While Facebook and Twitter are used for both business and social networking, LinkedIn.com is used purely for business and is one of the most overlooked networks for marketing a business. People underestimate this powerful network. This may sound counter-intuitive, since many people use LinkedIn as a job searching tool, but I would encourage a business to ask all staff to set themselves up on LinkedIn and to list their positions within that company in their profiles. Have them choose “Select Full View” in their settings and equally list your companies blog and website URLs in their profile. Since LinkedIn ranks very high in Google searches, this simple step will actually help improve your blog, Facebook Fan Page, and website ranks in Google.

We have always been social by human nature.  For example, social media has always been a part of backpacker travel – the hostel common room is a place where travellers share stories, review other hostels or places to go, and make recommendations – with or without the Internet. Likewise the wine industry has also always had a very social nature where competitors will readily ring up each other and ask questions like “my fermentation is stuck, what do you think?”, or “I am having trouble with my distributor in Australia. Have any recommendations?” and in most cases that the competitor would give friendly and helpful feedback.

LinkedIn is that service in an online capacity.  Groups in particular provide an area for such candid discussions.

What makes LinkedIn so significant, however, is when someone “friends you”, they have, do, or likely want to engage in business with you. unlike Facebook and Twitter when you contact someone in LinkedIn via a group, or they contact you, the intentions are obvious – to discuss the possibility of doing business together.

In the middle of June (right in the middle of WinterFest to be precise) we delivered a new website for Iconic Adventures.  The website was a culmination of about 6 months work in total – combining an earlier version we had built for the Salomon Southern Tri Series.  The website is awesome – but was made more awesome last week when in an interview on More FM the directors of Iconic Adventures (Travel Neil and Geoff Matthews) waxed lyrically with the presenter about how fantastic our website is.

As well as the Salomon Southern Tri Series, Iconic Adventures is mostly famously known for their annual Motatapu Race which has nearly 4,000 competitors either mountain bike or run through the incredibly scenic Motatapu valley from Wanaka to Arrowtown – I for one have been a competitor for the last three years.

In building the website we made some pretty big improvements from their previous setup.  Most obvious is that we bought all their seperate events together under the Iconic Adventures brand, giving them all a much more uniformed look and making it much easier for competitors to get the actual information they needed.

Most excitingly though we created a competitors log in where competitors could enter events, see their previous times and also get more information.  It is a very cool interface, one that can be reached using their Facebook log on.

We have also created an extensive CRM System for maintenance of suppliers, competitors, sponsors, media and volunteers information.

Overall the plaudits have been loud and clear and we were very pleased with the coverage the website got on the radio the other day – thanks guys!

I have just finished talking at the New Zealand Community Newspapers Conference.  It was a thoroughly enjoyable hour and I think stimulated a bit of grey matter given the level of questions and feedback from the floor.  The theme of the presentation was social media.  Great venue in the Rydges Hotel in Queenstown also.

Given that I have never actually built a social media strategy for newspaper and press I did quite a bit of reading before hand and came up with a hypothetical role called a Social Journalist and then a 10 point strategy for a community newspaper built on social media that included progressively harder or challenging tasks.

Here are my notes (Community-Newspapers-Conference-May’10) and the slides as a Movie (Community-Newspapers-Conference-Presentation) that can be downloaded.

The end of last week saw us release a complete overhaul version of Travel Generation, the travel planning community.  Travel Generation has been in development for many years now and the latest release is simply awesome.

Over the years the emphasis has continually changed and evolved but the principles stay the same; a user can create a travel plan from any content from across the web which they bookmark to their own personal travel planning space.

This release however has seen a greater emphasis placed on the bookmark itself, and a popularity algorithm is applied to determine what bookmarks show on the main home page and on the category pages.  This is from feedback from our initial beta users.

Most importantly in this round of development however is that we have removed the requirement for a user to be referred to Travel Generation.  The use of the beta travel planner is now open to anyone.

