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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.

I’ve been using Hootsuite as my primary social media management tool for the past several months and I’ve been extremely impressed. There is a Hootsuite App available for iPhone and I’m waiting for the Blackberry app that will hopefully follow.

Have you used Hootsuite?

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?

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.

So, is social media just a fad?

There are plenty of people who still dismiss social media as useless. In fact, there are studies that show that 40% of all ‘tweets’ are pointless babble. Even though that may be true, that doesn’t diminish the power and usefulness of social media in marketing and PR today. There will always be people who don’t understand new technologies and how they can be useful, and social media is no exception. The video below has been circulating online in the past couple of weeks and it does a fantastic job of highlighting how much a part of our lives social media has become. No longer can you ignore social media, in fact, in a recent survey of Indiana Tourism entities, nearly 30% of respondents use Twitter on to promote their destination and more than 90% use Facebook.

My favorite quote in the entire presentation is:

Social Media isn’t a fad – it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

That’s such a true statement. Social Media isn’t just a way to waste time and talk with friends about useless bits of trivia, it’s truly a new way to communicate directly with consumers, with your customers.

Some other encouraging news for the use of social media is that more 80% of US adults use social media on a monthly basis. For more information about the different types of social media use check out these posts on Groundswell):

The video below is the precursor to the other video in this post. While this one doesn’t focus on social media exclusively, there is still some pretty amazing information in here.

If you’ve attended any of the conferences or sessions that Indiana Office of Tourism Development has recently hosted, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve been talking a lot about online and social media marketing.

• 2008 Indiana Tourism Summit: We brought in Josh Hallett, who talked about Flickr and other social media platforms.
• 2009 Hoosier Hospitaliy Conference: IOTD hosted a blogging seminar (featuring Doug Karr, Paula Werne, Jeff Robinson and myself) where the panelists talked about the importance of blogging.
• 2009 June Tourism Council: We hosted a panel (featuring Jen Perry, Bruce Hetrick, Erik Johnson and John Palmer) about Marketing in a Recession that talked about different social media initiatives to get you through in this tough economic climate.
• 2009 Meet The Media: This event occurred just a few weeks ago. We had sessions about Social Media from Erik Deckers and Duncan Alney as well as a Twitter session from James Burnes and an Indiana Insider Bloggers Panel that featured each of our Indiana Insider bloggers.
• 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit: This upcoming summit will be completely web-focused and will feature such topics as web research, online optimization, social media and permission email. (Click here to register for the 2009 Indiana Tourism Summit – PDF form)

We’re choosing to focus on web-based and social media marketing so much because it is such an important part of an effective marketing mix, especially in today’s economy. All of these sessions and conferences provide a great opportunity to hear directly from some of the  smartest minds in online and social media marketing, but what do you do between sessions? Who should you pay attention to? Who should you go to with questions about online marketing?

In addition to the Tourism Tech Corner, we’ve compiled a short list of other great resources for social media and technology questions. Several of them are even located here in Indiana. Here are some of my favorite blogs to follow as well an excerpt from each:

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We’re not usually the type to toot our own horns, but we got some fantastic news yesterday that we can’t keep to ourselves. Gammet Interactive, a marketing firm in Michigan that focuses on travel and tourism just released what appears to be the first study to look at the use of social media by each State’s tourism office. On founder Dave Serino’s blog, he explains the methodologies that were used to determine and rank how social each State DMO is.

There we are, Indiana is at #2 out of all 50 states! Huge congratulations go out to Pennsylvania, Florida, Oregon and Nevada for their top five finishes. Each of these states does a fantastic job with social media and we’re absolutely humbled to be included in such great company. If you’re interested in seeing the full report, click here for the PDF.

We’ve worked hard at the Indiana Office of Tourism Development to provide content that people want through our various social media channels and we’re very excited to be recognized for the job we’re doing. This is a great example of how, even in a time of decreasing budgets, you can still promote your destination in very effective ways for very little money.

I just got an email from Qdoba Mexican Grill (click on the image at left to see a larger version) and it was a great example of creative permission email.

I signed up to receive emails from Qdoba when I became a member of their frequent purchaser card. I’ve received several other emails from them and they have all been very straightforward.

When I saw the Subject Line of this email (Stinky Brown Bag), my first thought was that the email was spam and I should delete it. Then I read it again and realized that it was from Qdoba. I’d bet that everyone who works in an office has received an email like this at some point in their career. By using a creative headline like this, Qdoba got me to open an email that I might not have opened otherwise.

