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.

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

The Rise And Fall Of Klout

I can see the headlines now as web historians tell the tail of booming web projects that went bust.

There was a day that I regarded Klout with some credibility – and even focused my efforts to conform my online actions to support the assumptions that Klout purported in their online influence algorithm.

However, after closely monitoring my actual Klout score vs my actual online activities and replies – I find no basis to believe that the two have any correlation.

Today I disconnected all of my social media profiles from Klout.

And I recommend you do the same.

How to delete your Klout Account 

“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” – Mark Twain

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 Missing Key To Social Media ROI

More Businesses Choose WordPress For Tourism Marketing

In it’s early days, WordPress was almost exclusively used for Blogging. Over years of continual development, WordPress is released as a publishing platform, not as a blogging platform. More and more small businesses like fishing lodges, outfitters and hunting camp owners are benefiting from the unmatched SEO and Social Media integration provided by WordPress For Tourism Marketing.

Wikipedia reports that, in 2009, WordPress won the best Open Source CMS Award, and in 2010, WordPress has won the Hall of Fame CMS category.

Web Technology Surveys reports that WordPress is used by 14.0% of all the websites they surveyed, that is a content management system (CMS) market share of 54.6%.

Social Media and WordPress For Tourism Marketing

Social Media works seamlessly with WordPress For Tourism Marketing. Why is this important? Because Social Media has created a changed consumer-scape for all business sectors, not just travel and tourism.

National Tourism Week Social Media Seminar

“Visit Bucks County has been embracing the revolutionary changes that have impacted the tourism and hospitality industry by speaking directly and interacting with the people that fuel our economy,” said Jerry Lepping, executive director of Visit Bucks County. “Hosting this seminar during National Travel & Tourism Week was the perfect time to encourage the importance of this transition as well as the impact travel has on our economy.”

Watch This Slide Show – Interesting Social Media Data For Business

Rural Tourism Marketing Recommends

The Wharton Internet Marketing Blog sums up the benefits of WordPress for Tourism Marketing: At a recent workshop, Joanne Steele from Rural Tourism Marketing recommended that business owners make sure their websites are built using WordPress.

Using WordPress As A Content Management System (CMS)

Evoke Design writes “As WordPress has developed into version 3, it is slowly becoming a top choice for CMS solutions for designers and developers. It provides great flexibility and it’s easy to work with. This means that WordPress has moved on a long way from being heavily biased on a personal blogging system.”

9 Great Reasons to Use WordPress as a CMS

Today, WordPress is released as a publishing platform, not as blogging software – which means it’s even better to use as a CMS. In this article WordPress Ninja explains why WordPress is such a good choice to use as a CMS.

WordPress For Tourism Marketing

KDCA AGM 2011

I am very excited by the invitation from the Kenora District Camp Owners Association (KDCA), to make a short presentation on Social Media Marketing for Tourism and Travel, during their spring Annual General Meeting!

KDCA AGM at the Waldhof Hall

With about 70 Camps and Lodge Members, and about 70 Allied Members, the KDCA is a large and influential lobby organization who work closely with Ontario Sunset Country Travel Association and the Northwestern Ontario Tourism Association (NWOTA) to promote the well being of tourism and travel in Northwestern Ontario.

KDCA AGM, May 6 2011