Mat Weir has led the development over the last twelve months and you can read his post on the development blog on what this latest release means: http://travelgeneration.com/where-travel-generation-is-going/  There is plenty more to come over the next few weeks – so watch this space.

If you are interested in seeing how a few of the travel plans can work mine has some of my upcoming travel on it: TravelGeneration.com/Dan and we are working closely with our favourite permanent travellers Craig and Linda Martin as they use the travel planner almost daily in their professional travels

I have just completed judging the website category for the NZ Community Newspapers Association Annual Awards.  It was an interesting exercise and one that made me think about what is a good newspaper website – particularly one that appeals to a specific community audience.

I spent quite a bit of time reading blog posts and articles about the change in the media landscape and how newspapers are facing challenges with the loss in readership, decline in advertising dollars and realignment with the web.  Nothing new I can report here that is for sure.

Nonetheless, I thought I would share the categories I came up with myself for grading the websites:

1. Quality of Code – those that have heard me speak at conferences etc will know that I have a real thing for this.  I got it from Mat Weir (our Lead Developer) who is simply brilliant at making websites the right way through his judicious and expert use of CSS and Javascript.  Here I was looking for minimal use of code relative to content, preferably not tables, and javascript stored off page at a minimum.
2. Aesthetics – this is a hard one, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but I was looking for sites that are initially pleasing to the eye, showing easy symmetry that draws your eyes to the content and through the navigation.
3. Clarity of navigation through to important data – here I was looking to see that I could get to the main content whether that be a news story, a weather report, classifieds or what-ever that website offered to the community with a minimum number of clear clicks.  I don’t really mind making lots of clicks to get somewhere, but what I do mind is that the navigation is not easy to spot where and how the site actually works and what I definitely hate is getting lost in a site to where I can’t easily get back to the content I want to read.
4. Engagement of the community readership – I broke this into a number of categories:

• Commenting/interaction – I asked the question how much is the reader encouraged to comment and interact with the website?  Was it easy to comment on a story and were readers actually encouraged and rewarded to do so.
• Creation of viral loops – this is the ability of the web user to share stories through Facebook, Twitter etc to beget more readers for the website?
• Stories beyond news – again I was looking for a communication with the community that was more than just a rehashing of new stories every Thursday when the newspaper was published.  I like the sites that had regular blogs and competitions etc.
• Two way relationship with readers – I don’t think that a community news media website should be purely about pushing Thursday newspaper stories down the web as if it was just another channel.  I think that such a site should at least make the effort to include an introduction to the reporters (whether that was via a link to their profile pages) and should reach out to the community for some sort of engagement whether that be suggesting stories to follow, citizen journalism where the community submits stories, sharing of community photos or simply a discussion initiated around commenting.  Anything but a one way straight publishing attitude.
• Engagement of the reader – once reading one story I was looking to see how likely the reader was to keep going and look for more stories of interest.  The goal for the newspaper surely is to increase page views, increase time spent on website and therefore increase value for their advertisers.  I was looking for tools such as related stories or headings and archives that made it easy for me to follow from one news article or opinion piece to another that was in my area of interest.

Overall none of the newspapers that I judged rated very highly.  I came up with a scoring system out of 80 and only one got past the half way mark.  It was quite a way ahead of the next three.  I don’t know when the results are named but I am speaking at the Community Newspapers Association Conference in May so I am looking forward to defending my decisions and putting forward an argument for a new style of “community” media websites.

I ventured to Invercargill last week to give a presentation on what makes a good website as part of Eric Billoud’s Breakthough Business Systems Accelerating Growth Seminars.

Here are the notes from this seminar

Happy New Year to you all.  Back from holiday and straight back into it.  I hope this first half of the year gives me more time to post more regularly than the last half of last year did.

To start the year off I found this great list of articles on the forcasted trends in tourism and travel in 2010: http://aboutourism.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/trendsspotting-2010/