Travel Portland: Online and Social
November 16th, 2009While I usually post about my hobbies around Portland, my life, like many of yours, is increasingly steeped in all kinds of online interactions – particularly social media. Here’s an update on Travel Portland’s activities with this blog; our own social network, GoSeePortland.com; our presence on Twitter; and Travel Portland on Facebook.
The fact that you’re reading this means you’ve already discovered one social outgrowth of our main online presence. This blog gives us the opportunity to not only share the wealth of Portland experiences that we collectively experience both personally and in our work, but also to discuss Portland with you — we love your comments and encourage you to keep them coming!
Our first foray into the social web was with the launch of GoSeePortland – a user-generated content site featuring reviews (or “tips”) about anything and everything, from restaurants, to accommodations, to shopping. It currently contains about 2,000 distinct reviews, and we continue to encourage locals and visitors alike to share their perspectives about all facets of Portland. If you haven’t yet, visit the site, browse the newest tips and guides (a guide is a themed set of tips collected on a map), and hopefully, you’ll feel compelled to create an account and add your own two cents. The payoff: GoSeePortland.com is unique in that it generates recommendations for you based on your preferences and the content you create. We’re currently spiffing up the design and adding features, but we’re plenty proud of how it is today – please, join the conversation there.
Early this year, we hit a perfect storm of right place and right time when we launched our “Twisitors Center“ – the nation’s first virtual visitor center. Not only can you interact directly with us by sending tweets to 
@travelportland, we established the “hashtag” #inpdx to make it easy to create and follow content related to visiting and living in Portland. We also monitor Portland-related topics and proactively offer any advice we can. While we’re proud of our large number of followers (more than 12,500 and counting), we’re most pleased by the engagement metrics surrounding our Twitter presence: almost half of our tweets are in reply to other users – whether they’ve addressed us directly or we found them via a search. It also makes us very happy to see how many of our tweets are re-tweeted (and re-re-tweeted!), spreading the Portland love further than we could on our own.
Most recently, we launched our Facebook fan page, and we’d love for you to become a fan there. Our fan page wall offers unique content not found on our blog or Twitter, as well as additional ways to interact with us and others who love Portland. We love it when fans post pictures, videos, or just drop in to share pearls of wisdom (and praise!) about Portland. As with every city, there are a handful of fan pages for Portland, but we hope you’ll visit ours, become a fan, and share.
In the coming months, watch for us to roll out special offers exclusive to each of these online channels. Our goal is not to saturate you with content, but to reach as many people as possible where they’re already hanging out online.
Even with all these points of presence online, we know we’re just hitting a fraction of the “social web” – let us know where you are online, and where you think we should go next!
Tags: facebook, social media, twitter
November 16th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Hi Bryan, nice work on all fronts! How long did it take to get these latest efforts off the ground. We’re looking to launch into similar social arenas… and would like to get a sense of the scale of effort (time, people) involved.
Thanks!
Scott
November 18th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Cool stuff!
I’m @jbern on Twitter. Found the site through the #inpdx hashtag…
Keep up the good work!
-Jeff
November 19th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Jeff, thanks for the kind words!
Scott: With Twitter in particular, which we got into before Facebook, the big up-front time investment was researching and following thought leaders / people of interest that tweet on topics that are related – sometimes loosely – to promoting Portland and the region. For instance, we tracked down, followed and were followed back by a good number of foodies / wine connoisseurs, etc.
Still re: Twitter, we really hit a right-place-right-time circumstance that would be hard to duplicate that really drove our follower count to explode. Being the first “Twisitors Center” really generated a lot of PR over a prolonged period of time.
With Facebook, it was really a matter of setting up a quality, but simple, Fan Page, and then directing traffic to it from our main home page via a Fan Box, from Twitter, etc. I still feel like we’re in our infancy with Facebook, with cool stuff to come.