The “fam tour” or “familiarization tour” is standard practice by which tourism boards and Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus (CVBs) introduce their destinations to media people.

In the past, such tours have been filled with only print and broadcast media representatives. Not any more.

One example in progress right now is the “So Much More Hawaii” fam tour just for bloggers; it’s sponsored by the Hawaii Tourism Authority (HTA.)

I’m on the tour covering mostly family travel, and other blogging specialists include:

• Rick Calvert, founder, Blog World and New Media Expo – a huge annual blogging conference.  He’ll cover the islands as a business and convention destination.
• Leah Lamb, covering eco-tourism and green travel for Current TV. I know she must be intrigued by Hawaii’s recent efforts to invest in clean and renewable energy resources.
• Jim Turner, OneByOne Media and host of the Social Mediasphere show on Blog Talk Radio.
• Shira Lazar, blogging on solo travel for Jaunted.com, the pop culture travel guide.
• Aric S. Queen, producer, writer, podcaster and value travel blogger for the UpTake travel site.
• Mark Tafoya, our tour foodie blogger. He’s a professional chef and co-founder of the Culinary Media Network.
• L.P. “Neenz” Faleafine, a native Hawaiian, Chief Evangelist for Alltop.com and founder of Hawaii-basedPono Media.

As we all know, the economy is down around the world. The Hawaii tourism industry is in crisis right now andthe outlook is grim.

By some standards, this social media outreach could be considered a risky move by the HTA, but I think it’s simply smart.

I applaud this major tourism organization for seeking new, more effective ways to use social media to showcase the islands for potential visitors.

(This is an Open Letter guest post from travel expert Tim Leffel, who wants to help public relations (PR) and marketing folks who are stumbling around in the dark regarding Web-based tourism development.  Anyone who still deals with a recalcitrant boss about these issues, even if you aren’t in travel and tourism, will find something helpful in his suggestions.)

Dear person who handles the marketing budget for your travel destination:

In case you have not been reading the news, the media landscape rug has been pulled out from under you. What have you done to adjust?

I’m a travel writer who writes a lot and travels a lot. In the past year, I’ve had two dozen PR and marketing people working in travel tell me that their boss or executive board is at least a decade behind the times in their marketing focus. While my contact person telling me this may be clued in to what matters, the people controlling the marketing purse strings are still fully stuck in the old world they understand, namely print and TV press and advertising.

A couple of times a month, I’ll get a call or e-mail from some PR person about an article I wrote for Perceptive Travel, the Practical Travel Gear blog, or Luxury Latin America—all sites I run myself. The caller needs to put together some kind of ad value report to show their boss or board because, well, that’s the way it’s always been done and that’s the report that has to be written. If the article can’t be measured in monetary terms, it doesn’t matter in their eyes, regardless of how many visitors it brought to their door.

The problem is, while that may have sorta worked in the print world, it doesn’t on the Web.

It was never a very accurate gauge anyway, as this article will attest:   Why most magazine industry metrics are bogus (and that’s from a publishing industry trade!) Anyone on the inside can tell you the circulation numbers are bogus, the published advertising rates are bogus and the demographic breakdowns are bogus.

But at least the suits are used to those particular stretches of credulity. On a website, however, this is an exercise in futility; an invitation to just make up a bunch of numbers to please the boss.

There’s no such thing as a “full page ad” to value to start with. Just banners. There’s no real circulation—just unique monthly visitors and page views. And how do you place an ad value on an article that people will keep reading for years, month after month? How do you value a link to your site? For someone who knows about search engine optimization, that link is very valuable. To a visitors’ bureau board member who still doesn’t know what a blog is, it’s worth far less than a one-paragraph newspaper mention.

Everybody’s heard of the Detroit Free Press, right? So it must be more valuable than being on something called BoingBoing, right? (Um, hate to break it to you, but no. It’s not even close. Besides, the Free Press is the one that had to cut back home delivery to three days a week because it’s a financial wreck.)

I promise you that your potential visitors, including the ones who increasingly can’t remember the last time they read a newspaper, are getting their information from all over the Web and from social media. They are relying less and less on what the traditional gatekeeper people you always pitched (newspapers and magazines) have to say. Unfortunately, this means you have to work much harder now.