I’d be very interested to see what Qdoba’s open rate was on this email. In addition to having a clever headline on the email, they followed up with clever content and offered a deal. This somewhat deceptive subject line is definitely not a tactic that should be used frequently, but Qdoba was able to highlight a special offer in a unique way.

This kind of creativity should be employed in more email campaigns. One of the most important parts of an email marketing campaign is the email subject. The better your subject is, the more people that will open up your email. Of course, you still need good content in the email, but can use good headlines to get your foot in the door.

This post doesn’t really have anything to do with tourism, but I thought it would be a fun way to close out another week. National Geographic has created a truly amazing feature on their website called The Infinite Photograph.

Description from the Infinite Photograph’s website:

What makes up our world? Dive into this photo-mosaic portrait of the Earth to see it through the eyes of users like you. It’s made up of hundreds of photos of the natural world, each submitted by users to My Shot. (Submit a photo) Move the yellow square over an area you would like to explore, click, and go. Double-click on an image to see more information about it. Keep clicking—and diving deeper into the Infinite Photograph—to get a truly boundless picture of Earth.

Check out the video below for an example. You can visit the site and click through on your own to view the nearly limitless photos available in one large image.

Enjoy the site and have a great weekend!

Yesterday, Google unveiled a new feature on Google Image Search. Until then, Google Images had been a great utility when looking for specific images on the web. Whether you wanted to find pictures of different Indiana License Plates or the Indiana State House, you’d probably be able to find just what you were looking for. But what if you specifically wanted to find a picture of Indiana License Plates that were red, or blue, or even green? Your only hope was to type in “red indiana license plates” and hope that someone had tagged the photo as such.

Purple Flowers on Google Images

That all changed yesterday. Google unveiled the ability to filter images by color. Let’s say you want to find a picture of flowers for a blog post you were writing. the image on the left shows what you’d find if you just typed “flowers” into Google Image Search. If you only want pictures of purple flowers, simply click on “All Colors” just below the search box then click on the purple box and…voila, you have purple flowers!

Red Flowers on Google Images

If you want to find red flowers, simply click on the red box and you’ll be given a great selection of red flowers. Not only does this new functionality give you the ability to better refine your search, but the fact that Google can scan the images for specific colors opens up the door to some amazing technological advances in the future.

How will you use Google Images’ new color selection feature?

It was great to see so many partners from the Indiana Tourism industry at this year’s Hoosier Hospitality Conference (@HoosierHospConf on Twitter) at the Crowne Plaza in Indianapolis this week. In addition to some great panelists (@Doug Karr of Compendium Blogware, @Kyle Lacy of Brandswag, @Paula Werne of Holiday World, @John Palmer of MediaSauce, Santhana Naidu of Williams Randall Marketing and Jeff Robinson of the ICVA, just to name a few), there were some great topics discussed. Among those topics, RSS was only briefly touched. I had a few people make comments to me about being interested in RSS, but not quite understanding it. If you’re interested in reading my first post about RSS, please check it out.

The people at CommonCraft have created a wonderful video series called “…in plain english” (check out their channel on YouTube) where they give you a quick and easy to understand description of lots of different types of technology, from Twitter to blogs, from social media to wikis, even from web search strategies to electing a US President. Below, I’ve included their “RSS in plain English” video. It gives a great, simple description of what RSS is and how to use it.

So now you understand what RSS is, and how it can help you to stay up-to-date on websites and blogs that you want to follow, but who should you follow first? The Tourism Tech Corner, of course! Use this RSS link to subscribe to the Tourism Tech Corner in your new RSS reader (I recommend Google Reader). While you’re at it, you should probably subscribe to the new Visit Indiana Blog too (RSS link here).

Now that you’ve set up your RSS reader and you have started following some blogs, it’s time to begin subscribing to your favorite websites or blogs. If you’re using Firefox as your web browser (which I recommend), they make subscribing to RSS feeds REALLY easy. Look at the image on the right. I’ve boxed the RSS feed icons in yellow. Firefox actually scans the websites to see if there is a feed to subscribe to and if there is, Firefox will place the feed icon in the address bar. Simply click on the RSS icon and you’ll be able to subscribe to the site.

In a later post, I’ll talk about how to set up your website so others can subscribe to your RSS feed, but the basics of RSS are here and it can save a tremendous amount of time as you let the information  come to you, rather than spending the time to go find the information you want.