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Within Indiana’s Tourism Industry, I’ve noticed that most organizations have created Fan Pages, while a handful have decided to instead create Groups or even a Personal Profile for their organization. Hopefully this post will clear the air about the differences between the ways you can reach out to potential and current customers on Facebook.

Whether you decide to use a Fan Page or a Group for your organization depends on your goals for Facebook. One thing you should not do, however, is create a personal profile for your organization. Beyond being against Facebook’s Terms of Service, your organizational goals will be much better met by setting up a Group or a Fan Page.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups started out as the only way to interact with organizations and other groups of people. My college class has a Facebook group that is used to update members when reunions are happening or when something big is happening at my Alma Mater. A Facebook Group is a great way to keep a small group of people updated on what’s going on with your organization.

A great example of an effective group in the tourism industry is Travel Michigan’s. They recently shifted their industry communications from the standard email newsletter to a Facebook Group – Travel Michigan Industry News. This has the potential to be a great change for Travel Michigan, as they now can reach industry members in a medium they prefer. Also, by creating a group for the dissemination of Michigan tourism industry news, they’re also providing a place for industry members to have conversations and participate. A standard email newsletter doesn’t allow for this level of interaction.

That being said, the Facebook Group works great for groups like a college alumni class or an industry group, but it might not be the best fit for a true business to consumer (B2C) communication.

Facebook Fan Pages (AKA Public Profiles)

Facebook Pages were created as a way for companies, organizations, politicians, celebrities, non-profits  and others (basically, anything that isn’t an individual person) to have a profile on Facebook. Several years ago, before the advent of the Fan Page, the only way for organizations to interact with their customers on Facebook was through a group. Luckily, Facebook realized they needed to give organizations, celebrities, etc, a more robust and customizable way to interact with their fans. Thus was born the Facebook Fan Page.

At Visit Indiana, we use a Facebook Fan Page (also known as a Public Profile) to connect with our fans. Pages give you all the flexibility of a personal profile and (most importantly) provide you with in-depth statistics on your page and demographic information about your fans.

Pages also allow you to install different applications, like the FBML application I talked about in my last post, Flickr applications and many more.

One more great thing about a Fan Page. Once you have more than 25 fans, point your browser to http://www.facebook.com/usernames and you can create a vanity URL for your Fan Page. The Visit Indiana Fan Page URL used to be: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Visit-Indiana-Indiana-State-Tourism/42785429080; quite the headache to remember. Now that we’ve created a vanity URL for the page, you can find it at http://www.facebook.com/VisitIndiana.

All in all, there is a lot more flexibility available through a Facebook Fan Page than through a Group. In the end, you can decide what’s best for your organization, but here’s a quick comparison chart so you can see, at a glance, the differences between Facebook’s Fan Pages and Groups.

Facebook Groups Vs. Fan Pages

Now that you’ve seen the differences between Facebook’s Groups and Fan Pages, you can make an informed decision about which will best serve the needs of your organization. Let me know which one you’re using and how you came to that decision.

Click here to get started with your organization’s Facebook Fan Page.

Or click here to get started creating a Facebook Group for your organization.

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.

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) recently posted an article about how the Phoenix Suns leveraged Twitter for some great PR.

Twitter has been a growing trend for the past year, and more and more people and companies have been joining the social network. The Phoenix Suns are one of the latest in a string of companies leveraging Twitter for PR and marketing purposes.

The full article gives the details, but here’s a quick rundown for you. The director of digital media for the Suns started up a Twitter account and gained a significant following. Once they reached a certain point, they planned a “tweetup”, an in-person event planned through Twitter, that gave Twitter members discounted tickets, access to the players’ warm-ups, a special section in which to watch the game and a post-game get-together where Shaquille O’Neil showed up.

Not only was this a great way for the Suns to interact directly with their fans, but it gave the organization the opportunity to thank some of their most avid fans for supporting the team. All of this leads to positive press through articles and blog posts (like this one) as well as the priceless word-of-mouth advertising the people who attended tell their friends and acquaintances about their experience.

Is there a way you could leverage social media and your most avid fans to show them how much you appreciate them?

If you’ve never heard of Twitter, or are confused about what it is and why anyone would ever use it, check out this short video, Twitter in Plain English:

Regardless of how you define the word ‘recession’, we’re definitely in a down economy. Local, State and Federal governments are taking in less tax money than expected, many businesses are losing money, budgets are being slashed across the board (especially in marketing and advertising) and many consumers are pinching every penny they can. While this all sounds very ‘doom and gloom’, it doesn’t have to be. There are effective ways to market to your customers, even in a slow economy like the one we’re in now.

