There are 50 million visitors to TripAdvisor each month.  These people are right at the center of the purchase funnel. They’re researching and planning trips.

A destination’s TripAdvisor page offers some simple functionality, much like the things you can do on a Facebook Fan Page.  On TripAdvisor, you can upload videos, photos and information for travelers.  This is a huge opportunity that is often overlooked by destinations in favor of a Facebook page.

While Facebook is an excellent way to maintain relationships with people who have experienced and love your destination, TripAdvisor offers a very immediate opportunity because the web traffic that goes there is pre-qualified.  If you share appealing content about your destination on TripAdvisor, you could convince people to book a trip while they’re in a critical stage of the planning process.

DMOs should share photos and videos (either your own or links to Flickr and Youtube) that are relevant to the time of year or what’s going on in your destination right now.

Are you actively managing your destination’s TripAdvisor page?

Finding engaging content is key to community management. You’ve got to be interesting.  If you can share relevant and timely content or just make people laugh, you can keep Fans and Followers coming back for more. Sometimes it can be challenging to keep digging up entertaining content but Stephanie’s found a great solution:

“TVeyes.com is my favorite tool for five reasons:

1. it’s the best TV clipping service I’ve found

2. it has a built in editor for editing clips instantly

3. it clips all major cable networks and all news stations in most of the markets across the U.S.

4. it’s so cheap it’s freakish. $3,500 a year to start

5. it’s the perfect tool to find awesome content about your destination that you can quickly edit, post on YouTube and then post on your social media channels.

I found this hilarious clip about Momo, the Missouri Big Foot from the show “Cash Cab.” Edited it into a 30 second clip and posted it on Facebook. This took me roughly 15 minutes–from the power search on TV Eyes (for content) to uploading on YouTube to posting on Facebook with the line: Touring the fall colors this season just got a whole lot more interesting, baby.

This tool is the ultimate content curator. You don’t need to create any content for your social media channels if you have this tool combined with YouTube and Flickr.”

Thanks Stephanie!

You can follow Stephanie at @NtheMO

If you have an idea or initiative that you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them: rodney@thinksocialmedia.com with the subject: Earth-shattering Idea.

At Think!, we’re constantly trying to come up with innovative ideas and solid strategies for digital and social marketing. Often we have ideas that don’t get used straight away so I thought I’d share some of them with you. After all, ideas have sex with each other and create better little ideas.

I’ll share the ideas that I talked about in my presentation over the coming weeks. Some you may have heard us talk about before, others are a little out of the box, but not all of them are flashy. We’d love to see DMOs and tourism businesses take them and try them. If you use any of them, please let us know how they work!

Here’s Idea #1: Create Social Objects

The transparency brought about by social media forces marketers to focus on offering a quality product. You can’t fake it anymore. Consumers are going to talk to each other and social media just makes it easier.

Destinations (and the tourism businesses within them) need to give travelers things to talk about. As Scott Stratten keeps drilling into us, people don’t talk about ‘Meh’. Give them something ‘remarkable’ to talk about. Remarkable meaning something people will remark on in conversation.

There’s a little town in Alberta called Vulcan. It doesn’t currently have a huge tourism draw so the local DMO got creative. They’ve played up to their name and branded the whole town around Star Trek. The visitors’ center is a giant space ship. They have a scale model of the Enterprise. Even city hall has been rebranded as the Intergalactic Planetary Headquarters. I can’t even imagine that conversation…

There’s lots of other examples too. Fargo have created a replica of the ‘Wood Chipper’ from the movie so visitors can take pictures to share with their networks.

Love Virgina brought their brand to life offline with ‘LOVE’ sculptures . There’s tons of photos that people take with these ‘social objects’ being shared all over the web.

Being remarkable can be as simple as surprising travelers by welcoming them in social media when they arrive in your destination.

What are you doing to encourage travelers to share their experiences?

Google’s recently launched Circles network has me intrigued though. If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a great Mashable article that links to some of Googles explanatory videos.

Paul Adams created a very clear presentation about the flaws of existing social networks (ie Facebook) while he was at Google. It explains the importance of privacy to the user. It also explains why the term ‘friends’ is not helpful. In short, he contends that ‘friends’ is too broad and doesn’t allow users to categorize their message by audience. The presentation has been viewed a whopping 670,000 times on Slideshare.

Facebook has a vested interest in complete openness. The network’s model turns on connecting the whole world. They are unapologetically pushing the bounds of individual privacy. As a result, there has been a lot of high-profile resistance to complete openness both publicly and from government watchdogs.

Privacy, and the ability to control it could be Facebook’s Achilles Heel. This is why i’m intrigued by Circles. It’s the biggest weakness in Facebook’s model. At Think!, we believe in the power of passionate communities. These communities center around a common interest and can be simply represented using concentric circles. We don’t believe that the world is one big circle. That’s the old world. We believe that it is one big circle made up of many, many much smaller circles. In these small circles, relevant information is essential and giving people the power to control their message is paramount.

Google Circles lets you categorize people on the way in and on initial appearance its very intuitive and smooth. Facebook Groups goes a little way towards solving the problem. However, many of the privacy settings are well buried, presumably so that people don’t use them. Circles is the complete opposite.

Of course, given their momentum, Facebook could always copy the idea. Interestingly, since he released his presentation and released his book Social Circles, Paul Adams now works at Facebook as their research lead on social.

Those of us back in the office are feeling a little left out of Online Revealed Canada 2011 so we thought we’d join in from a distance.  We made a word scramble challenge to keep you entertained.  Inside the puzzle below, there are 17 brands relevant to social media in tourism.  While you’re sitting at your desk (at lunch time of course) or at #ORC2011, see if you can find them all.