Your universe of 20 magazines and 50 newspapers is now a few less of those, but 100 or even 500 blogs. And some of those writers contribute to multiple outlets. You’re no longer pitching an outlet, you are pitching a person: an influencer. The good news is, you get to the right influencers, you’ve got champions who will send you visitors by the planeload, year after year.

This requires a radically different approach and a vastly more fragmented way of spending your resources. Buying one of those silly “special advertising sections” in a general travel magazine is going to pale in effectiveness compared to spending that same amount on Google Adsense and 20 specialized travel websites. Inviting a dozen freelance print writers on a press trip will get you spotty results over time, but inviting a dozen prolific writers who blog on subjects specific to your destination’s appeal will pay off for years and send measurable traffic to your official site.

Here are six things you can do right now to drastically improve your destination’s marketing effectiveness and pull in more visitors:

1) Figure out who is already writing about your destination and engage them the way they want to be engaged. This may be e-mail, Twitter, phone, Facebook or LinkedIn. It is almost surely not by spraying them with press releases.

2) Figure out which blogs and sites are already sending visitors to your website. (You do monitor your stats weekly, right? You do have Google alerts set up, right?) Those are obvious ad targets for the marketing people and those are editors/bloggers your publicists need to be talking with. First go thank them, then build a relationship.

3) Spend some time researching which websites and blogs are a great match for your visitor demographics. As a cheap destinations expert, I hear regularly from and/or have been on press trips with Honduras, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Malaysia, parts of Mexico and Panama. I haven’t heard a peep from most of the other destinations profiled in The World’s Cheapest Destinations book or on my blog, even though I am quoted in the major media every month and my blog is one of the top 100,000 sites on the web. I’m the best-known travel writer in Nashville, Tennessee, but in a decade of living here I’ve never heard from the city’s visitors’ bureau. That’s just silly. If you run a family travel destination or attraction and don’t have Sheila Scarborough or the Traveling Mamas on your radar, you’re missing a huge opportunity. It’s even easier to target sites focused on specific geography. For some destinations there are fewer than 10 people who generate 80 percent of the search engine hits. For a place like Nicaragua it’s two or three. Do you even know who they are? Those people should be on your cell phone’s speed dial.

4) Add every relevant site to your RSS feed and visit them often. (You do have an RSS reader set up don’t you?) You can’t pitch to blogs if you don’t know their style, tone and subject matter (or at least follow them on Twitter if that’s your thing.) Blind pitching doesn’t work anymore. Mass market advertising doesn’t work anymore. You need to focus and converse, not broadcast.

5) Stop worrying about bragging rights. Sure, it’s great to say “As featured in Travel + Leisure” when they write a few sentences about your destination on page 148, right behind the fold-out ad for Lexus, but in terms of influencing travelers to visit, did it matter? Was that one-page magazine ad that ran for one month really more effective than advertising on 20 very well-matched websites or blogs for an entire YEAR? Focus on the actual objective, not on what sounds impressive on a report.

6) Listen to your people at the bottom. The most junior people in your organization probably already know what needs to be done. They don’t have your built-in preconceptions and prejudices and will always be two steps ahead of you. Give them a budget, stop worrying about whether they are “wasting time on Facebook,” and turn them loose.

If you still have questions after reading this, let’s get together at Travel Media Showcase or Visit Europe Media Exchange (VEMEX) or have a drink in your destination’s best pub. (“Will work for beer.”)

But if you really want to jump on the social media train with both feet and don’t know where to start, keep reading this blog…or just hire Sheila and Connie!

Tim Leffel is the author of three travel books, editor of the award-winning webzine Perceptive Travel, and editor of several blogs.

He still likes to write for magazines too.

You can see his portfolio and contact information at TimLeffel.com.

I see it over and over again.

In between the squawking about how blogs are already passe and how Twitter is going mainstream, there is a fundamental Old School operating concept of the Web and social media that is routinely ignored by many organizations, mostly through what I suspect is simple lack of knowledge and fear of a netiquette misstep.

Here it is  –  they fail to acknowledge the link.

If a blog links to your business/organization/nonprofit/product/service, the simplest way to acknowledge is to leave a comment on the blog post that linked to you.

If someone links to you in their Twitter stream, then acknowledge with a return tweet.

If someone writes on your business Facebook page Wall or uploads a great fan photo, write something back.