I’ve been reading articles just about every day that talk about the opportunities that have arisen because of the slowdown in the economy and here are seven trends I’ve noticed (in no particular order):

• Email Marketing
  • Permission-based email blasts are still a great way to keep your consumers up-t0-date on things going on with your company. Unlike direct mail pieces, your consumers have requested to receive information from you via email. That gives you the opportunity to give your consumers what they want.
• Web Analytics Integration
  • There are several web analytics suites available, but whichever suite you decide to use, you should use one. Google Analytics is a good free option. I’ve found that one of the most useful features of Google Analytics it the ability to find out which search terms people used to find your site. That knowledge can help you better optimize your website’s content or assist in the creation of a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign to push more traffic to your site.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • While there are many companies that specialize in SEO you can do some basic optimization on your own. Focus on keywords that relate to your business. If the copy on your website hasn’t been rewritten in a few years or even a few months, it’s probably time to put up some new copy. This will help the search engines find your site when users search for those keywords.
• Blogging
  • In addition to enabling you to get information out quickly and informally, blogging can also be good for SEO (see above). If you use your organization’s blog strategically, by using key words and focusing on specific topics, you can come to be seen as an authority in your field. Search engines love blogs because content is created frequently and is stored forever. Unlike a website where you change out the content on a page a few times a year, every time you create a new blog post, all the old posts are still there, continuing to be indexed by the search engines.
• Social Media engagement
  • In the same way that blogging is good for SEO, social media can be as well. By getting involved on different social media sites, your name gets out there more and, in addition to delivering information to your consumers in a new way, people will be able to find you in more places using search engines. (Click on the image on the right, you’ll notice that when I searched for “visit indiana” in google, our webpage came up, but so did our twitter page and our Visit Indiana blog. Those are two more opportunities for people to find us.)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
  • Search engine marketing is a relatively inexpensive way to drive more traffic to your site. If you are working to optimize the content on your website for search engines and engaged in blogging and social media, you’re in a great place. But if you want to supplement that work with paid search listings, SEM is for you. I know that the Columbus Area CVB uses paid search and it’s also a part of our ongoing marketing plan as well. This summer, our office launched Live Indiana for our summer promotion. During the promotion, we targeted consumers we don’t typically target – specifically, motorcycle enthusiasts. Since we did not have a wealth of motorcycle content on our website, we purchased motorcycle related keywords in Google and Yahoo and were able to drive traffic to our Live Indiana motorcycle promotion through SEM.
• Social Media Advertising
  • Social media advertising, especially on sites like Facebook is another way to stretch just a few dollars a very long way. Facebook allows you to advertiser either a group or fan page on Facebook or an outside website. I created a mock-up ad we might have used for the motorcycles portion of Live Indiana this summer. I was able to target about 30,000 adults 18+ in Indiana and the surrounding states who have an interest in motorcycles and motorcycle riding. You can also dig down much deeper to target more specifically. You can also run your campaign based on ad views or on click-throughs. (click on the image for a larger version)
  • Columbus Area CVB launched a campaign in October called Chicks Click Here. The campaign features a website, blog and a Facebook group – Unforgettable Women. Cindy from the CVB will put up a post with more details about the campaign, but for just about $25 a month, they’ve run a pay-per-click campaign on Facebook and have been able to attract women from as far away as San Diego, Boston, Florida and everywhere in between, to join them in the Unforgettable Women group.

Many of us will experience budget cuts in the year to come, but by thinking strategically and investing some time and effort, you can stretch those limited marketing dollars in ways you haven’t stretched them before.

Have you already implemented some of these marketing tactics? If so, what results have you seen? If not, do you think you will look to internet advertising more over the next year?

Some sources:

• MediaPost – Social Media Wins In Marketers’ ‘09 Plans
• BusinessWeek – Why Online Ads Are Weathering the Recession
• New York Times – Some Online Ads Thrive in a Miserable Economy

Groundswell

I just finished reading Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and I can’t say enough good things about the book. Not only does it give you a great insight into the world of social media, but it gives case study upon case study about how organizations have successfully integrated different social media initiatives to varying degrees of success.

I mentioned in an earlier post about Groundswell that this book is a must-read for anyone thinking about getting involved in the groundswell, but after reading the book cover to cover, I think this should be required reading for just about every organization. We’re quickly headed in a direction that will essentially require you to be involved in the groundswell for your business. A great example given in the book mentioned that if you visited a website in 1995 and it had one header image and some text, that was pretty commonplace. If you visited that same website now, they’d be far behind the times. This is likely to be true in the not-too-distant future with groundswell technologies. If you visit a website in 5 years that doesn’t have social technologies integrated into it, they’ll seem woefully out of date.

There’s no need to fret, and you don’t have to be worried that your website is currently obsolete, you just need to read Groundswell and begin implementing some of their suggestions. If you have any questions about how your organization could begin to dip their toe into the groundswell, please feel free to ask me.

A great place to start for most tourism organizations is with Google Alerts (TTC Blog Post) and Flickr (TTC Blog Post). The Google Alerts allow you to listen to what people are saying about you and Flickr allows you to put your best foot forward and show everyone what your location is really all about.

On a personal note, I hope that everyone has a wonderful Holiday season and a Happy New Year. I’ll return in 2009 with more Tourism Tech Corner posts and more information that can help you more forward in your business. If you have any questions or recommendations for Tourism Tech Corner post topics, either leave me a note in the comments below or shoot me an email.

- Jeremy

Below is a list of the places where you can find Indiana Tourism involved in Social Media. Join our Facebook Fan page and add some of your photos to our Flickr Group!

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