Lessons I Learned From HubSpot: Promoting a Social Media Marketing Seminar

[tweetmeme source=”pagetx”]If you haven’t heard of HubSpot yet, you will.  This Boston-based company is filled with bright and creative people who live and breathe social media marketing – or “inbound marketing” as they call it there.  Much of what I’ve learned on the subject has been from the free resources they provide to their customers and the general public.

Their main line of business is their inbound marketing software.  From their web site:  “HubSpot is an inbound marketing system that helps your business get found on the Internet by the right prospects and convert more of those prospects into leads and paying customers.”

Here’s how I’m putting my lessons learned from HubSpot to good use.

Social media monitoring: Are you listening to what they’re saying about you?

[tweetmeme source=”pagetx”]Social media has given us another platform for communication.  There are conversations going on out there right now.  Are you listening?  For tourism businesses, this means that there are travelers out there talking about us, our destinations, our customer service, and ultimately their experiences … both positive and negative.  Wouldn’t it be nice to know what they are saying?  Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to respond to them?  It’s what we would do if they were standing right in front of us.  Why shouldn’t we do the same when we have conversations using social media?

Fortunately, there are as many ways to listen to social media conversations as there are to have social media conversations.  If not more.

There are some excellent companies that offer fee-based social media monitoring solutions, such as radian6 and trackur.  There are also some very good free ways to monitor social media conversations if you’re willing to do a bit more legwork.

Here are a few of the free tools available to monitor conversations on Twitter and blogs.

Which DMOs Are Using Twitter To Promote Their Destinations?

[tweetmeme source=”pagetx”]I’ve been spending a lot of time lately on market research.  It’s been a fun and very enlightening experience.  My quest was to find out which DMOs were using Twitter,  and how it was helping them promote their destinations.  The assumption I had going into this little project is that there would be hundreds (if not thousands) of state, regional, and local DMOs using Twitter … but that not very many of them would be from Texas.

So far, I’ve been right on both counts.  Now I’m on a mission.  We Texans tend to have rather high opinions of ourselves, but I find we are lacking in this department (trust me, that was hard for me to admit!).  I’d love to help change that.  Here’s one thing I’m doing about it.