When someone links to you, particularly in a two-way conversation tool like a blog, that is the blog author’s way of saying “I acknowledge you and find you link-worthy.” Someone is talking about you with that link. It may be good. It may be bad. The important thing is that they’re digitally waving at you.

If I were a real, live person standing in front of you waving, would you ignore me, or would you engage and talk about your business/organization/nonprofit/product/service?

Of course, you’d engage….unless you don’t care, in which case, you’re on the wrong blog and there’s nothing for you here at Every Dot Connects.  (Go watch old Van Halen videos, maybe?)

You should acknowledge because people behind keyboards are real, too, and links are important.

Links are the coin of the realm online.  They are a “vote of trust.” They drive Google authority. They are a powerful “communication path.” They provide helpful background information.

Most wonderfully, they can shed light on hidden gems that might otherwise be lost in the Webby flood. Through a well-placed link, an influential blogger or wired journalist can bring millions of people’s attention to worthy Susan Boyle-like businesses or services that would otherwise labor in obscurity.

Sure, if you’re a big business with lots of Web traffic (or a small organization with a tiny staff, or a one-person organization like me who writes for more than one blog) it’s tough to keep up with all the inbound links. I discussed this issue on Twitter with the ebullient Dell online community guy Richard Binhammer, who said that while he and his company certainly keep track of who is linking to Dell and its blogs, they only go back and provide “commentary when warranted.”

Well, sure. Some conversations in real life are ignored when appropriate, some just get a cursory nod or “hey, thanks” and others elicit a more active exchange. It’s the same online.

This assumes that there is a mechanism in your business or organization that TELLS you when there’s an inbound link, and from whom.

I think that half the battle with lack of response to links is that the right people….

1. Don’t even see data about links or Web traffic or Facebook business page commentary, and
2. Don’t know what to do with the data if they get it.

The answer is to:

1. Get an internal communications system set up so that you see, immediately, when people link to you (to start, here’s how to see when someone links to your site and where to set up a Google Alert for your URL.)  Then….
2. Recognize the value and acknowledge the link.

As a travel writer and tourism consultant, I link to travel-related and state/county/city tourism organizations all the time.  Usually, I am trying to highlight a place in a positive way because I love and support travel.

The only way I can ever get a comment response to those links in my blog post is to send an email to the linkee, saying, “Hey, I linked to you. Come say hello!”

Um, I’ll wait here while y’all think about the absurdity of that.

Don’t be “that guy” online  –  acknowledge the link.

I’m doing some writing and marketing work for the travel site UpTake; in addition to hosting my Carnival of Cities blog carnival periodically on their Attractions blog, I’ll be covering travel industry social media topics on the UpTake Travel Industry blog.

To get started with a bit of a bang, I wrote two posts this week that Every Dot Connects readers might enjoy….

• A “wake up out there!” manifesto asking when the tourism businesses and CVBs (Convention and Visitor’s Bureaus) are going to “back off on printing brochures and rejiggering their Web sites (again) and really engage with the Web 2.0/social media world.” Assuming that my semi-rant results in the tourism industry wanting to know what to do next, I followed up with….

• Helpful hints on how to get social media traction for your tourism blog.  It has entry-level guidance for any blogger, such as, “Is your number of blog content subscribers (by RSS or email) moving in an upward direction?  Do you make it easy to subscribe and is it obvious how to do so on your site?  Do you periodically encourage subscription in your posts?”

Both UpTake posts sprang from my experiences as a blogger attending a recent travel industry conference; most of my impressions are unfortunately corroborated by others like Darren Cronian, who writes the UK’s Travel Rants.  Even today, there is a surprising lack of tourism folks who are really out in front trying to use Web 2.0 tools to promote their destinations in an effective manner.

When I started blogging in February 2006, I thought I was “late to the game,” but I hustled to learn everything I could. Now in 2009, it’s safe to say that any professional communicators worth their salt had better have more than a passing acquaintance with social media.

How blunt do I need to be – if you don’t understand this stuff right now, you are behind. That is all there is to it.

I am pained to find such fear and ignorance when as an avid traveler, it is obvious to me that this is an excellent communications vehicle to publicize tourism offerings.  It is not the ONLY communications vehicle (there is still a place for your printed brochures down in the lobby of the local Hampton Inn) but it is not something happening in the future – it is the way the world is right now.

(I wish they’d stop calling it “new media,” already.)

