From Awards to Talktourism on Twitter!

The closing date has come and gone for voting in the ‘Net Visionary Awards‘ 2009 (1^st May) and we are none the wiser in respect of how we performed. We actively encouraged all our Talktourism members to vote for us and we are grateful to all that have supported us.  I guess we will just have to wait until the 21^st May and watch this space!

We are happy with the publicity which has come about as a result of being short listed in the ‘Online Tourism Category’.  We have also attracted additional new members with a good geographical spread around the country.  We have also seen an increase in visitors to our Talktourism.ie site from around 1,650 visitors a month in 2008 to around 2,500 currently.  This is minor league in the online World, but we are happy as the site is targeted at small to medium tourism enterprises. The big question is how do we encourage more to actually engage and contribute to the site? I’ve been thinking about this one for a while and I would appreciate any new ideas… 

We held one of our ‘Talktourism Web2.0 Network’ workshops recently and we concentrated on Twitter.  We all quickly became familiar with twitter and everyone got hooked because it is an effective way to communicate with colleagues / friends and establish new online business relationships.  Following two weeks of communication via ‘Twitter’ the tourism entrepreneurs have outlined there own experience of using twitter on Talktourism.ie, which you can check out here.

Twitter is also a good source of up-to-date information on the travel industry and today I came across an interesting article about ‘Which travel firms do twitter well (& badly)!’ As with everything else online the main cost is time, but in these recessionary times, I think its worth giving it a go.

If you want to follow us on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Talktourism & tweet me! I am also delighted that we have loaded our ‘tweets’ on to our blog which can be viewed here on the lefthand column.