Archives for 2010

Social Media and Travel ? A Social Media Success Story by Jeanne Dee

What could be better than traveling the world on an open ended tour?

At Soultravelers3, we have been amazed to find absolutely stunning opportunities, beautiful connections and world wide collaborations through social media.

When we began our open ended, family world tour in 2006 we had no idea that it would play such a big part of our journey? and our lives.

We travel the web 2.0 while we travel the world and it expands our benefits as well as the benefits of our audience that travels with us virtually.

We are the opposite of geeks, don’t own an iphone or ipod, yet our world traveling digital lifestyle as a family led us to be early adopters in some ways, primarily in social media. We knew nothing about blogs when we began, but wanted to share with family and friends, plus create a memoir for our child, so we are shocked that out of the estimated 200 million? travel-related websites on the net, that we are in the top 20 today. We were stunned when our first Youtube travel video went viral with over a million views.

We live richly and travel the world on just 23 dollars a day per person and find ourselves to be accidental trail blazers for a new way of being. Social media has also played a huge part in our daughter’s education as? a 21st century global citizen which is the primary goal in our journey ?(as well as wanting to spend more time together).

The very best part has been the people that we have met that have enriched our journey beyond measure in so many unique ways.

Before leaving, I researched information about what digital piano to buy on a piano forum and by chance the most helpful person was a man from Spain who lived an hour away from where we would winter. That family became one of our best friends in Spain and our guardian angels.

Our daughter takes piano and violin lessons via Skype webcams with teachers on a different continent, both found through social media. We find great travel secrets by asking on social media and we share the great secrets that we discover.

The positive stories are truly endless and I wrote about some a while back in a popular post called “Twitter and Travel 2.0”. We’ve had a lot of fun meeting up with some of the people we’ve met online, like Wendy Perrin from Conde Nast Traveler who invited us to do Hallowe’en with her family when we were in New York City meeting the thousands of disadvantaged school kids who followed us virtually through a non-profit. Her kids were fans of ours because of our Youtube videos and they all had a blast together.

When I had a bike wreck on the Danube and landed in the hospital in Austria, a quick tweet on Twitter allowed my mom and sister to find us and call us. When I tweeted about my daughter taking an online? class with John Hopkins University’s CTY program, a teacher sent her the books she needed from London,? gratis because he was a fan.

Perhaps the biggest way social media changed our lives is when we got a Twitter Direct Message out of the blue which resulted in a featured story in the New York Times from one of our favorite writers. That led to many literary agents finding us and now we are writing a book. Social media makes it a small world today!

About the author: Jeanne Dee is an internationally recognized travel guru and creative lifestyle design consultant, via her award winning website Soultravelers3 that National Geographic Traveler called “One of the best Family Travel Blogs in cyber space”. Find us in Social Media via our Google Profile.

Community doesn?t mean hippie love by John Haydon

Everyone’s talking about community. Brands are shifting strategies to demonstrate how much they care about theirs. Small businesses and nonprofits are being told that engaging with theirs leads to more sales and donations.

Not just hippie love

If you haven’t defined your community, you could be wasting a lot of time pulling the wrong levers.

Think about it. If you define community as everyone who follows you on Twitter, you’ll waste time tweeting with folks who will never buy and never tell others about your company. A little hippie love is nice, but it won’t pay the rent.

Sure, it would feel pretty great for me to claim that my community is over 14,000 strong. But I’d be lying myself and I’d be looking like a fool to everyone else.

The quickest way to define community

If you define community as?the people you share common interests, resources and needs with, then you’re getting somewhere.

I like to keep things simple. Simple is easy to manage and easy to scale.

In my business, people who talk about what I do are like gold. And I do my best to treat them so. I promote what’s important to them. I retweet and share things that they want me to share. We go back and forth on Facebook, Twitter and comments about a number of topics – both personal and professional. The more I do this (and I’ve measured the hell out of this), the more they’ll talk about me to their friends.

So I define community as: People who are talking with me about shared needs and interests.

Is community conversation?

If someone is talking to you and about you, it means that to some degree you both matter. You become part of a community when you talk about what’s important to that community. But what about people who just read your blog and don’t comment? What about the Lurkers?

How do you define community?

About the author: John Haydon advises non-profits and small businesses how to implement inbound marketing strategies with the social web and social media marketing strategies. Follow @johnhaydon on Twitter.

Are You Strategic? by Mark W. Schaefer

How are you trying to create competitive advantage for you and your company?

More advertising?

More time on the social web?

Work longer hours?

Cutting costs?

All of these tactics can provide short-term gains ? but they?re not really strategic. Your competitors are probably trying to do the same thing, aren?t they?? So if they are, how is this going to create ADVANTAGE for YOU?? There is only one way to create competitive advantage in the long-term:

Listen to your customers more effectively and respond more rapidly than your competitors.

That?s it.

I?ve just saved you a ton of money on business books because every successful strategy is based on this idea and every great product innovation has this concept at its foundation. So if times are still tight and you’re looking to make cuts in your business, don?t jeopardize your relationships with your customers.? In fact, this is the time to embrace them more tightly.

The social web provides a great way to connect more deeply with customers. Mastering that skill really can lead to competitive advantage.? So even when times are tough, keep listening, keep responding, keep innovating!

About the author: Mark W. Schaefer is the Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and has more than 25 years of global sales and marketing experience as well as advanced degrees in business and applied behavioral sciences. You can follow Mark on Twitter or read his daily blog to learn more.

Taking Time Out for Health Reasons

The blog has been really quiet this last week or so, as has my Twitter stream and other online outposts. This is due to some serious health issues I’m having at the minute, which is leaving me drained.

Therefore, I’m taking an extended break to hopefully work myself back to full health. I’m currently waiting on some test results to see what the next stage is. There will still be the odd post here as I hand over the blog reins to other writers. 12for12k will be looked after by the core back-room team, so please continue your awesome support there as we move more into 2010.

Thanks for coming by here like you do, and hopefully you’ll still be around when I’m back online. Until the next time, take care.