the people who are presently taking the course – and it gave me even more clarity about the elements of a page that can be improved to help increase bookings!!  Sorry I missed the Live Event, but completely awesome to watch the replay!

My Next Two Month Goals

• • to update my clients sites
  • have Tim and the crew on the Webinar give it a review and suggestions
  • complete the suggested updates

…And then… complete the case study with a testimonial from some happy Fishing Lodge or Outpost Camp Owner, because their website is getting more contacts, more calls, more enquires, and – more bookings!

Then the Success Cycle will be complete, I will compile my ‘Before-And-After Test Results’ and create a Case Study to share with other seasonal tourism businesses and web designers.

I am super excited to get back to work!! Many thanks Tim!

More updates to follow!

To Your Success,

Doug

Got my coffee ready and I’m digging in to the new course by Tourism Tim for the third day straight. It’s been a marathon to go through all the material he’s presented! Normally the course is presented in bite-sized pieces over several weeks, but I got access to the entire buffet!

These are busy days for me, and it’s hard to drop everything and spend three days focused on something that I hadn’t planned for… but sometimes I discover a new internet marketing strategy that makes me change the way I build my websites, from the ground up, so the changes are incorporated in the very design and engineering of the website.

This is one of those times.

And I want to blog about exactly what my experiences are, while they are happening, with the knowing that my story will only resonate with the small segment of the world who are also trying to improve the sales success of their current website.

Great Sequence Of Teaching

Tim knows his stuff and has the track record of success in helping tourism and travel professionals make their site into a marketing piece that are time-tested and proven to generates sales and bookings.

The sequence of material in the course is brilliant!

For me, the course started out with an aspect of web design that I wasn’t expecting. It felt something like a baseball-bat-whollop out of no where – and it clarified something I had seen before, but didn’t even recognize.

And then, Tim followed up with a clearly organized, masterfully edited, 56 page ebook that, for me, was like a super slow motion replay of the baseball-bat-whollop… from several angles.  (I’ll tell you more about the specifics of exactly what I mean by that, I’m going to create a Case Study of a before-and-after, doing a website make-over with some of the current websites I manage… then Tim will personally review my work… on video!)

After hitting you with everything up front, then Tim presents a series of detailed case study videos that reveal how these strategies help his clients improve aspects of their website design that, as a result, get more bookings.  I love the client testimonial videos that are included at the start of each section of the course.

Sometimes, it’s hard for me to watch his entire video, I’m so excited that I want to dash off and implement these improvements on a dozen websites all at the same time!!

Today’s Module is Search Engine Optimization

I’m completely stoked about this section of the course and I want to cut this blog post short and get to it, but I set a timer and I must keep writing until it beeps… (thank you Ed Dale).

I think Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a fantastic carreer for anyone who would do well in perpetual university.  SEO used to be focused on the keywords and keyword density of your web page, and then it started to include links in the importance, then the quality of link and anchor text became critical elements and now we have real time search and a focus on the most recent material and the additional weighting that social actions now have on the staying-power of newly gained top rankings…

SEO is now a sophisticated orchestra that includes the social engagement of your customers.

Self Promotion Pitch

Not Blogging?  Not Social-Ready? Not Mobile-Ready?

Not reorganizing your content and marketing message to match Tourism Tim’s Strategies?

Then it’s time for your business to consider an annual marketing plan with specific, step-by-step strategies that change throughout each month of the year – specifically created FOR the small to medium seasonal tourism business.

One of the most fantastic things about Tourism Tim’s Course and the solutions that I provide for my clients is that both strategies and both plans fit together perfectly – and I can’t wait to share more about that as well!

Ok, my timer went off.  Now I’m going to watch the next series of videos in the amazing new Tourism Marketing Success Course by Tourism Tim Warren!

With all the buzz about social media and the Internet for vacation planning, one might forget about the awesome power of meeting people face-to-face when selling trips.

Sports Shows and Trade Shows are sometimes portrayed as being a marketing method from the past – but beware – the people who are telling this story are biased toward online marketing.

I know this from first-hand experience.

You see, I firmly believe that tourism marketing is made far more effective with a website, email list and social media presence – and I used to think the Internet was the answer for all marketing needs… that is, until I attended a 10 day sports show with a Fly-in Fishing client, Kashabowie Outposts, in February 2011.

Should You Still DO Sports Shows?

The simple answer is YES.  And your online marketing should be carefully crafted to boost the effectiveness of the shows you attend.

Plan ahead to use your blog, email and social media – to pre-market your fans to walk past every other booth in the show, and come directly to YOUR booth!

Using The Internet To Market Your Shows

Hubspot recently released a report that should be required reading for all Tourism Business Owners, Managers and Employees who may be involved in working your booth at any sports show or travel, trade, adventure, boat and home show!  I continually scour the net to find gems of information about how to market Tourism businesses from Canada, and I’m very happy to share this powerful report.