I mentioned in the second UpTake post that the next big bite to chew is mobile content and interaction. Any tourism organization that is still head-scratching about “whether we should use social media” is going to get their PR and marketing clocks cleaned within the next two years, as mobile activity combines with social networking and they simply cannot handle the steep learning curve of the whole package.

Now, ‘scuse me while I go see if my blogs appear OK on an iPhone display….

In June 2008, after a lot of talks with Connie Reece, reflection time at the SOBCon conference and great advice from both Small Biz Survival’s Becky McCray and Successful Blog’s Liz Strauss, we began to teach a series of entry-level Every Dot Connects social media workshops.

Connie, Jennifer Navarrete and I knew that we had a valuable skill set; a pile of knowledge born of many hours living online trying to figure out how social media works and how to be an effective part of the Web 2.0 world.

The trick was figuring out a way to make a living out of it.

Teaching focused workshops to small businesses, freelancers and solo entrepreneurs seemed like a good start….towards exactly what, we didn’t know, but we were gonna start something!

To be honest, a lot of it was classic “throw something up against the wall and see what sticks….and what peels back off and goes SPLAT on the floor.”

Even how we look is part of what we offer….we are three semi-fearless professional women in our 30′s, 40′s and 50′s who are living proof that social media isn’t only for narcissists, pajama-clad losers living in Mom’s basement or “young people.”

Along the way, we’ve learned all sorts of lessons and discovered that we provide a service that is not all that common and is currently in high demand. Journalists, for example, want to know what we know, so I recently spent two days in Dayton teaching Cox Ohio journalists at the Dayton Daily News about writing for the Web, blogging and general social media topics.

Here is some of what we’ve learned….

• When in doubt, set a date and make things happen. If you don’t want to make money right away but want to test the waters for interest, offer a free one-hour class about some aspect of social media at your local library.  Pick a date, reserve a room and start getting the word out. Nothing’s more motivating than having a set date when you must deliver content.
• The ones who want entry-level social media training are – newsflash! – probably not on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or even blogs. Our biggest marketing struggle is remembering that we can’t depend on announcements to our geek network.  Attending the local Chamber of Commerce meeting and passing out business cards is better for reaching the market that we seek, as is attending our Association for Women in Communications (AWC) or IABC or PRSA chapter meetings, and monthly eWomenNetwork get-togethers.
• On the other hand, don’t assume that high tech Web developers or coding nerds understand social media; they may not know Twitter from a circuit board. For us, Door 64 Austin High Tech Online has been a surprising source of workshop interest.
• It is hard to hit the instructional sweet spot. At one workshop, an attendee wrote in a post-event survey that, “This would have been better for my Mom. I already know a lot of this,” but someone in the same class wrote, “Wow, there is so much to learn! It’s rather overwhelming.”
• Don’t try to cram in too much. We’ve gone from trying to cover 5 different social media tools/services to hyper-focus on one at a time. Our next workshop is just on LinkedIn – even trying to include Twitter last time turned out to be almost too much to digest for entry-level attendees.
• We’re also exploring one-on-one Consulting with Connie sessions; is being a “social media personal trainer” a viable approach? We think so, but are still testing the waters.
• Find the right venue. To teach, you need a room with tables, chairs, lots of outlets, strong WiFi, a projector for a laptop and a screen. Not complicated, but you’d be surprised how hard it is to find all of that somewhere that doesn’t charge an arm and a leg and is also well-located.  If you can find a good spot that’s not expensive, you’ll be able to do the next item….
• Price it right.  Our target audience of successful businesspeople are not necessarily raking in big bucks, and today’s tough economy makes them even pickier about where to spend hard-earned money.  We set what we think are very reasonable prices for our workshops. We don’t run a “soak the rich” corporate training outfit, but neither are we willing to go broke doing this.  We have bills (and taxes!) to pay and our valuable expertise is worth a lot. It is a tough balance.

Serving as social media teachers, trainers and guides to others is a pleasure for us. Connie, Jennifer and I also try to keep in touch with our students long after each workshop is over. We introduce them to each other on Twitter, swap comments on Facebook, admire their new blog, connect on LinkedIn or just say, “How’s it going online for you?” when we meet workshop attendees in person out in town.

Do any of you have tips and helpful advice if you’ve been teaching others about social media? Let us know in the comments – fresh ideas are always welcome!