Destination marketing with Twitter
My former stomping grounds, Seattle, and employer, Seattle’s Convention and Visitors Bureau, has a wonderful asset at the helm of their Visitor Center – Ann Peavey. Ann’s twitter handle is appropriately @SeattleMaven, a self-described “Seattle’s Know-It-All, History Buff, Concierge & Visitor Information Maven, Food & Wine Enthusiast, Aficionado of Good Hygiene, and Worshipper of the Planet”.
The branded Twitter experience
@SeattleMaven now sports a fantastic Twitter skin, chock full of iconic Seattle eye candy, branded with the SCVB logo and color scheme. To keep up with all the Twitter action, SCVB recently created a Twitter landing page on their vast website, visitseattle.org, where Ann really hams it up about one of the best products Seattle has to offer – tourism. She has a healthy following of SCVB member restaurants, hotel, venues, tourists and locals alike. Her updates are useful, engaging and often quite hilarious. She manages to weave her personal follies and observations of Seattle life into the mix of member shout-outs, happy hours, and extra tickets to live theatre she just happens to have at the Visitor Center.
@SeattleMaven gets it
The most notable aspect of Ann’s twittering style is that she engages her audience. Not only will she gladly retweet a good deal, she’ll ask her tweeps for feedback, guide them through the “what’s to do in this town” gauntlet, and reward them almost daily with some kind of entertainment perk by tweeting Seattle trivia. She really does get the conversation going, and keeps you hooked – until tomorrow when it starts all over again.
For other destinations, attractions and even small tourism-based businesses, @SeattleMaven is a stand-out example of how to brand your business on Twitter and how to create and nurture genuine relationships with your followers. Congratulations Ann! I look forward to your tweets – despite the fact I am now 3,000 miles away in Vermont!
Building a brand with Twitter
A great branded presence on Twitter might keep visitors looking through your tweets for good information, and will likely entice them to follow you. As I’ve featured in a previous post there are a few (but not nearly enough) great looking skins seen on various destinations’ Twitter pages.
I recently developed a skin for a Seattle-area restaurant, BeachHouse Bar + Grill. It matches their website already in place, and will eventually tweet about Twitter-only coupons and special deals available to its followers.
Call to action
I also created a Twitter landing page on their website which contains the coupon or special deal info along with a big thank you to the followers. The page is linked from Twitter exclusively so it will be a snap to figure out the effectiveness of certain deals by looking at spikes in traffic after specific tweets. At this writing, visitors print out the coupon and present it at the restaurant.
Rewarding your followers
We’re hoping that by rewarding the followers with a delicious treat, they’ll spread the word and BeachHouse will gain more followers – and patrons – by simply offering something special to its followers at random.
A thesis of Thesis
Here in the blogosphere, there’s a miracle blog platform known as WordPress. Lots of kind folks have designed beautiful FREE WordPress themes sure to please any blogger’s taste and style. Some of the more exotic or complex themes are available for a fee, including the phenomenal Thesis theme, created by DIYthemes.com.
Customizing Thesis
Thesis was created primarily for bloggers who want to get the most out of their SEO (search engine optimization) statistics and tools. Thesis is somewhat customizable for blog administrators that might know/care very little about css and coding – he has more important things to do, like write. Digging through some Thesis showcase designs, I noted that most customizations were basic, i.e. plain. Of course content is king (and navigation, and validating code, and SEO-friendliness,) but the googly-eyed designer in me wants some eye candy, too.
The before and after project: SocialMediaCommando.com
My newly minted tweep and friend Joe Mescher was in need of a clever design for his Social Media Commando blog. Joe uses Thesis for the SEO capabilities and blogs about SEO and branding with social media. I took a stab at the customization, and after much R&D, head scratching and coffee, I was able to coax and tweak his blog into looking like no other Thesis layout I’ve come across. Check out Joe’s blog >>
Social Media Commando, if you’re reading, I wish you much success and look forward to those SEO and branding re-con posts!
Vermont Quilt Festival 2009
I’m always looking for ways to stoke my creativity, whether for personal projects or just to explore a new design angle or school of thought. Usually my good ol’ Moleskin journal is just the ticket, but since I really enjoy being a tourist (but not looking like one) I like to check out oddball festivals, art shows, gallery walks, etc. I always leave these events with new ideas for projects, and sometimes a new friend or two.
The 2009 Vermont Quilt Festival is one of those gatherings that I would not normally attend as a personal passion, but boy was there some incredible design talent showcased. Most of the quilts featured some level of machining, and more than just your regular Singer sewing machine – there were vendors demonstrating stitching machines that you’d need a 2-car garage to keep in. Beautiful end results, but something about quilting as a pastime or hobby should lend itself to the handmade. Amid the hokey, country, garish and over-embellished, I came across some very imaginative projects that just oozed genius from a graphic designer’s perspective.
Disclaimer: Taking pics of many of the quilts was not allowed, but hardly enforced. Flash cameras and even sketching (!) were absolutely not tolerated. Unfortunately I did not gather every artist’s name for credit, but you can find out more about the festival at vqf.org. These are from my phone:
My favorite. No painting from what I could tell, just fabric as food. The dark background fabric had a felt-y pattern which really gave it some drama and depth.
Honey, I'm Home - Hope Johnson Heavy on the hex and stunning. Math geek as quilter?
This rogue quilter chose unusual subject matter and cropped it - love that.
Tribute to Pantone #1
Tribute to Pantone #2 (Escher and Tetris, too!)
Life in Holly Ridge - Nancy Prince This small wall quilt was over-the-top with fluffiness and texture, but I found it remarkable how the fabric was used to show shadow, light and perspective.
Hosting service – you get what you pay for
Today brought to a close a series of obstacles brought on by trying to switch a client’s über-cheap hosting service to a more professional and reliable service, Media Temple. What should have been just a couple of clicks to update the DNS (name server) turned out to be an odyssey across 3 continents, 4 hosting service providers, one confused client, and a miffed designer.
Let’s back up: 5-6 years ago the client signed up for hosting service with a small (maybe someone’s garage) outfit that was sold to a bigger outfit, which was eventually gobbled up by a global conglomerate. Along the way, DNS info, logins, passwords, account numbers, etc were bundled, truncated or vaporized into the thin air of Nepal.
Of course none of these providers have a useful knowledge base within their websites, only trouble tickets to fill out and wait 2-3 days for an auto reply of useless info. I was finally able to talk to a real live human at all three of the previous providers – who incidentally were the SAME company dba separate biz names (I’m sure to alleviate customer confusion!) These nice folks, and they were nice, lead me thru a maze of call centers and help desks that might be featured on the Amazing Race. Each fresh help desk would naturally need the exact same diatribe I’d rattled off to the previous.
After 5 days of 24-48 hr waiting periods for the transfer of domains etc, to take hold, I could finally call the client to assure him that he would no longer need to wait 24 hours for his assistant to receive an email he’d sent from just across the room.
What may have eased the pain of this necessary operation of domain transfers when signing up with a new hosting service, is to have all previous info at my fingertips.
Here’s what I’m recommending for myself and clients to keep all the logins, account owners, contact info in one neat trail:
What might have saved me and client a big headache would be to hire a professional (i.e. not free or almost-free) web host in the first place. There is a reason why it costs $20 (still cheap) a month rather than a year for site hosting: stored records, affable techs that are actually available on weekends, and a usable online knowledge base and support.