The first person to CORRECTLY identify all 17 words will win their very own ‘Like’ and ‘Dislike’ stamp for the office – hand delivered by Ben (or Canada Post). Go go go.

Be the first to send us the CORRECT 17 words and these little beauties are winging their way to a desk near you.  You can enter them in the comments section below, send them to our Fan Page or get creative and send us a twitpic @thinksm.  You can even use the email to send them to ben@thinksocialmedia.com.

We’re seeing more and more businesses slash their prices in order to gain exposure through services like Groupon, Living social and their multitude of competitors.

Under the right circumstances, these can be great tactics.  However, price competition can create lasting expectations of low prices and attract the wrong consumers who are unlikely to repeat.

Instead, why not compete on something else?  How many customers do you really need to get through your doors?  Spend time getting to know your customers and what they really want.  Do you cater specifically to them or are you trying to be everything to everyone?

Airlines are, with a few exceptions, relatively generic services.  You get a seat of some description that takes you to another place.  The airline industry has seen huge price competition in recent times.  What if they competed on something other than price?

How much of a premium would a business traveller pay on a long haul flight for an important meeting in Sydney to be guaranteed not to be seated next to a screaming child?  $200? $500? $1000?

What would that new mother pay to have a bassinet built into the back of the seat in front of her?

What if there was an entire plane dedicated to American backpackers going to Europe for summer

Hotels, too, are relatively generic.  In the most general description, you pay for a bed and some privacy.  Granted, there are many varieties of quality and location.  Could you go further?

What if a hotel partnered with the local marathon during their off-peak season.  Instead of price discounts, offer an in-house masseuse, pick up and drop off at the event, and a variety of meals for dinner loaded with carbohydrates.   If lots of marathon runners stayed in the same hotel, they may even have a better time as they have so much in common.

Social media gives you the opportunity to get to know your existing and potential customers and engage with them very cheaply.  As a result, you no longer need to be everything to everyone. You can find out who loves or might love what you offer and cater to them.

These may not be the best examples but it gives you an idea of a few possibilities. Can you think of other ways that airlines and hotels could really differentiate themselves?

For years, people have been leaving their mark on the rocks.  Each one is brightly coloured with messages and pictures relating to peoples’ visits.  Here’s a photo of the sea wall on Flickr.  Over time, the paint fades and someone else takes their turn on the rock.  It’s kind of like a Facebook Fan Page Wall.

Here’s the rock I painted with my girlfriend, Lily and my neice, Sophie.  I painted the kiteboarder and they thought it was appropriate that there should be a shark chasing him… I disagree.

Not only is this tradition remarkable but it also gives people something to talk about after their trip.  How many people do you think take a photo of their rock and share it with their friends and family?  If you’re interested in some other examples of remarkable traditions, have a look at William Bakker’s blog on the power of traditions as a motivator for travel.

Do you have a remarkable travel story?

In October I had the opportunity to share with some of my tourism colleagues at the BC Tourism Industry Conference on some of the early successes of our Facebook page as part of the Think! Social Media workshop.  The following is a short overview of lessons learned and a few take aways to consider when deciding to build your own online community through Facebook.

1) Name the Page: One of the most important first steps is choosing what you’re going to name your Facebook Page.  When doing this ask yourself a couple of things, first what is the visitor interested in and who do they want to follow; a destination, or a tourism organization.  For us we debated on a number of names (1) Dawson Creek, BC, (2) Tourism Dawson Creek, (3) Mile 0 Alaska Highway.  At the end we opted for ‘Mile 0 Alaska Highway’ for a number of reasons.  The name had a further international reach with the inclusion of Alaska Highway in the title.  The Alaska Highway is what our visitors are most passionate about. Mile 0 Alaska Highway had the best search engine optimization (SEO) amongst the three choices.

2) Target a Niche Market: Don’t try to be everything to everyone or your fans will become disengaged.  The visitor wants relevant information.  In Dawson Creek , we target those who are interested in learning more about the Alaska Highway and we engage with people who have already completed the trip.  So far, one of our favourite fans is a 72-year-old grandmother from Florida, who provides insights on a daily basis.  This also helps to dispel the myth that only young people are on face book.

3)   Time Management: This is the question I get asked most: How much time does it take and how do I fit it into my already-busy schedule.

At Tourism Dawson Creek, we spend 30 minutes a day on Facebook.  Half first thing in the morning, and the other half right after lunch.  Not a lot of time when you think about it!  As William Bakker wrote in an earlier blog posting, “consumers are already talking about your destination or product online, so what are you doing to engage them.”

4) Be real: As destination marketers we are used to working in an environment where everything has to be glossy and polished.  We use professional photos, HD video, graphic designers, professional writers to write story content, and the list goes on.  This is not the case anymore, the visitor wants real conversation not something that is rehearsed and static, they want to see pictures and video clips that other visitors have posted that are raw and unedited but portray the actual experience. Most importantly they want this all in a very timely fashion.  A quote from Scott Stratten, “ If it takes you as long to reply to an inquiry or question on Facebook and Twitter as it would to send postage stamped mail…you’re doing it wrong”

Remember If we can do it, so can you..Good luck, have fun with it and all the best promoting your destination or business through social media!

Many commentators believe that in the near future, a consumer’s social graph will be much more valuable than search engine ranking. The reason is that the recommendations that we receive from people we are connected to in the real world are more relevant to us than search results from engines like Google that are ranked using the wisdom of the crowd.

My friends know me and understand me.  They know what I like. They are familiar with my past experiences. Facebook is just a convenient platform with which to connect with them.

I know precisely which members of my social network to ask for advice on whether to buy a Macbook Pro or a Macbook Air, which skis to rent or where to stay when I visit Argentina.  Asking people I trust saves me time.

Do you trust your friends more than Google’s search results?