Register and Free Download:

http://www.hubspot.com/The-Inbound-Marketing-Tradeshow-Planning-Guide

Use the handy chart that lays out the detailed step-by-step methods and strategies you should use in the months leading up to the show, what you should be doing online while you are at the show, and most importantly, what you can be doing to increase the bookings you get from each show by using a specific follow-up routine after the show is completed.

Twylah

I just learned about an amazing new Twitter service called Twylah – that may help you get more value out of Twitter for your Travel and Tourism business.

My friend @tinalussier told me about a blog post by @adamdince that shows all the steps required to Optimize Your Twitter Feed with Twylah

You can see an example of my trending tweets here:

http://tweets.queticointernetmarketing.com/

Shaping Your Twitter Content With Twylah

Once my trending tweets were live, I was surprised to learn that my top topics were the following:

winnipeg
social media
wordpress
business
video
tourism
facebook

This is a great insight into how I’ve been using Twitter in the past while, and provides me both with feedback about my recent content, and a way to start selecting my twitter content more deliberately so that I’m correctly focused on my Niche.

Shmap.it

My friend @tinalussier also told me about Shmap.it, a free service that will analyze your followers on Twitter – and tell you some pretty amazing things about them!  Here is a screenshot of the report I received:

Click To Enlarge

Get your own Twitter Follower Analysis and let me know what you discover!

How Twitter Could Help Your Tourism Business?

Twitter is an excellent way to connect with people – specifically, your customers.  These two tools will help you create a better content strategy for your twitter feed, while helping you see more about the audience of people who follow you, and even target sub-sets of your twitter followers by interest or geographic locations!

Social Media for Marketing Tourism.

What Social Media Tools do you find the most effective for marketing your travel destination?

Do you know of a Twitter Tool that should be shared here?

Recently I’ve been secretly checking my Klout Score day and night.

In fact, several of the social media profiles I manage have been gaining increasing Klout Scores every single day for weeks now!

With all this success, I’ve become obsessed – addicted – to checking my Klout Score!

Then, the unthinkable happened! To my shock and dismay, I brought up my profile on Klout this evening – only to find out that my growing Klout Score has dropped back for the first time in the past few weeks!

I had full anticipation that I would be measuring the growth and development of my overall Klout score and I had also expected to gain further gratification in my self-absorbed monitoring of my ‘true reach’… but, instead, I saw this chart;

What Is A ‘Klout Score’?

It may sound like a phrase that Fraternity Brothers might use in College, but it’s actually a great way to take a bird’s-eye view of your effectiveness online.

Why You Want A Healthy Klout Score

Your Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action.

Klout Measures Influence. Influence, and your ability to drive action within your Niche is the cornerstone that separates the successful businesses, therefore learning about how Klout works can help you become a more effective communicator, and this will improve your business!

Every time you create content or engage with content online, you influence others.

Klout uses data from social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google +, Linkedin, Flickr, YouTube and others in order to create a score that measures your influence based on:

True Reach: When you post a message, what people tend to respond or share it?
Amplification: When you post a message, how many people respond to it or spread it further?
Network Impact: How often do top Influencers share and respond to your content?

How To Increase Your Klout Score

I consider myself very fortunate to be in a position where I can experiment with several specific content strategies and engagement strategies with many business and personal projects across multiple channels – and see how different strategies effect results.

A New Mini-Mission: After completing many marketing campaigns, monitoring results, reporting to clients – and comparing these various activities to the changes in Klout Scores over time, I’ve started on a journey to learn everything I can about what affects your Klout Score, and to create a repeatable process, a guide, that anyone can follow.

Starter Articles on Increasing Your Klout Score

I’ve read some nice general outlines that offered basic tips for increasing your Klout Score – almost all of them provide a similar top recommendation: telling you that you should provide fantastic content for your niche.

They say ‘Create Content Worth Sharing‘ -

This is fantastic advice. I liked much of what I read, I nodded my head, yes, yes, yes…

but many of the recommendations were very generic: too general to use in creating a plan of action. There were no specific examples; no case studies that I might use as a Guide To Increasing My Klout Score.

I had to read on.

Many of the articles I read about increasing my Klout Score were focused on using information tools to help with building new connections with people online – with people I have only met through cyberspace.

I agree it is important to be business-ready for inbound marketing, to establish my profiles and manage the citations about my business – but having a great presence with thousands of followers is a different thing than getting a response from your following, or even having your content show up in their time-line.

It feels to me that actively cultivating blind connections with new people through social media is like putting the cart before the horse.

I didn’t find any useful information that pointed out strategies for cutting through the enormous online clutter, and focused on my personal network of contacts.

Finally Getting Some Answers

Understanding The Score That Klout Gives You

Your score is a collection of about 20 different variables as Klout analyzes the content you have created across the 12 networks it calculates. The most important aspect of your score is a measure of your ability to drive action. This is influence.

Another key concept in your score is time. Klout believes that influence fades over time and you must constantly produce content that drives action, in order to remain influential on a topic. I’m not sure I fully agree with this assumption but, time is a strong part of how the score is calculated and important to know about as you reflect on the relative importance of your Klout Score against your total marketing plans.

