Foursquare’s branded pages and lists

Ever since my #geekcation in Chicago (an excuse to work on Explore Chicago’s Foursquare badges), I’ve said that I would love to see a CVB create a Foursquare guide. Well this is it! Foursquare recently allowed brands to get pages for free and also unveiled a new lists feature on Monday.

What does this mean for you? Get your CVB on Foursquare. Now.

It’s easy to create a page. All you need is a graphic, description and a branded twitter account to get started. Once you’re ready with that, it’s time to add a few tips. You have to add at least 5 tips when you create your page. What’s great about these tips is that they come from your “official” brand and not a personal account.

Lists are an excellent way to group Foursquare venues together into themes, whether it by a list of museums, BBQ restaurants or even neighborhood guides. Three CVBs that have already created Foursquare lists are Visit Savannah, Baltimore and Tuscarawas County CVB.

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Conference Hashtags

A lot has changed in the social media world since October 2010 but most of the basics in Hashtaggery (how to create a hashtag for your event) have remained the same. Here’s an update:

1. Think: choose a hashtag that can easily correlate to your event

What type of abbreviations can you use? If there will be live-tweeting at your event, make sure you choose something that can be easily typed. Keep it short and sweet but not so short that it becomes confusing.

Should you use the year in it? I’ve seen a lot of hashtags that use “2010″ or just “10″ as a date. Twitter search history lasts only a few days so there’s no need to differentiate your annual events by adding the year to your hashtag. Remember that people will be live-tweeting and it takes an extra step to add numbers on a mobile device.

The thought process behind this hasn’t changed. Since my original post, I’ve upgraded to an Android phone (from a Blackberry) so typing numbers in a hashtag is more difficult now but my keyboard (Swiftkey) auto-suggests words and hashtags so leaving off numbers in a hashtag is not as crucial. Just keep in mind whether you want to use the hashtag year-round or only specifically for the conference.

2. Research: are your choices already being used?

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Twitter Transcripts

Transcripts are essential for twitter chats. Not only to refresh your memory of the chat but they’re also great for those who were unable to participate during that hour.

If you’re not familiar with #tourismchat, it’s a biweekly twitter chat focusing on social media in the tourism industry. Each chat varies but we normally see over 300 tweets from 50-75 twitter users during that hour.

As many of you know, we were using “what the hashtag?!” (wthashtag.com) for the #tourismchat transcripts but for some reason the site started displaying error messages, for both the #tourismchat and #SoMeT hashtags. It’s working now but was down for a few weeks so I researched other twitter transcript sites for a substitute method.

Here are my results:

what the hashtag?! http://wthashtag.com

-pros: easy to use, customizable, list basic hashtag usage stats, create transcript for custom dates, unique transcript URL

-cons: site did not work for a few weeks, stats are only available for the past 7 days

Tweetdoc http://tweetdoc.org

-pros: provides a nice pdf transcript, use custom dates

-cons: not instant/takes time to process, pdf must be housed somewhere (I use Google Docs) for easy sharing

tweetreach http://tweetreach.com

-pros: interesting stats include exposure and impressions

-cons: no custom dates, transcripts for up to 50 tweets are  free, monthly plans are expensive

Twapper Keeper http://twapperkeeper.com

-pros: use custom dates, creates RSS feed & excel version of transcript

-cons: must format export with text to columns in excel before saving into google doc, could be a user error but I don’t always get all of the tweets in the export.

For geeks: As I was researching these sites, I came across this very cool site. Summarizr provides charts and stats for any hashtag, via Twapper Keeper. The #tourismchat Twapper Keeper account was created in the beginning of December so these stats only reflect the past two chats.

My temporary solution for replacing wthashtag was a hodgepodge of things stored in a google doc. I plan to continue updating this doc but my preferred method is definitely what the hashtag?!

What are your preferred methods for accessing and sharing twitter transcripts?

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Twitter Engagement

I recently found this great post about a Twitter Engagement Formula (Angela Maiers) and even though it’s over a year old, the basic strategy behind it still holds true today. Angela states that she uses a 70-20-10 formula for twitter:

Share Resources (70) – Successful learning in the 21st Century is not what you know, but what you can share, so 70 % of my Twittertime is spent sharing others voices, opinions, and tools.

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Hashtaggery (how to create a hashtag for your event)

Hashtags are a great way to organize tweets around conversations and events. If you’re new to twitter, check out this Twitter Help Center page about hashtags. Creating a hashtag is easy but a lot of thought must go into the process. These steps will walk you through creating a hashtag for your event but can also be used for creating any type of hashtag.

1. Think: choose a hashtag that can easily correlate to your event

What type of abbreviations can you use? If there will be live-tweeting at your event, make sure you choose something that can be easily typed. Keep it short and sweet but not so short that it becomes confusing.

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So you’re going to a conference

With the use of social media, more and more people can now experience conferences virtually. Whether you’re attending in person or just following along via a hashtag, here are five tips to help you get ready to use social media at a conference.

1. What’s the hashtag? Hashtags are a great way to follow the conference on twitter. If you’re leading the conference, create the hashtag early and publicize it! Put it on all of your registration information, printed and online. Be sure to include your social media icons here as well. When creating a hashtag, make it short but not so short that it becomes confusing. Use “10” instead of “2010” or consider using no year at all.

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Using Twitter’s Advanced Search

Social media is not traditional marketing. If you’re only pushing out information to your twitter followers, you’re missing out on connecting with potential visitors.

People are talking about you and your area. They might not know that you’re on twitter but they do know that twitter can help them find answers. Are you listening?

There are many tools that can help you find these people and Twitter’s Advanced Search (search.twitter.com/advanced) is one of them.

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Google Maps: it’s that easy

Creating a custom Google Map is a great way to enhance itineraries, attraction and hotel listings, special events and so much more. Plus Google made it very easy to create and embed these maps.

Go to the “My Maps” tab and create a title and description for your new map. All you have to do now is find, drop or drag placemarks and draw lines. You can customize the icon for the placemark as well as adding live links and images via html.

Flickr is always a great resource for images. Search within the Creative Commons to find images that can be used commercially. You can find the html under the “Share This” tab for each photo.

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120 is the new 140

When you first started twitter, you may have felt overwhelmed fitting everything in to one little 140-character tweet. Abbreviating where you can, leaving off some of the details and trying your best to just cram it all in and still have room for a link should be considered a skill. Well I hate to burst your bubble but now you have to do it in less characters.

One of your twitter goals should be to get retweets from your followers. In order to make this easy (see How to retweet properly), you need to leave enough characters so retweeters don’t have to edit your content. Specifically, subtract the amount of characters in your twitter name + 5 to save space for “RT @[yourname]” at the least. This doesn’t allow room for the retweeter to add a comment so leaving off a few more characters is even better.

Don’t like doing the math? Just make it a general rule to use a maximum of 120 characters per tweet.

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Using BudURL

A great resource for tracking links, BudURL can also give you insight on which themes gather the most interest among your followers. An easy way to do this is by creating a BudURL label for each theme such as architecture, culinary, destination (a catch-all category), family, nightlife, etc.

Once you create your theme labels, all you have to do is check off the corresponding box as you shrink your URL.

When analyzing or creating a report on your URL click-thru stats,

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