This is where it's up to us to help encourage the change and highlight the companies and brands that are doing it well, so that others may follow suit. I intend to offer a follow-up on this topic soon. Hopefully I'll see you back here to share your views again.

This is a great concept. I’ve been trying for years to figure out how best to integrate my groups of real-life friends, online friends and business connections. There’s so much potential for great things to happen; it’s just hard to envision getting to that point. The best I’ve come up with so far is a massive social event, but that’s so impractical, for the most part… I’d love to hear about other people’s successes!

@ Kari. That’s the beauty of it, Kari – the ideas you mention are so simple to implement and keep up-to-date with, it’s surprising that it’s not more widespread at the minute. I feel that if just one of the bigger sites you mention ran with it, we could see something very special happen.

@ Scott. Again, another great idea and one that I’d love to be kept up-to-date with on progress, so look forward to seeing how you implement it.

This is the reason I say that the comments are frequently better than the post itself – the ideas and forward looking that you guys keep coming up with is immense. Thank you.

So much can be done here…I’m beginning to see a few good sites that could really take these ideas to the next level, like Viscape and TripAdvisor.

It was great to see the original Suzemuse post on Small Towns, particularly with the last few days’ wrangling over “authority”, and to see Danny explore how SM can benefit the town, and visitors.

For the last couple of years, we have been exploring how the participants in all of our communities, whether geographic, relationship or affinity, can become better informed and individually stronger, which will result in stronger communities. We call the effort C3 – Complete Community Connection, and have been charting progress at http://cpetersia.wordpress.com

The comments so far raise concerns we also share – relevance, context, accuracy, timeliness, etc.

So, we think it is our job to create the “elegant organization”, championed by at least Jeff Jarvis, to allow individuals in our region to make sense of what is happening, and to get exactly the information they need, when and where they need it.

We are looking for all the help we can get!

Thanks for the perspectives.

Chuck Peters
The Gazette Company
Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Chuck Peters´s last blog post..Relationship = Attention x Trust

Taking social media to the next level requires going back to basics…find the fundamental usefulness of the medium by finding out what people really need.

They don’t need more shilling. They don’t need more blatant advertising. They do need real information that makes sense to their needs.

Find the ways to do that in your communities…and the real benefits will become blatantly clear.

Susan Murphy´s last blog post..How Small Towns Are Social Networks

@ Neil. This is where Twitter and other applications would benefit from working closely with the towns and cities in question. Have some form of authorizing process in place to confirm identity, as well as hold relevant profile names aside for these places.

With regards the “sweeteners”, if it’s the official Tourist Board or Chamber of Commerce handling the profiles, the fear of false information wouldn’t be there. Of course, you will always have paid profiles singing the praises of a place, but that’s probably already happening and wouldn’t affect the official profiles.

Another concern would be the purpose of the Tourist Information Bureau of Chamber of Commerce is to indeed promote the city, destination or what not to bring in revenue to the local businesses. A lot of times these are the people offering free trips to the writers, photographers, travel agents and such in order to give them the information they need to write, publish or sell the locale.

As @ariherzog mentioned bringing into the role of the people does seem to make a better use and it will be interesting to see what he is working on as mentioned above.

Neil Corman´s last blog post..Democratic National Convention – August 2008

@PortlandTravel tweets about Portland news, of course, like power outages, Blazers’ stats and the official declaration of the city’s doughnut. Their most recent tweet to @ViciousVictoria was a response to the Southern Californian’s trip to the Rose City. And local businesses, like New Seasons Market (@newseasons) gives free grocery delivery to customers who mention the store’s use of Twitter.

This example tied in with your post demonstrates how chambers of commerce and travel bureaus can engage and lure audiences via Twitter. Twitter search terms related to their town can be used to initiate inviting dialogue with potential visitors, and also maintain communication with folks who live in the area.

Since Portland is the largest city in Oregon, I’m not surprised @PortlandTravel is up and running. I’m sure many big cities and recognizable towns are on Twitter. It’s just a matter of time before smaller, more rural towns adopt the microblogging tactic to draw tourists.