How Your Message Can Improve Your Klout Score

Learn From The Best Examples Of Influencers

It’s always good to study what the leaders are doing, and come up with a creative way to provide something of similar value for your audience.

Communication is a skill that can be learned, and Klout provides a fantastic way to easily find top content influencers so you can learn from them and gain insights into their success.

In addition to reviewing the Total Klout Score of a leader, you can also sort Klout users who have received the most +Ks for respective topics. This is fantastic feedback that can help you review and focus the wording of your marketing message to better match the audience you are trying to reach.

(aside: When you give or receive a K+, it doesn’t affect the Klout influence score, it only affects the topics you’re influential about.)

Who Is Your Message For?

The same care should go into planning your audience as you put into planning your message. A great message to the wrong audience goes by unheard, or worse, causes irritation.

Get Past The First Information Filter

We are truly bombarded with communication and incoming information these days. Much of it is filtered, skimmed, set aside for ‘later’… With so much information, we instinctually use this primary information filter:

Do I Know You?

Before we even read an incoming message! This means you should tap in to your current real world network. Wondering what to review when studying how to increase your Klout Score? Start with your list of real world contacts.

Learn, use and practice the person-to-person networking skills then simply connect with these people on all the online services – and in truth, if you follow just a few of the *McKay’s Maxim’s* – your network will grow, you’ll have more fun than ever, and your Klout Score will take care of itself!

The Secret To Increasing Your Klout?

It’s all about people. It’s all about communication.

The more we are overloaded with information, the more important basic communication becomes.

Back-To-The-Basics Networking, Harvey McKay’s book:
‘Dig Your Well Before You’re Thirsty‘

Who Are You Currently Interacting With?

Are you certain you are connected to the people you know who are also using these main social channels?

In my experience, my Score recently started to increase once I removed my focus from trying to gain the attention of people I have never met – and instead, started to communicate exclusively with people I have a real-world connection with – then my Klout score started increasing at a steady rate.

Why Is My Klout Increasing?

Simple – I know these people and they know me. Our personal connection cuts through the mass of marketing messages, and we respond to one another.

The paradox is: we are not marketing to each other – instead, we are talking about our passions, we are working together, we are playing together – and we are extending those relationships by planning, following-up and having real-time conversations about our real world interactions, using online media.  Klout uses interactions on these public networks as a measure your influence.

Therefore, by definition, Klout score is a thin representation of the actual interactions occurring between people, and at best, only casts a shadow of a representation of your actual, real-world influence.

Increasing your Klout Score should get as much attention as changing the oil in your car – you want to keep a casual eye on it because it is a general indicator of your marketing success online, but we all know it would be foolish to stare at the oil gauge in the car while driving! You must keep your eyes on the road and focus on driving to your next destination!

The New Facebook Layout

Perhaps you have noticed the new layout on your personal Facebook profile. The reaction that users are having to continual changes to Facebook are best summed up by an entertaining cartoon by The Oatmeal – This is what happens when Facebook changes it’s layout.

New Facebook Subscribe and News Feed Options

Last week, Facebook announced improvements to Friend Lists and a new Subscribe button to help you see more of what you care about, and less of what you don’t.

In addition, the News Feed updates used to slide down in chronological order so it was tough to zero in on what matters most. If you only checked it to Facebook occasionally, you may have missed important updates from the people closest to you. Now the News Feed acts like your personal Newspaper – If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with a blue corner in the top left corner of the status update.

This is all well and good, once you get used to it – but it may have a profound impact on the effectiveness of your Business Page on Facebook

Secure Browsing on Facebook

Facebook secure browsing was introduced in January of 2011. I use it, and recommend you do as well.

Now you will be required to change your URLs in the custom tabs of your Facebook Page to use the https links instead of the http links as well. Even though it is yet another technical hassle for developers and business owners, ultimately, it’s a good step becuase the use of SSL and HTTPS makes Facebook a safer place for all of its users, and increases the trust that your Fans will have in the content on your Business Page.

SSL Connection For Your Business Page Tabs

Are Your Facebook Custom Tabs About To Break? One of the big developments in March 2011 was the Facebook Page overhaul to support for iFrames and depreciate FBML (Facebook Markup Language) in Fan Page custom tabs. Now, another upcoming Facebook change may have a large effect on your company Facebook page: on October 1 2011, all content displayed on custom tabs will need to be served from domains secured with an SSL certificate.

This will ‘break’ break many companies’ custom Facebook tabs and Welcome Pages.

Not great news… If your webmaster is snoozing, your business could be losing.

Think Your Page Might Be Affected?

How To Secure Your Tab Page Content

If you are a techie, this tutorial will be very helpful for you to comply with The New Facebook Page SSL Requirement.

If you are small business owner, and your head is spinning – I would be happy to provide social media consulting services if you are having difficulty with your Facebook welcome page.